Thanks to the top referrers for Teach Effectively!
- Joanne Meier of “Sound it Out” at Reading Rockets;
- D-edreckoning;
- KitchenTableMath;
- Liz Ditz (I Speak of Dreams); and
- Miss Profe (It’s a Hardknock Teacher’s Life).
Archive for the 'Administrivia' Category
O.K. Maybe there are only five visitors to Teach Effectively! At least, that’s the total number of votes on the current pole about roles. So, I’m moving the voting booth over here…putting it in plain sight.
Continue reading ‘Visitors’
For a long time I had no problems with spammers who ran scripts that sign-up bogus users for my blogs. But recently, there’s been a spate of them. Yesterday, I eliminated these accounts:
ID #51: barsikjak, ID #52: barsikjal, ID #55: beepbeek, ID #54: beepbeet, ID #58: derisgun, ID #50: barsikjan, ID #48: chuchundra, ID #49: chuchundrra, ID #44: Delmarbbq, ID #47: goorooro, ID #42: JacomoR, ID #46: ritalinB, ID #63: bortycuz, ID #60: gortusbig, ID #61: grofvuri, ID #59: trusaerus,
I also activated a software resource (”plug-in”) that will trap most of them at the time of requesting an account, so I shouldn’t have to hassle as much with this.
Anyone else seen an increase in such activity recently?
Sphere: Related ContentFolks, I don’t use a fancy stats package and, even if I did, I’d only have a passing idea of who visits Teach Effectively. So, I’m running a poll for the next week or so in which I’m asksing visitors to indicate their connection to education in general and Teach Effectively specifically. Please click on the page marked “polls” and explain yourselves (both of you, please).
Sphere: Related ContentI’ve added materials for the presentation by Diane and Brian Bryant to the RtI commentaries page. Also, I’ve corrected the link to the PDF of the slides from the presentation by Charlie Hughes and Don Deshler. (Sorry for the typo…rushing too much, no?)
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This is national de-lurking week. Come on out and play. Shoot, commenters can even leave notes using a pseudonym. Teach Effectively! missed participating last year and it appears few sites are participating this year (even Sheryl over PaperNapkin isn’t participating this year), but I wanted to promote interaction on this site.
We’re back!
It took me a lot longer than I’d anticipated to get the blogs functioning again, but I believe that Teach Effectively is now ensconsed in its own little home. There are, to be sure, a few remaining bits of packing material and similar remnants of the move lying about the space, and I’ll be working on tidying them. However, I think that the posts, comments, images, and etc. are working properly now.
It will take the search engines and tag systems a bit to refresh their records about Teach Effectively, so I shan’t expect Google entries or Technorati tags to be up to date for a few days or weeks. However, readers (both of you, please) can help by updating any Web links you have to TE; here’s the code to use:
<a href="http://TeachEffectively.com/">TeachEffectively.com</a>
Spamdammit
As P. Z. Myers noted in a recent post, one of the plagues of blogging is handling the comment spam; not that Teach Effectively is anywhere nearly as popular as Professor Myers’ Pharyngula, but Teach Effectively does get hit with a lot of spam. People send robots to add comments to post for nefarious reasons such as less-than-honest advertising. Fortunately, there are ways to automate rejection of spam comments. In the year plus that I’ve been using it, a wonderful piece of software that I employ, Akismet, has protected the Teach Effectively from 61,654 spam comments (for the current number, check the total in the left sidebar).
When I compare the number of legitimate and spam comments, I get a signal to noise ratio of 0.0023193953. That makes Akismet a pretty valuable product.
Another valuable one is Bad Behavior. Whereas Akismet blocks comment spam, Bad Behavior stops robots from registering as users and, sometimes, from even reading the blog.
These are things worth employing.
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