Loose Leaf Notes

The fact that the attendance of our 4th monthly regional Blogger Meet-up at the Café Del Sol was less than normal turned out to work in my favor. I came to the meeting equipped with a pen, a notebook, and a list of blogging questions, and for over an hour I had an audience with Doug and David, two local bloggers who are more experienced at the technical side of blogging than I am.
We didn’t just talk and the guys didn’t just answer my questions. We turned my laptop on and Doug showed me step-by-step how to delete over 13,000 spam comments stored in my blog’s junk mail file. I only knew how to delete junk emails one-by-one and because I get hundreds of them each day, they had piled up like debt I couldn’t pay.
Did you know that bloggers should export their blog data to their hard drive on a daily or regular basis? I sort of knew, but I didn’t know how. Doug showed me that too. At the end of each month, I had been saving that month’s archive page to my desktop and to a CD, but that’s just blog pages and not the data. Pages won’t help to restore my blog if for some unforeseeable reason it gets lost in cyber space.
Although it was an especially productive meeting for me, and I came away feeling like I had just been to a doctor’s appointment and received a clean bill of health, not everything went right. I sat next to Doug at the meeting table because he has a reputation of uttering quotable comments that I like to record. Unfortunately, he came up with a good one, and I wrote it down, but later discovered that my writing was illegible. Not only that, the picture I thought I took of Doug and David (and Jamie when he showed up), I actually hadn’t, and the one I did take I mistakenly deleted. (The one posted above is from a previous meet-up).
Meanwhile, on the same day a deer crashed into the café’s front door and thrashed about, wrecking the place before it found its way out, Ann’s brother, Tuffy, was in a terrible car accident. Ann (pictured here in a photo I did manage to take that morning) is a familiar face, one of the women who work in the café. She was selling raffle tickets as a fundraiser to help her brother’s family stay afloat while her brother is in the hospital facing a long road home to recovery. Having lost 2 brothers and my dad recently, I was particularly touched by her dedication, love, and concern for her brother. Stationed under the hanging art exhibit of The Floyd Figure’s Art Group, she told me about a family member’s recent sighting of a white deer, as her brother – a hunter – lie in his hospital bed fighting for his life. We both agreed the white deer was a good sign.
Besides selling raffle tickets, Ann was engaged in a little farm activism. She handed me a flyer with a headline that read “Protect Traditional Rights to Farm. Just Say No to NAIS.” NAIS stands for the National Animal Identification System, and is the USDA’s government plan to track births, deaths, sales, breeding, and all movements of all livestock in the United States. Originally, proposed as a way to open up foreign meat markets to benefit bit Agri-business exporters, NAIS now says the program is justified to prevent disease. Activists believe that small farms shouldn’t be burdened with such an invasive program that does not benefit them.
It was a good morning and a good meeting. I learned something new…and came away with some homework. I’m deleting junk mail as we speak.

Post Notes: 1. Thanks to David for hosting our monthly blogger meetings. 2. Floydians, if you want to buy a raffle ticket for a TV or camera and help a family out, go to the Café and ask about purchasing one or making a donation to “Tuffy’s Tips.” 3. Learn what you can do to stop the USDA’s proposed animal tracking system by going to NONAIS.ORG.