This Weeks Post Was Suggested By Steve

Cpl. Ira H. Hayes
3rd Parachute Battalion, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, 1st Headquarters Battalion, HQMC
January 12, 1923 – January 24, 1955

Ira Hamilton Hayes, participant in the famous flag raising on Iwo Jima, was a Pima Indian, born at Sacaton, Arizona, on 12 January 1923. In 1932, the family moved a few miles southward to Bapchule. Both Sacaton and Bapchule are located within the boundaries of the Gila River Indian Reservation in south central Arizona. Hayes left high school after completing two years of study. He served in the Civilian Conservation Corps in May and June of 1942, and then went to work as a carpenter.

You can read more about Cpl. Hayes here.

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

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I know I have talked about how much I love Entrecard.  They are a great way to drive traffic to your blog and have a great community.  Today, some cool changes took place and some not so cool changes too.

First, the cool changes.  Now, you can see how many times a person has dropped their Entrecard on you.  It also lists your last 5 posts that you have done on your blog.  Both are very cool changes that I think are great.

Now, onto the not so good changes.  The change that I absolutely hate that happened today (without any warning) is that you can only drop 600 cards per ip.  Now, if you have one blog this is no big deal.  However, if you have more than 2 blogs in the system (I have 3), this royally screws you.  How?  Normally, you can drop 300 cards per account you have.  Since I have 3 accounts, I was dropping up to 900 cards a day.  Yes, I actually do read the majority of those blogs I was dropping my cards on (not everybody updates daily or weekly).  It would take me several hours a day to do.  However, the traffic that I received from that made it well worth me doing.  By looking at my entrecard stats, I can definitely see the difference in my traffic depending on the number of cards I dropped.  More cards = more traffic.

Now, this not only effects me.  This effects every person who has more than 2 blogs in the system.  If I drop evenly between my blogs, I will drop only 200 cards per blog.  I am losing out on potentially 100 more drops (if everyone reciprocates).  If this is the case, this blog will never make the top three spots nor will my other two blogs since I won’t be able to reciprocate everyone who drops on me.  I am also going to assume that the top three blogs are people who only have a single blog in the system.  If that is the case, they will be dropping 300 cards to my 200 on a daily basis.  Tell me how I ever catch up to the lost traffic.  The top spots got there by dropping 300 cards daily.

This change effects anyone who uses a shared computer and/or ip to do their drops.  Husbands and wives won’t be able to both have accounts and not effect each others ability to drop.  People won’t be able to drop (or be limited) from work if anybody else in the building does Entrecard.  And heaven forbid, if you have to use an internet cafe or library to drop.  Who knows if somebody already used up the 600 drops off those ips?

What’s the reason for this change?  Well, according to Phirate (one of the head guys of Entrecard):

It’s not a penalty, it’s just our only real rational response to people creating multiple “spam blogs” and going nuts dropping a thousand + per day. Unfortunately, some legitimate users will get caught in the cross-fire.

Well, go after the spam blogs.  Set up a system where the blogs have to be 30-60 days old and have 10 posts or so.  That should weed out a bunch of them right off the bat.  I would think they would rather be able to say that they have 7,000 good blogs in the system instead of 6,000 good and 1,000 not so good.

Another issue with this is that it is pretty easy to change your IP.  If you use AT&T like I do, it is simple (just a pain in the butt to have to do everyday).  I won’t go into how you do it, but if I know how to do it, the spammers definitely do to.  Also, another way around this is to use a proxy.  Again, if I figured this out, so can the spammers.

Entrecard, I love your system.  It does exactly what it is suppose to — it drives traffic to my blogs.  However, you are hurting the very people who make the system great.  I would think that you would want your best users to be able to put more of their quality blogs into the system.

If you agree, please let them know.  From the few people I have talked to like Jenn, I am not the only one who doesn’t agree with this change.  Entrecard has made tons of changes based on what the users want.  I am hoping that the users can bring about change again.

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This Weeks Hero Was Suggested By Mary Ann

Spc. Jeffrey Jamaleldine
Company C, 1st Battalion, 77th Armor
“How can I say to my sons, stand up for something, fight for what you think is right, if I don’t do anything myself?”

The Jeffrey Jamaleldine that you speak to today is a complete 180 from the Jeffrey Jamaleldine that you would have spoke to in the past. In 1991, Jamaleldin was living in Germany when joined in anti-American protests on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm boulevard during Operation Desert Storm. “That was the way it was back then,” he says. He was 15 and “America was simply the enemy.” And today, Jeffery Jamaleldine is a wounded veteran of the U.S. Army. On June 6, 2005, after the terror bombing in Madrid, Spain, in the middle of the Iraq war, he showed up at the U.S. Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, to enlist. His father, Bashir, told him at the time: “Son, this won’t be a picnic.”

On June 30, Jamaleldine was on patrol in Ramadi, Iraq. The patrol ahead of him had been ambushed by at least 70 combatants and were now under fire. During the fight, Spc. Jeffrey Jamaleldine was hit in the face by a bullet. In the end, the battle lasted into the next morning and the soldiers were able to stop the enemy from returning to Ramadi.

The article on Spc. Jeffrey Jamaleldine is five pages long, and I simply can not condense it down to only a few paragraphs. You can read the entire story here.

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

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Hum the Boohbah theme song.
Mention glycerin suppositories.
Say, “Does this fat make me look fat?”
Moo when you take your bra off.
Call your partner “Daddy” in a singsong voice.
Remind him of the greatest miracle of your relationship: the time he saw your vagina turn inside out.

I got this list in an email tonight, and it was too funny not to pass it on! Now, a good way to rekindle the romance is take a few luxury vacations (and I’m not talking about the ones to the water park with the kids!). Let me know if you know so more ways NOT to rekindle the romance and I’ll add them to the list>

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Sgt. Steve Morin Jr.
34 years old from Arlington, Texas
111th Engineer Battalion, 36th Infantry Division, Texas Army National Guard
September 28, 2005
From the time he finished high school, Sgt. Steve Morin Jr. made serving in the military his career.

“He always stood up for what he thought was right,” Gwendolyn Michelle Morin, his wife, said. “He was a fighter. He would never give up.” “He had called me to let me know what he was going to do that day,” she said. He expected to be able to call her more often because of the missions he was being assigned. Sometimes they would go 11 or 12 days between calls.

Morin enlisted in the Navy after graduating high school in his hometown of Brownfield, Texas at 17. By 34, Morin had devoted 14 years to the Navy, served in the National Guard for two and planned to attend Officers Candidate School. Morin was still in the Navy when he met his wife. At the time, the two were working for a photo company; he was Santa Claus and she was an elf, she said. Both were attending Texas Tech University. “It was funny because we always kept running into each other. He would hang outside my classes and wait for me with a Diet Coke,” recalled Gwendolyn. “He knew how to make me really happy.”

Sgt. Morin died when an IED went off, overturning the vehicle he was riding in near Umm Qasr, Iraq.

“He’s very strong willed, very determined. Humorous, a clown, but he was also very disciplined and very passionate about what he believed in,” Gwendolyn Morin said. “He always wanted to serve his country.”

This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your site, you can go here.

Copyright © 2011 My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact mythoughtsideasandramblings.com @ gmail.com so we can take legal action immediately.