Sunday Cyber-Sermon (Sujatha)

Here are the suggestions of Sujatha, the humble not-so-uber-geeky blogger, on C&Ping from webpages when composing blog posts:

1. Focus on Tested Websites, not obscurities. (Psalm 345:1-3)

Notice how Sujatha extols Google first. Then, in comparison to Google, she has no need of alternate search engines.

"The Google is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?"

"The Google is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?"

Undoubtedly one of the greatest hurdles to overcome in blogging is fear, the fear of PC Viruses, Trojans and Malware.

Sujatha did not let fear take the blog out of her life.
Blogger Ruchira shares the story of a person who had a very bad day.

"Heinous pictures and videos can be deposited on computers by viruses — the malicious programs better known for swiping your credit card numbers. In this twist, it's your reputation that's stolen."

It began when Mike was suspected based on his internet charges by his employers of excessive internet usage. An investigation turned up pornographic pictures on his computer, which cost him his job and thousands of dollars in money spent to clear himself of the charges, which were found to have been the result of PC viruses downloading porn on his computer when he wasn't even at work.

Have you ever felt like that? One minute you’re whistling through life, blogging away happily and the next you’re caught up in a whirlwind of stress, as unwanted ads pop up on your blog's webpage.  Life sucks you up into its vortex and just when you think you’ve recovered from one trouble another wind of adversity blows in your direction.

Don’t be like Mike. Don’t let the blog go out of your life.

But how is this possible? It becomes possible when we focus on who the Devil WebAdsman is. In the case of Ruchira and her blog, it was the material cut and pasted from the Smithsonian website, that had the horrendous hidden code, which showed up C&Ping to Notepad. It quoth "Read more:http://smithsonian.blah.blah.blah.com" and stealthily, like the verily serpent that is Satan, downloaded Ads for cars and other monuments to human greed to tempt us faithful bloggers from the path of righteousness.

He is our light. He is our salvation. We are no longer living in the darkness of sin. We will diligently check for hidden code when we cut and paste from internet sources. No enemy can take the Internet’s salvation from us! No enemy can impose Satanic Ads on our blog posts!

--With apologies to The original sermon creator and a tip of the hat to Margaret Atwood and her marvellous alternate theology of The God's Gardeners in her latest book "The Year of the Flood"

Comments

[Ruchira]

In case Sujatha's sermon is a bit cryptic for some readers, this is what happened.

No, no pornography was inadvertently downloaded on Accidental Blogger. But about a week ago we did start seeing an unsolicited cyber-ad for a Ford automobile that was merrily occupying space on the front page and obscuring one of Joe's posts. Being mostly ignorant about the mysterious inner workings of Internet sites, I asked my co-bloggers if anyone knew how this happened since I had not knowingly opened the portals for any advertisement to appear on the blog.

It appears, as cyber-sleuth Sujatha figured out, that I had unwittingly pasted the "html" code for the ad when I had copied a bit of text from the Smithsonian magazine for one of my posts. The weird thing is that the code was not visible to the naked eye in the blog's draft page. Such codes show up only if one switches to the "html" version of the post or if one copies and pastes them on a separate page such as on Notepad. I did neither before publishing and the ad got published along with the post. By following Sujatha's astute step by step guidance, I was able to go back and erase the "invisible" code and republished the post without the annoying ad showing up on our blog. The lesson here? Bloggers beware of sneaky, creepy little codes lurking on the pages of seemingly safe websites!

[Sujatha]

Thanks, Ruchira. That was a clear explanation of the cryptic cyber-sermon,and you have continued the time-honored tradition of annotated commentary on the preacher's baffling ramblings :)

[Joe]

That was brilliant, Sujatha. Very funny!