The Digital Age: Setting Sail on Uncharted Waters

Have you heard about GDPR? Neither had I!

Living in the digital age is a little like setting sail on uncharted waters. The rapid expansion of information technology has and will affect us all in many ways: from data sharing and collection, politics, and even possibly our future employment opportunities.

While researching how GDPR impacts me as a blogger, I learned about how digital technology may be shaping the future for all of us, and how important it is that this technology be regulated. After viewing the videos I've linked later in this post, you may agree.

The topic of Internet security and the information we all share is more than a little scary. The GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is an attempt to improve the handling of data and privacy protection of website users from the European Union (EU) and seems to be a very good idea.

Last week I sent out an email to subscribers of this blog's newsletter. In it, I provided an opportunity to update subscription preferences and I explained that I have updated my privacy policy. (You can read my privacy policy here and I encourage you to do so.) This was all done in an attempt to be compliant with the new EU global privacy data regulations (GDPR).

The GDPR is now in effect and has bloggers and website owners sort of scrambling to be sure we are compliant with the rules. While these rules are a good idea, what compliancy actually looks like is a little confusing.

Since my opt-in forms have always made it clear to subscribers that they will receive newsletter email updates from me and because I've always had a privacy policy posted on my blog, I think that I satisfy the GDPR regulations without having to delete any EU subscribers from my email list (as some website owners are having to do.)  While I have no current plans to delete anyone, I want my email list to be composed of people who want to hear from me!

Therefore, I encourage you to:

• Update your subscription preferences to my newsletter by clicking here.
• If you no longer want my emails about making the most of life's moments, you can unsubscribe by clicking here or on the link at the bottom of any of my newsletter emails.

If you are not getting my emails, you can sign up for my newsletter by clicking here. (I really hope you will!)

I send newsletters on days when new content is posted on this blog and also sometimes on occasions when I have other information to share. (You will also receive a free down-loadable and printable copy of my Ten Tips for Making the Most of ALL Your Moments, as a thank you for signing up.)

Many thanks to subscribers who have already updated their profiles with me.

I want all the visitors to my blog and subscribers of my newsletter to understand what data is collected on this blog and how it is used. The GDPR  regulations are currently only applicable to EU readers, but I believe Internet data privacy protection is important worldwide.

Could Our Digital Technology Lead to Our Demise?

My convictions about the need for regulating digital privacy were strengthened when I listened to these fascinating lectures:

Vanished Flight MH370: New Answers or Just More Speculation?

During March, 2014 a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane mysteriously disappeared. It seems so inconceivable that 12 crew members and  227 passengers could just simply vanish. I watched the news closely, expecting to hear any day that the plane had been found. Unlikely as it was, I hoped that somehow the passengers would be found, safe and sound. I even wrote about it one of my first posts on this blog, Flight MA 370: Hidden in Plain Sight?

By December 2014, there were still no answers to the mystery of what had happened to the plane. I was saddened by how emotionally difficult holidays and special occasions would be for all the grieving families of the lost. It would be so hard to move forward without any type of closure.

It's now more than four years after the plane vanished and investigations of the event continue. Some pieces of debris were found, confirming that the plane did crash into the ocean. Strangely though, much of the wreckage is still missing. No bodies have been recovered. The disappearance of MA 370 has being called "one of the greatest aviation mysteries in modern history."

On May 13, 2018 an Australian news program, 60 Minutes Australia, aired a program interviewing experts who believe they now know why and how the plane crashed. Some of them concluded it was an intentional act by one of the pilots; a premeditated, methodically-planned and deliberate murder-suicide.

The hope was voiced that the conclusions presented will bring comfort to the public. I'm not sure they will at all, or if we are really any closer to knowing what happened. I watched the program and read the news reports; for me they just raised more questions.

Spammer Comments: What's a Blogger to Do?

Spam comments are the bane of a blogger's existence. Okay, well maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. Trolls of the Internet with their mean-spirited comments are even worse. Trying to keep up with social media, deciphering Google Analytics reports, understanding GDPR regulations well enough to implement them, and figuring out why a blog is loading slowly are challenges that rank high in blog-related frustrations for me too. But I do find spam comments annoying. Does anyone else?

I'm curious about how other bloggers deal with these unwelcome comments, so I decided to write this post. Also, I'm offering it as part-explanation and part-apology to my readers who may have recently experienced frustration while trying to leave comments on my posts.

First of all, who are these spammers?! I mean, really. Who has time to leave mundane or nonsensical comments on a blog? I wish I could be as prolific as these spammers in my efforts to support the blogs that I enjoy.

If you look closely, most spam comments are robotically generated and link back to a product being sold. Flattering compliments like "I've never found a blog so intriguing" or "You are so knowledgeable and this is just what I've been searching for" are really just an attempt to entice the blogger to publish the comment.

As a new blogger, I remember how elated I was when the first of those comments appeared on one of my posts. I was so excited that someone thought I was an expert! I quickly realized it as not really valid feedback. I soon caught on to their techniques and am now rarely fooled by one of their lines.

Unfortunately though, a problem persisted. How to keep those comments off my blog? I tried using word verification or captcha (those annoying letters you have to decipher to prove you are not a robot before you leave a comment), but I didn't like making my readers jump through those hoops.

For several years, I just allowed all comments to be published, and made it a part of my daily routine to delete spam. I wonder, thought, if that practice allowed those spammers to gain a stronger foothold? In the past year it seems spam comments on my blog, The Most - - of Every Moment, have increased a hundred-fold.

I have a few questions for other bloggers:

• Does anyone know if publishing some spam comments opens the flood gates for more? 
• Are there just a lot more spammers now than there used to be?
• In what way could my blog have become more easily accessible to spam?
• Are spam comments even worth worrying about? Is there any harm with letting them all just be published as they appear?

Whatever the reason for the exponential increase of spam comments on my posts, I finally decided a while ago to change the settings on my blog, so that all comments must be moderated by me ... meaning that I must approve each comment before it is published. This trick solved my problem of spam comments being published on my blog, but it created extra work for me and reader comments don't appear on my blog until after I approve them.

For a variety of the usual reasons, I have not been blogging full-time lately. As a result, there has sometimes been quite a delay before readers comments have been published. This makes me uncomfortable, as it is a major blogging faux pas.

Today, I started wondering if I should turn the captcha safeguard back on and comment moderation off. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my website platform (Blogger) no longer uses those indecipherable letter codes, but readers simply have to check a box indicating that they are human. 

Happy May Day! Did You Say Rabbit, Rabbit?

It's May 1st!

Did you remember to say Rabbit, Rabbit before you got out of bed? A friend of mine told me about this superstition back when we were in high school. Supposedly, if you say rabbit before you get out of bed on the first day of any month, you will have good luck for the next 30 days. Saying it twice makes the luck really stick.

Don't worry if you didn't say rabbit, rabbit this morning though, this NPR article offers some alternative suggestions for a lucky month.

May Day or May 1st is sometimes celebrated with May Pole dances and flower baskets left on neighbor's doorknobs. Ancient pagans considered it "the day halfway between spring and summer." Ha ha, they certainly didn't live in Montana!

However, I think spring weather maybe has finally arrived here. We did some hiking with our dog on Sunday. It was a different trail than the one I wrote about last week, when we had to turn back because of snow and ice. On this route, we didn't run into any snow. Instead, our descent was made in