Aloha Friday: Time To Post

Aloha Friday, Blogging

I typically write blog posts the night before they go live.  With making and cleaning up from dinner, getting the kids in bed, freelance work and chores that need to be done around the house, though, I often don’t have much time to write posts.  Not unless I want to go to sleep at 1am.  I would love to spend hours crafting a perfect post, complete with a photo/clipart on every post to accommodate services like Pinterest, but I honestly don’t have the time.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: How much time do you spend on each blog post?

P.S. If you haven’t already, try out my Twitter applications: FollowerHQ and Rout.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha Friday by Kailani at An Island Life

Aloha #145

The #DisneySMMoms Report: A Wild Time Trekking Through Africa, Part 2

Animals, Disney, DisneySMMoms, DisneySMMoms2012, Photos

I left my last Wild Africa Trek post on something of a cliffhanger.  Well, not a cliffhanger, but a "bridge hanger."  Yes, we were about to cross this bridge.

bridge

Our guides helpfully let us know that they had prepped the bridge for us by jumping on and knocking out any rotten planks.  So we shouldn’t be worried.

First, we climbed a tower and got a quick tutorial on what to do.  Then, as each of us had our turn, we were clipped into the safety line (remember the monkey tails from the last post?), and were given the go ahead.  Then, we carefully made our way along the bridge.

Whenever a safari vehicle passed beneath us, the bridge would rumble a bit.  Luckily, the ropes on the sides helped keep everyone steady.  We were encourage to take our time and take photos, and we all took advantage of the view.

crossing1crossing2

In addition to the photos we were taking, our guide was taking photos of us while we were crossing.

crossing3crossing4

My crossing went smoothly except for one near-incident.  I was taking photos of the crocodiles below me and didn’t look where my foot was going.  As it went down, I realized there was no plank there.  I pulled my foot up and tried frantically to regain my balance.  Luckily, I was able to and continued on.  There would be no techy-snack for the crocs that day.  The whole incident probably took about half a second, but played out much slower for me.  (Yes, I know I was clipped into a safety line, but I really didn’t want to test its strength.)  I’m convinced that the trek photographer captured my near-plunge in this photo.

crossing5

Once we were safely on the other side, we were unclipped and waited for our trek-mates to catch up.  Then, it was time to re-clip to get a closer look at the crocodiles.  We learned that all of the crocs were males.  Not a single female down there.  For good reason too.  If even one female was there, the guys would start fighting amongst themselves to figure out who got to mate with her.  Without any females to fight over, the male crocs spend most of their days relaxing in the sun.

crocs

When we were finished looking at the crocodiles, we were given the chance to refill our water bottles.  Then, it was time to move on.  Luckily, we didn’t have far to go this time.  We quickly reached the next stage of our journey.  After taking off our vests (but keeping our water bottles), we boarded a special safari vehicle, driven by a new (to us) trek cast member – Beverly.

Unlike the normal Kilimanjaro Safari vehicle, which has rows of seats for people to sit on, this one had one sitting area around the edge of the truck.  The inside was completely open so we could walk around.  Not while we were in motion, of course, but when we stopped we were allowed to get up and position ourselves for the best photographs.  And the vehicle stopped a lot more than the usual Kilimanjaro Safari vehicle does.  (Our trek photographer also kept snapping shots.)

driving1driving2driving3

Before long, we turned off the usual path and headed up to the Boma where we would have lunch.  As we disembarked, we were greeted with restrooms, Pog juice, and our meals (which I posted photos of here).  We were able to sit and talk amongst ourselves as well as get up, walk around, take more photos, and ask our guides plenty of questions.

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All too soon, it was time to take the last part of our journey (which I shall describe in my final Wild Africa Trek post).

Disclaimer: We paid for our own trip to Disney World to attend the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration. Though we were given an incredible deal from Disney, they never asked us to blog about this event. All opinions expressed above are my own.

Note: To see all of my posts on DisneySMMoms 2012, go here.

How To Deal With A Content Thief

Blogging, Copyright, DMCA, Internet

It is almost inevitable if you put content online.  At one point or another, someone will steal it.  Sometimes, it is someone stealing your words and claiming they are your own.  Sometimes, it is a company taking the photo you posted, stripping any watermark off of it, and using it for their brochure.  Usually these people will claim "the web is considered ‘public domain’" – a total falsehood.

In my mind, though, the most annoying content thieves are the spammer/scrappers.  These people troll the Internet looking for content to grab.  They gobble it up and repost it on their own sites/blogs with varying levels of attribution.  They use this content to gain Google ranking so that either 1) they get more money from ads, 2) their links to other sites get better ranking, and/or 3) their domain name becomes more valuable when they sell it.

While they are grabbing your content, they are doing much more damage than simple copyright infringement.  The duplicate text could not only help the thieves raise their Google ranking, but could also drag yours down.  In most of these cases, you are powerless to actually get the content removed.  You can send a cease and desist notice, mentioning that the copying is a DMCA violation that can result in a $750 – $150,000 fine per infringement.

Sadly, there are some content thieves who are stationed overseas and either ignore or laugh off any legal threats.  When you encounter a situation like this, you can’t do anything.

Well, unless they hotlink your photos.

Like the thieves we discovered on Sunday who stole B’s entire blog post.

Then, you can replace the photos with something "fun."

It’s a simple matter of editing your ".htaccess" file.  This file is very powerful and can tell the web server just who to allow to access content and who not to allow.  You can prevent hot-linking altogether, but I wouldn’t recommend this.  Blocking all hot-linking might make your posts show incorrect images when they are linked to on Pinterest, Facebook, and/or Google+.

However, if you know that EvilContentThief.com has put your post online, you can put this code in your .htaccess file:

# BEGIN BLOCK SPAMMER HOTLINK
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?EvilContentThief.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|gif|bmp|png)$ http://mysite.com/thief.jpe [NC,R,L]
# END BLOCK SPAMMER HOTLINK

This basically says that any images being requested by EvilContentThief.com will be replaced with "do-not-steal.jpe".  (Note: It isn’t ".jpg" because all jpg files will be blocked.)  With this code in place, the following image, when linked to from EvilContentThief.com:

anniversary

will look like this:

dmca-techydad

Of course, that link could contain anything, not just a bunch of text.  You could put a shot of an angry face, someone collating papers, or even something highly crude.

Will this get your content taken down?  No, it won’t.  But at least you will get the satisfaction of seeing the thief’s site "defaced" with your message proclaiming to all that stumble upon them that this site is a dirty, rotten content thief.

Faith in Humanity

Bullies, Internet, School

Last week news broke of a horrible situation.  Some teens on a bus apparently thought that it would be fun to harass a bus monitor, a senior citizen named Karen H Klein.  They called her fat, poor and a bunch of other mean, and hurtful things.  While they were doing this, one recorded the entire event and uploaded it to Facebook to mock the bus monitor even more.

This could have been just another in the long list of horrible bully stories that you hear of which results in a lot of anguish but nothing substantial.  Or, even worse, it could have stayed hidden with the bullies getting nothing to dissuade them from bullying again and with the bullied feeling like they were alone in the world.

It could have been, but then a man by the name of Max Sidorov intervened.  First, he noticed the video on Facebook and decided that the whole world needed to see this.  So he reposted the video on YouTube.  Here’s the video, if you can watch the whole thing.  Personally, I was only able to make it about a minute in.

Secondly, he decided that Karen deserved a vacation.  He opened a fundraiser on Indiegogo.  His goal was to hit $5,000 in about 30 days.  As I’m writing this (on Sunday night), there are 26 days to go and the fundraiser is at $641,196.  No, there isn’t a missing decimal point.  They have raised over SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars for Karen.  This isn’t just "take a vacation" money or even ""take a really nice vacation" money.  This is "retire and never have to deal with these horrid teens ever again" money.

There were (as of this writing), 29,606 contributors.  That’s almost thirty thousand people who gave over $20 each because Karen’s story touched them and they wanted to throw some support behind her.  Beyond that, there was a groundswell of emotional support as well.  I haven’t seen any comments saying "Oh this lady’s so old and fat, she deserved it."  I haven’t seen any comments saying "Meh, kids will be kids.  This is just part of kids growing up.  Ignore it any it’ll go away."  Instead, I’ve seen questions asking how the kids could be so cruel, asking how the kids could be allowed to do this, asking why didn’t anyone intervene, and asking what role do the parents have in this.  Emotional support was thrown behind Karen big time.

This overwhelming support shows that there *are* people out there who care.  There *are* people out there who will see bullying happen and will say "this is wrong."  It sends a clear message to bullyings that their activities will be exposed and will *NOT* be tolerated.

Moreover, I was impressed by Karen’s response to the kids who were bullying them.  During the bullying, she could have lost her temper.  She could have yelled, screamed, and threatened the boys.  She didn’t, though.  She kept her cool and stayed calm.  Yes, she cried, but so would most people subjected to such emotional torture.  (It didn’t help that they said she was so ugly that her family probably killed themselves… when her son killed himself when he was ten.  The kids hit a big emotional trigger there, purely by mistake but still in a malicious manner.)

Instead of screaming, Karen took the abuse and tried to respond calmly.  She showed more grace and restraint than those teens deserved.  She took the high road and rose higher than those teens could ever hope to soar.  Not unless they have some serious attitude adjustments.

When I hear about these bullying incidents, the bullies make me sad for humanity.  Especially the "mob bullies" who band together to take on a victim but would be too scared to do anything by themselves.  However, Karen’s reactions and the legions of people who came to her defense once the video was posted leave me with renewed faith in humanity.  Perhaps we can band together and defeat bullying after all.

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