Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

As you can tell from any of my more recent In the Mail posts, I am disclosing where or why I got each book from. I decided to do this after taking part in the My Last 20 Books meme. From now on, after the book title and author, I will put the details of the how and why of each acquisition. In the nature of full disclosure and that.

Yes, I have just reached my 1000th post! Can you believe it? I have been running this blog for years. Morbid-Romantic.net was a present to myself when I started college. Now, I have a degree and am about to return for another. 1000 posts in between that time… well, more. But, server crashes and moves and my own temperament has caused me to delete a lot. But, with this final version of my blog in place, I have reached 1000. It is quite a feat, I think.

I decided to celebrate it, I will have a contest up every day this week. Check this post every day to find the link to the new contest!

Monday- Online Poster Printing Giveaway
Tuesday- The Link by Colin Tudge
Wednesday- The Vixen Manual by Karrine Steffans
Thursday- The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos
Friday- Off Season by Anne Rivers Siddons
Saturday- The Impostor’s Daughter by Laurie Sandell
Sunday- How to Score by Robin Wells

Here are a few of the online resources that I use to ensure that my blog if protected and properly represented. I thought I’d put them out there for all of you other book bloggers who want to protect your content from other websites. Website theft is rampant. Some times a web thief will steal your design, but some are brazen and bold enough to actually copy and paste your content and place it on their webpage. While some may be new to website and unsure what the protocol is, I can’t imagine anyone thinking that out right content theft is acceptable.

MyFreeCopyright.com – Register your blog by adding your feed address. From the point that you register and beyond, your blog posts will be logged, registered with a date to prove you published at a certain date and time, and given a unique digital fingerprint. With this you will be able to prove that the content you publish is yours because you have a digitally stamped copy. You can’t alter the time and date or text like you can with a blog entry. So, if someone steals your content, you can just furnish your proof that it belonged to you first.

CopyrightSpot – As they say, this site is for free plagiarism detection. You put in your feed URL or your site URL and their search engine will seak out duplicates of your content. This is important for book reviewers because some sites and book sellers out there will just steal a review from a reviewer site and publish it in their book shops. Without permission.

SafeSurf Rating System – Not all of us rate books that are child or teenager friendly. There are a lot of hot and steamy novels out there! Of course, as responsible web owners and reviewers, we don’t want children to come across our reviews and read something that may be inappropriate. A quote, an observation, a joke… whatever. The site, once you register your content, will generate a META tag for you to add to your site. If your site is not for the eyes of the young, search engines will read that and not show it in results.

Is the phrase ‘RSS feeds’ redundant? Like Bunny Rabbit or Kitty Cat?

Eh, whatever. I found a plugin today that allowed me to make feeds based on category. So, with the plugin activated, I was able to set up two new feeds apart from my blog feed. There is now one feed for Book Reviews and one feed for Blog Giveaways, in addition to my overall blog feed. So, if you’re only interested in the Book Giveaways or my Reviews, you can subscribe to those feeds and never have to read another one of my boring posts again!

Did you guys know that Morbid-Romantic.net was ‘born’ today, on this very day, in 2002? Yes, today is Morbid-Romantic.net’s sixth birthday! I have been at this domain for a total of six years. Can you believe it? Pretty soon, we are going to celebrate the decade together.

I bought his domain when I started college. It was sort of a treat to myself to get one, as I had a blog hosted at other places for a while up to that point. I chose a name from one of my favorite Anne Rice book quotes and set off on the purchase. I can still remember very clearly sitting in the computer lab of the school, checking my URL to see if it worked. And I can remember how happy I was to see it and know that it was mine. I also recall very clearly how upset I was when I almost lost this domain. In the six years I have had it, I haven’t once thought of buying a new personal domain. This is my domain. I want no other name but this and I can’t imagine ever wanting another one to identify me.

This blog/site has gone through many changes, but so have I. Okay, so it has little more purpose than it did from inception, but it makes me happy and that is all that counts.

I just wanted to mark this occasion by announcing and by declaring my ever lasting love for this domain.

And the count begins again.