I’ve added a feedback form on the ‘About Me‘ page. Now if you have a general comment or question that does not go with one of my existing posts, you can still bring it to my attention.

And speaking of comments, I also wanted to clarify my policy about them. I don’t really have one and it’s never been an issue before, but yesterday I did get a very strange one. I didn’t publish it because it was on a five month old post and the half that was in English was completely irrelevant to that post. (And kind of crazy.) The other half was in what Google identified as garbled Swahili, though I am by no means confident that is accurate. So some guidelines for commenting (and I’ll try to include a handy link to these later):

-Stay relevant. If you want to say something that isn’t relevant to a recent post, use the comment form. If you want to say something that’s not relevant to anything I wrote and you feel that you must do it publicly, start your own blog. It’s easy.

-Stay sane. This is related to the above, but even if your comment is relevant to the post or another comment I am still not going to publish it if it is the equivalent of a guy standing on the pavement shouting at passer-by about aliens.

-Make sure I can read it. This is the one that I hate, because it’s no fault of the commenter if he or she speaks a language that I can’t read. I genuinely like hearing views from many different perspectives and it seems harsh to limit this to people who can speak and write English. But I can’t really apply the first two criteria to something I can’t read. My advice for people who want to comment in another language is to indicate what the language is and write it clearly, correctly and simply in that language so that I can get the gist of it from a translating service. (And I know those tend to be hilariously inaccurate, but since I know the context there is a chance that it will give me an idea of what is said.) Even that might not work though, so apologies in advance. Also: I read decent Latin and I have a couple of friends who speak French, so both of those languages could work to.

Other than that, I don’t really care. It’s still a subjective matter and I’ll still treat everything (what little there is) on a case-by-case basis subject to my mood and whims, but I am inclined to let things go through. Even if you just post to call me an idiot I’ll let it go if you can clearly articulate why. (Though just ‘ur a idit’ will probably not get through.)

I was away from the blog for 10 hours last night and this morning. In that time there were 67 comments here, all of them spam and all of them accompanied by an individual notification email. I don’t usually have 70 unread messages in my inbox in the morning, so one can imagine my surprise. None of the comments actually appeared here, I manually moderate most comments, but it was still a right royal pain. In response I’ve had to download some filtering software, but I don’t know how it will affect legitimate comments. It shouldn’t be a big problem, but if anyone has any problems commenting let me know via twitter, facebook or G+. (I assume everyone reading this has an account with at least one of those services.)

I’ve set up pages on Google Plus and on Facebook for the blog. You can now find it on G+ here and on Facebook here.

I’ve added a few new links to the blogroll. They’re all quite good and I encourage anyone who comes here to check them out.

I have a blogroll now, blogrolls are cool. It’s over on the right underneath my twitter feed. I encourage everyone to go to all those sites.