blogging | Quilt Obsession

Last week, when I looked at my stats, I noticed a couple of hits from a site that seemed somewhat odd to me. Because of the workload last week, I didn’t have time to investigate it further.

But today I did. And upon going to that site, I was upset to see that they had copied entire posts from my blog, without my permission, and posted them on their site — but peppered with ads. It seems a scraper has found me. But it’s not just my blog — I also saw posts from some of the blogs which I read regularly on there. They too were peppered with ads. I have written to the scraper’s web host and to Google asking that the offending posts from my blog on the scraper site be taken down, but upon doing some research today I was horrified to find out this is becoming more and more common.

What these scrapers do is take our content. We spend the time writing the posts, taking the photos and editing them, checking them over before we hit that “publish” button. What do the scrapers do? Nothing. They just swoop in, copy our content, paste it on their site, pepper our content with ads and sit back and make money. It’s clearly copyright violation run amok! I am not giving out the offending site address as I don’t want to drive any more traffic their way than they’re already getting.

And that explains why I’ve noticed a few of my favourite blogs are now truncating their posts so that all that’s seen in the blog reader are the first few lines or a short excerpt from their blog post. I swore I’d never do that, but now I’m having second thoughts.

You can read a great post about these scrapers here. And another here. And yet another here.

And now I find myself thinking seriously about truncating my blog posts. I would hate to lose readers as a result of taking that step, but I’m also not happy to find my photos and content copied onto other sites without permission.

So starting tomorrow morning I’m going to try out truncating my posts somewhat. I hope you’ll stick around and click through to read and comment.

On Saturday we went up to Sew Sisters as I wanted to look for more florals for the Pickled Ladies blocks. I found these and then, on Sunday, went through the final container of shabby chic fabrics here and found another great grouping. So now I think I’m getting close to the halfway mark with florals for the clamshells. I’m thinking of adding some Oriental florals into the mix as there are some that play quite nicely with the shabby chic.

As well as the florals, I found some great blacks that will work perfectly for the spiky triangles in the arcs. There are some super black fabrics around now and they’re light enough on the back that printing the shapes with Inklingo is no problem. I find that now I look at the back of fabrics when choosing them and am surprised at just how many dark fabrics are quite light on the back. This photo doesn’t really show the black fabrics that well — they’re much darker than they appear in this. I think I had the flash on when I took the photo.

Sunday afternoon I got out my window template and fussy cut and printed enough of the clamshells to keep me stitching for a couple of weeks. Using a window template makes it so easy and quick that I had close to 30 blocks ready in next to no time.

Friday we had temperatures in the 90s. Saturday? Saturday it was maybe in the low 60s but very breezy and it felt unbelievably chilly after that heat the day before. The sky on Saturday looked so stormy, although we had nothing but a few sprinkles of rain. We got this shot just down the street from Sew Sisters.

This one of some of the trees in the area looks very much like fall to me. I kept saying to Mr. Q.O. that the clouds looked like snow clouds. Hopefully we don’t see any of that white stuff until January or February.

Last week I went to visit one of the blogs I read, Ann Champion‘s, and got a warning about malicious content. On Sunday, Ann posted about what had happened — all as a result of links left in comments to pages that no longer exist. It seems Google has a bot that crawls through links on blogs and if a link doesn’t work, the warning goes up about that blog. Rather than repeat what Ann wrote, I’d suggest you go to Ann’s blog and read about her experience. What it has made me realize is that links in comments are something I’m going to go through and delete. It’s going to take a couple of weeks to do so but, after reading about Ann’s experience, I’m thinking I’d rather be pro-active on this issue. I think I’ll also test any links I had in older posts and, if they no longer work, then I’ll delete them as well. Ann wrote, “As you have time..go through your blog and check your links. Active links of any kind are considered dangerous by the Google ‘bot’ when they reside in your comments,” so I think it’s worth the effort.

We had the heat on, on and off, during the weekend. At one point, Lester was sitting on the windowsill and the warm air blowing up from the heating unit was making his ruff look rather — well, interesting.