As soon as I started hosting the blog on the new domain I was besieged by spam comments. Akismet for WordPress blogs helps to control this problem. But I also use Bannage, and by banning the IP of offending posters, I have experienced a dramatic drop in spam comments. Even though I get the hits, I don’t see the spam. It’s refreshing! For the convenience of other bloggers I will list my banned IPs here. I recommend sharing this kind of information among the blogging community.
Contest!
Photos by MJ Klein
The contest has ended.
This shot shows just how light and fluffy the batter is
A number of years ago I ate breakfast in a restaurant in the Midwest. I ordered pancakes. What I was served blew me away! They were the lightest, fluffiest pancakes I have ever experienced! Most of the pancakes I’ve eaten felt like an iron bar in my stomach for hours afterwards. Not these. There was something very different about these particular pancakes. A Secret Ingredient.
luisa said:
With this simple comment, Luisa left our 1,000th comment! We’ve reached a milestone here at TheNHBushman.com!
I met Luisa online in the Flickr.com D80 Users Group, when I commented on some of her photographs. She is a nursing student and interesting to chat with. I find her photography very promising, and she does use a Nikon D80 just like I do. I urge our readers to check out her photos on Flickr.
A few things have come up in the blogosphere today that are worth mentioning. I’ve been saying for some time now that “blogging” these days, is anything but. It appears that others are also coming around to this idea too as there are more and more articles talking about the content of blogging.
Today, ProBlogger had an article called “What Do You Miss About The ‘Good old Days of Blogging’?” I left a lengthy comment:
Today I was checking out stats for our hosted domain and I thought I would share some of the search engine keywords that brought people to our site. Some of them are funny, while others are just strange!
Keyphrases used on search engines:
Comments are the life blood of any blog community. Two small improvements that we’ve made to make your commenting experience more enjoyable are:
We hope you enjoy these improvements that will make your visit more enjoyable!
Taiwan blogger Todd Alperovitz kindly wrote a guest article for TheNHBushman.com! Todd runs one of my favorite blogs, The Daily Bubble Tea. The Taiwan blogosphere is highly talented, and like other well known bloggers, Todd is an excellent photographer. Recently, Todd has featured articles on several Japanese destinations he has visited and his photographs bring you right there. If you missed those articles, I suggest you take a look! Many of our readers also enjoy The Daily Bubble Tea and I’m sure you will too.
Here is Todd’s article:
I checked myself into Veteran’s General Hospital on a Tuesday summer afternoon because the left side of my body was feeling numb and was significantly weaker than the right side. In Taiwan, you can choose what type of doctor you would like to see, so I chose to see a neurologist. In the U.S., however I would have had to go through a general practitioner and then be referred to a specialist.
Once my number was called I saw my doctor, she ran a few strength tests, asked a few questions, and informed me that an MRI would be required because I had the symptoms of someone who had suffered a mild stroke. I was told that if the symptoms got worse, to come back immediately. I walked down to the basement of the adjacent building and signed up for the earliest available slot for the test: 3 weeks later with results available in a week. It was a very stressful time for me, I was taking Mandarin lessons at Shida and juggling a bloated schedule working at a cram school I detested. It had appeared I had 4 weeks scheduled to wonder and stress over whether or not I had a stroke at 26 years old. I was telling a couple of parents whom I trusted about my dilemma when one parent offered her help.
First she drove me to visit her husband who is an acupuncturist. He probed my head and left arm for the appropriate pressure points and he began putting in the needles. It was while he was finishing up that he had asked his assistant to add electricity. A few of the needles had a pulsing electric current running through them, my face twitched and my left arm jumped rhythmically with the pulses. As I left, I was handed a seven-day supply of herbal medicine and a bill for $250 NT (the rest covered by the National Insurance). I was asked to come twice a week until I felt better.
The next day, while sucking down a glass of herbal medicine (which tastes like dirt by the way), a person from the hospital called and asked if I could come in the following day for an MRI. The woman, who had taken me to see her husband, had met with the right individuals at the hospital to get me in sooner. I visited her that evening to thank her when she had given me detailed instructions as to how to receive my results that day instead of a week later.
The day of the MRI I followed her instructions to get my results that day, the pictures were uploading onto the Director of Radiology’s computer as I was walking through the doorway of his office. He took me through the pictures and informed me that there was no neurological reason for my symptoms. He told me if acupuncture was making me feel better to continue doing it and if I didn’t feel better after a couple months to come back for blood tests.
It’s caring individuals like this who have complicated my original plan to live in Taiwan for only a year. I will forever feel grateful to my student’s parents who helped me during that incredibly worrisome time and Taiwan’s National Health Insurance for covering my visits to the neurologist, MRI, and acupuncture sessions.
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Todd, I’m very happy to know that you are alright and feeling better! -MJ
This week our guest article was written by David Reid, author of one of the most widely read and informative Taiwan blogs, David on Formosa. We hope you enjoy this guest article as much as we do!
It seems that everywhere I go in Taiwan people tell me I am very lihai. This is a commonly used word in Taiwan that in this context means something like amazing or extraordinary. If I do something that is amazing then by all means praise me. However, it seems that even the most ordinary things, when done by a foreigner in Taiwan, make them in the eyes of the locals extremely lihai.
Here are a few examples of the conversations I might encounter.
You can eat stinky tofu?! Oh, you’re very lihai.
You can take a bus around Taipei by yourself. You’re very lihai.
You can speak Mandarin. You’re so lihai.
What does this say about Taiwanese people? I think it means that their experience or expectations of foreigners is limited. They think Taiwan is something that foreigners can’t meaningfully experience or participate in. Admittedly I think some foreigners who come here do live in a relative degree of isolation. Some of them would think doing some of the things mentioned above is lihai. But just because I live in Taiwan and do things that most Taiwanese people ordinarily do I don’t want to be regarded as lihai.
One of the reasons that we upgraded our blog to the WordPress platform is because there are so many things you can do with WordPress that are just not possible using Blogger. This is a good example.
On our home page, you’ll find several navigation links at the top. One of them is called Geotagged Articles Map. Clicking on that link will take you to a page within our site that will display a Google map, with location balloons that indicate the location of geotags that exist within certain articles. Clicking on one of the locations will open a dialog with an excerpt from the article. If you wish to read that article, simply click on the title link in the excerpt dialog and the article will be loaded.
As we visit more places and produce articles with geotags, you will see more and more articles on the map. Be sure to zoom out and pan around because not all of our articles are about Taiwan.
UPDATE: 10/26/2007:
Feed issues with the “Subscribe” icon in the corner of the header have been resolved.
If you wish to manually configure our feed, use:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheNewHampshireBushmanInTaiwan
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