Yes, you heard me correctly. Give me some relief. Of course, I could go over to my bag and get one of my Darvocet, but I’m trying not to deal with pills. Allow me to explain.

For about 3 weeks now, I’ve been dealing with pain in my left foot.  This pain very closely matches the type of pain I experienced 7 years ago when I had a stress fracture in my right foot. The throbbing, aching, odd cracking and popping noises, pain that gets better for a bit then flares right back up without any sort of provocation such as walking. So I finally had enough and went to the doctor. He pulled me from work and ordered a bone scan on Tuesday at the hospital. He also gave me Darvocet to attempt to at least give me some relief from the discomfort of my foot.

I am seriously hoping that my bone scan doesn’t come back the way the one 7 years ago did, with a stress fracture on it. For those who have never dealt with a bone scan, you are injected with a radioactive dye which you then drink as much as possible and pee as much as possible to remove as much of the excess dye from your system as possible.  You then go through a series of rather uncomfortable positions on a table in the nuclear medicine section of your radiology department while they use machines designed to detect the radioactive dye to take pictures of the area in question. I’ve done this before, and although it’s not an entirely pleasant experience, it is tolerable. The biggest annoyance for me, really, is the injection of the dye. I hate needles. In any case, I really can’t afford to only receive 60% of my normal pay, which is what short term disability is. So I sincerely hope my bone scan comes out all right.

I’m trying not to take the Darvocet if I don’t have to because it can be addictive, and because it’ll make me sleepy. LOL I don’t want to go to sleep right now.  So there’s that. I hope everyone else is having a better weekend than I am. LOL

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this seem to be taking it a bit far? Now I’ve been in my share of online feuds. Most last maybe 2 or 3 weeks and then die out of their own accord. But this…..wow. I can’t believe someone would do something like that. Wait, I take that back. Yes I can. Because that is how our society does things these days.

We seem to have become such a volatile society that the slightest thing sets us off. We take online feuds against people we can’t see personally. If someone insults us, we feel the need to bring that insult right back to them. And if they don’t stop, we apparently feel the need to do some digging, find out who they really are, where they are, and do something about it. Whatever happened to simply going to the authorities of the website or chat service you were on? When did we start taking matters into our own hands, instead of getting the appropriate people involved to stop the conflict?

Is an online feud worth going to jail over? I don’t think so.

I just downloaded and configured the All In One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This plugin is designed to help your WordPress powered blog move up in pagerank, etc. Although I have been doing paid blogging for a few months now, SEO is still one big mystery to me. I don’t promote my site as much as I should, that much I can tell you. I have high hopes that this plugin will help me achieve better pagerank, etc. We shall see.

Does anyone else have any ideas for how to go about raising Google Pagerank, lowering Alexa scores, etc? I’m curious about these things as Gothic-Peach.Net has bounced back and forth in Alexa scores but stays firmly lodged at PR4 for Google. Now I understand that 4 is not a bad PR at all. I’m just saying I would like to eventually get a PR5 on this blog. So tell me, if you have a higher PR, or even a lower PR that keeps climbing, tell me how you did it.  I really am interested in finding out how other people boosted their pageranks and Alexa scores.

I have often wondered what the best thing for spam protection, comment wise is. Most blogging platforms offer at least one plugin that allows users to prevent spam comments. WordPress comes packaged with the Akismet plugin, but there are other plugins as well, including captcha plugins. However, I’ve been told more than once that captcha plugins are annoying and actually turn visitors away from commenting on your site. So my question is, what do you use on your blog for spam protection?

I used to use a captcha plugin, but after being told several times that it was annoying and was detracting from my commentors, I switched to Akismet. So far it works very well, although I’ve heard of bloggers who didn’t get nearly the results in keeping spam comments out. Of course, I not only use Akismet, but my comments are moderated as well.  So I make doubly sure that spam comments don’t get through.

I just thought it would be helpful to myself and possibly others to find out how others handle their spam problems.