A couple of blog housekeeping news

Dear friends,

I wanted to share with you a couple of blog housekeeping news.

First, the "kinda-but-I-am-not-so-sure-bad" news: after both of the people whom I had asked to help me as pre-moderators bailed out on me (the first one due to disagreements in the format of the blog, the second due to personal issues) I have decided that when the new blog goes live I will do all the moderation myself.

Which is both bad and good, really.  Bad: it will take more of my time I could have spend doing other things.  Good: at least I would bail out on myself.  Also, I have to tell you that with time I have lost my inhibition about tossing out "bad" comments and now I do this as soon as I see anything discourteous, the use of CAPS, or any other comment I think deserves to be trashed.  And this helped a great deal.  This morning when I woke up there were 66 comments awaiting in the moderation queue and all them them perfectly good.  Apparently the trolls are gradually giving up (except this one crazy guy who hates both the English and the Indians who regularly tries to post a comment advocating the genocide of both; for weeks I have been tossing his crap into /dev/null, but he keeps trying).  So since I will do the moderation myself, I will never bad a person, but I will shoot "bad" comments on sight with no remorse.

I have had another friend agreeing to pre-moderate for me, and I could ask another two, but why go down that road?  There are advantages to doing that myself and, even more importantly, there are much better ways to save time.

And this is the good news.

This morning I received an email from a reader who very kindly sent me a version of my latest SITREP corrected from all the numerous typos it had.

You can down load this corrected version by clicking here

This is when an idea hit me.  But first, let me explain my past dilemma.

God knows I am a terrible writer.  Not only is English not my first, second or even third language, but I always write under huge time pressure and, to make things worse, I never see my own typos.  Lastly, I simply never have the time to re-read myself and try to clean-up my writings.  In the past I have had readers posting comments with corrections, sending me emails with lists of mistakes to correct and even sending me completely proof-read texts.   The problem is that correcting is also time consuming.  As for simply replacing my text with another one is very tricky if not outright dangerous.  First, there is the possibility of a well-intentioned corrector incorrectly understanding my (poorly-written) text inadvertently making a mistake.  Second, there is the non-trivial risk of a not well-intentioned corrector deliberately mis-correcting what I wrote and then, once it is posted, crucifying me for saying something I never did.  With the recent smear-campaign against me where I was accused of saying things I never said I became very paranoid on that account.  As for re-reading the proofread text sent to me before posting it, that again takes too much time.

But then, this morning, "H" sent me my corrected SITREP as an attached document in ODT format.  All I had to do was to save it to Google Drive, and post the link (which I did above).  That solves ALL my problems because I can post a proofread text in just a few clicks and I don't have to re-read anything since the original document, with typos and all, is still posted.  Thus, it is absolutely clear that the corrected document has been edited by a friend but not by me and if a malevolent "corrector" twists something that I wrote and I get challenged on that, I can easily point to the original text as the only "original" one.  Finally, to for those of you who want to re-posts my stuff elsewhere, do have access to a well-formatted clean ODT text is also much better than to have to cut-n-paste my original text, no?

So here is my idea if you guys agree.

If somebody does the same thing "H" did today and sends me a corrected text as an attached ODT file I will immediately update the original post with a note at the bottom pointing to a clean, proofread, text.  Does that sound useful to you?  Please let me know.  I like the idea a lot, but I want to make sure that I did not miss something and that most of you like it too.

As for me, the next time I write something under huge time pressure (like yesterday's SITREP), I will add a note at the bottom saying "text needs proofreading" and, hopefully, somebody will pick that up, send me a corrected text to which I will then post a link.

Watcha think?

Please let me know.

Kind regards,

The Saker