Comment Notification … You Don’t Have to Moderate

Thursday, June 21

In a comment on my Spam post, Sherry (of In the Direction of Our Dreams fame) noted:

… I get almost no spam AND blogger doesn't catch any either but I do leave comment moderation on because I love having the comments come in my email. Without those I wouldn't get any email. :-))

Comment moderation doesn’t bother me.  In fact, I have it turned on for posts that are 14 days or older as those seem to be spammed the most often.

That said, if getting comment notifications in email is the only reason bloggers have their moderation turned on, there is another way to do that.  I get ALL of my comments — legitimate and otherwise — sent to my email.  That way, I don’t have to go back to my blog to read them.

If you’d like to have your comments sent to email, here’s what you need to do (using the new Blogger interface):

• Go to your Dashboard
• Click Settings from the sidebar
• Click Mobile and Email
• Enter your email address where it says Comment Notification Email
• Click the orange Save Settings button in the top right of the screen

Once you’ve completed the steps, all of your comments will go to your email.  No worries; they’ll be published in your blog too :-)

At this point, if you want to leave moderation on, you can do so.  The email you receive will have the usual options to publish, delete, etc.  If you want to change your moderation settings, however, here’s what you need to do:

• Click Posts and Comments in the sidebar (still in Settings)
• Click Never to turn off moderation completely — you’ll have to go to your blog to delete any comments that are not legitimate; or
• Click Sometimes to moderate comments on older posts and enter a number to specify the time frame (as noted above, I’ve got mine set for 14 days) — you will have links in the email to manage these comments as they won’t be automatically published
• Click the orange Save Settings button in the top right of the screen

Have fun blogging!

Spam … On the Rise Once More

Wednesday, 20 June

It’s been a while since I turned off word verification and comment moderation on my various blog sites.  After the change, I was averaging 5-10 spam comments per week.  Most of them were on my ‘original’ blog, Two to Travel.  This is the blog where I recount our non-Phaeton travels.  It has an international readership, which, I believe exponentially increases the chances of receiving spam comments.  The good news, all of the spam comments were caught by the Blogger filter.

The spam comments tapered off to almost nothing for a while, but now they seem to be on the rise again.  And this time, Phaeton Journeys seems to be the target.  Why?  Who knows; my mind doesn’t work like a spammer’s mind works.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Two to Travel has been on hiatus for a while.  That’s about to change, however, so we’ll see what happens then.

All spam comments are being caught by the filter, and I have comment moderation turned on for any post that is older than 14 days.  Overall, I’m a happy camper — though I can’t help but wish that spammers had something better to do than to flood the www with meaningless words.

If you don’t have comment notification turned on, you might consider checking your spam box every once in a while.  To do so (in the new Blogger interface):

1. Go to your Dashboard.
2. From the list on the left, select Comments.
3. Click the Awaiting Moderation and Spam boxes individually to see if there are any comments in either box and take action accordingly.  (I usually report them to Blogger as spam and then delete them.)

By the way, a more important reason to occasionally check your spam box — to make sure legitimate comments have not been filtered as spam by Blogger.  I’ve fished quite a few out of the spam box and restored them to their rightful place in the blog world.

Gekkos Are Fun

Sunday, 17 June

No, that’s not a typo in the title of this blog post.  Why?  Because the Gekkos I’m referring to are not the ones you find in the wild.  Scratch that.  You might find them in the wild, but it is more likely that you’ll encounter them on paved paths!

Our Gekkos are not to be confused with Gecko, the famed actor of advertisements.

We’ve been looking at wheels to add variety to our ‘active retirement’ days.  No matter which brand or what kind of bike I tried, I didn’t feel comfortable on any of them.  I am not talking about the comfort of the seats.  I just didn’t feel safe enough to ride them for any distance.  Let alone when I might find myself on a bike path along a busy road.

Enter into the scene — the Gekko trike!  I immediately fell in love with these fun wheels.  Our initial plan was to buy a trike for me and a bike for Mui.  But then he made the mistake of test driving a Gekko.  The rest is history and we now have his-and-her wheels to go triking (is that a word?).

We picked up our trikes yesterday.  The adjustments to custom fit them took about three hours.  No surprise, I guess; the shaft on mine had to be sawed-off several inches and reassembled so I could reach the pedals :-)

Plans to go triking at Bull Run this morning didn’t work out as expected, but we did get to take our wheels out for a spin at the nearby county government complex in the afternoon to test the gears and get familiar with our trikes in general.

Here’s an 11-second video that shows me in action!

More on the trikes will be coming soon.

P.S.  For those wondering how on earth we’ll be transporting the Gekkos — they fold and fit into the trunk of the toad!

Video: The Smokies in 15 Minutes

Tuesday, June 12

We're counting down to our next adventure, which will be a non-Phaeton trip and will be published in our Two to Travel blog, but that's still three weeks away.

In the meantime, Mui has finished editing his footage of our trip to the “quiet side” of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.  For those who might be on a limited data plan, be aware that the finished movie is 15 minutes long.

Enjoy your virtual trip!

Another Lens … Another Zoo

Saturday, 2 June

I tried.  I really tried to get some ‘wildlife in the wild’ photos with my new Canon 70-200 f2.8 lens, but our recent trip to the Mason Neck NWR was a bust.  There were no birds, and the few deer we saw were hidden in the thickets.  So, I had to resort to another zoo trip to test my lens.

Instead of revisiting the Smithsonian Zoo in DC, we took advantage of a beautiful early summer day to drive the 55 miles (88 km) to The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore — aka, the Baltimore Zoo.  Getting there was a piece of cake; the return trip not so much.  The seemingly endless road construction projects around the area backed traffic up for miles.  With even alternate routes not providing any relief, that part of the day goes into the books as “best forgotten.”

1 hour and 15 minutes to get there; 3 hours and 30 minutes to get back.

We arrived at the zoo just minutes before they opened the doors to the public at 10:00a.  That’s a little late, IMHO; but I guess it works for the general populace.  Luckily, we’d purchased our tickets online ($16.50/person) so we didn’t have to stand in the long line to gain admittance.

Zoo layout; map scanned from brochure.

Once inside, we made a quick stop at Prairie Dog Town to see the young pups before heading over to the main area of the zoo to check out the other animals.

Black-Tailed Prairie Dog pup and sow.
The pups open their eyes around 5 weeks and leave the burrow a week later.
by my calculations, this pup is 6+ weeks old.

Before I get to the rest of the pictures, let me just say that the lens performed beautifully despite operator error.  Lest you’re under the misguided impression that I never make a misstep, the blunder I made today was a doozy — I neglected to check and correct the ISO setting on the camera.  I knew there was something wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Maybe I need better glasses to differentiate between ISO 100 and 1000!!!!  Duh, Erin — you know better … grrrr!

I saved the best of the photos from the shoot, as well as a few of the not-so-technically-good ones that captured ‘behavior’ and deleted over 500 of the photos I took.  Here are a couple of the keepers for your viewing pleasure.

Arctic Fox
Probably my favorite photo from this shoot.  You can see it in B&W here.

Arctic Fox
This young fox is just starting to change from its winter coat into its summer coat.

scarlet Macaw
Because she’s a ‘quacker’, the keepers have named her Ritz.

Demoiselle Crane

Addra Gazelle & Lesser Kudu
This young Gazelle apparently didn’t get the memo that he’s supposed to mate
with his own kind.  The kudu was remarkably patient with him; but just after I took this
photo, she turned around to nip at him, thus ending his amorous attempts to mount her. 
[one of those technically not good photos I kept because of the ‘unexpected’ behavior.]

Plains Zebra
This zebra wasn’t braying, so I can only assume that it was scenting the air.

Cattle Egret (left) showing breeding plumage & Little Blue Heron in the free-flight aviary.

One of my favorite areas turned out to be the Warthog pen.  Kumari was out with the four piglets she gave birth to in April — three females and one male.  The dappled light in this area made for difficult light conditions, so I decided to try the 7Ds monochrome setting.  I like how these pictures turned out.

Warthog
Kumari — a face that only a mother could love!

Kumari Suckling her Piglets.
warthog Sows have four teats, which limits a litter to at most that number of piglets.
Each piglet has its 'own' teat and nurses exclusively from it.  Even if one piglet dies,
the others do not suckle from the available teat.

I can’t visit a place that has a mural and not take pictures of it.  So here are segments from the Wall of the Wild, a 150-foot (46 m) mural I came across at the zoo today. (You can read more about the mural, and the artist who painted it, in this article.)

Wall of the Wild

After handling the 70-200 all day, my main problem with the 300 mm lens I returned became quite apparent.  It wasn’t the weight (5.17 pounds [2.3 kg] vs 3.28 pounds [1.49 kg]), but rather the diameter of the prime lens that made handholding it difficult for me.  At 3.5 inches (9 cm), the 70-200 fits my hands much better than the 5-inch (13 cm) round 300 mm lens.

There’s no question that a prime lens is superior too a zoom, but I am very happy with this next best option, which is going to go a long ways towards simplifying my camera bag.  The 70-200 lens is a keeper :-)

And now for my pièce de résistance …

The End!