BLOG BUGS

One of the functions in this blog is the ability to click on an underlined link, and be transfered to a previous post on something similar. As in yesterday's post, for instance; I was talking about Barack Obama and put in a link to my post of two years ago on the same subject.

While I was writing it, I happened to notice that other words also had the blue link under them. But these were single words, where I had not made the link; money, date, win, woman. When I clicked on them, I got annoying ads asking me to join a casino, or become friends with Russian women. Even more irritating, I found that the links went through all of my previous 800 or so posts. So whenever I had written the word money during the past two and a half years, there was a link inviting me to find a Russian girlfriend.

When I have IT problems, I usually turn to my son, he of the Globe 6 Adventures blog. Since he couldn't see the links under the words in his Firefox browser, he guessed that it had something to do with the Chrome browser that I use to write the blog (blogger.com being, like Chrome, part of the Google stable). I uninstalled Chrome and then reinstalled it, but the problem remained. However, after surfing on the internet for an hour or so, I found the following link http://wordpress.org/support/topic/unwanted-ads-suddently-overlaying-my-images that told me what to do. It was a problem with Chrome, an extension within the browser called Fast Save. I disabled this, and bingo, the annoying words and the Russian women all disappeared.

Computers and other IT-thingies are very useful tools, until they start to go wrong. At which point, they quickly become frustrating and irritating to someone like me. In this particular case, I persevered, and finally managed to sort the problem out. So I suppose I should view the whole thing as a learning experience.

Walter Blotscher