After posting information on several literary writing contests I came across some information on Poetry Contest scams. Now, poetry scams are not new, they’ve been around for a long time. Before the Internet they were published ads in writers magazines, newspapers and other marketing material geared toward writers, especially new writers. Since I’m not a poet I never entered one of those so-called-poetry-contests. But a friend of mine did and she won! Well, that’s what they wanted her to believe but of course there was a catch. What she won was the chance to win the grand prize (cash amount, don’t remember the amount) and just for getting into the semi-finals she would have her exceptional poem published in an anthology book, no purchase necessary. Such a deal, right? Wrong! The book was $49.99 plus shipping and handling and there was a deadline for ordering the book. There were other costs, depending on what you, the poet, might want, such as a bio and fancy typeset. It could easily have cost her $100 just to see her poem in print.

She did purchase the book but not with any of the extras and was disappointed at the quality of the poems. Her poem was very good as were a few others but the vast majority were terrible. Are these contests legit? Technically, they are as long as the cash prizes are awarded and apparently they are, though how much it cost the winner to receive the cash award may be more than the award itself. The anthology is published and sent out but only to those who purchased it before the deadline. The books were not marketed anywhere, meaning you could not go out and buy one, but now with the technology age, you can see/read the better poems published from past contests online.

One of the biggest online poetry contest marketers is poetry.com, which has also been known as The National Library of Poetry, Watermark Press, and International Society of Poets. What they all are is vanity press marketers. Essentially, you pay to be published along with hundreds of others and have a slim chance at winning the cash prize.

The National Library of Poetry was exposed on ABC’s 20/20 in January 1998. Read about it Here. Here is more information on poetry.com from WritersWeekly, an online ezine, that was posted in 2001 and updated in 2002. Then there’s this piece by David Taub, Failure is impossible at poetry.com — the website where every poem is a semifinalist, originally published in the Poetic Voices, an online magazine, in 2000.

Here is information on the Hollywoods Famous Poets Society Poetry scam. All the websites mentioned in this article are now apparently gone. Here is information on the other names this society had run their scam under, Famous Poets Society, amazing!

Here is a list of poetry/writing scams. And here is a WritersWeekly’s resent warnings. And here is an article written by Kurt Heintz, A Word to the Wise, on entering online poetry contests. It’s worth the read, especially if you are thinking of entering one in the near future.

The lesson here is to always research any online writing contest. Do a Google search for information on the organization, look at the whois information and see if the contact details match what’s on the site offering the contest, look to see if there is BBB information on the organization and last but not least, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. I’ll probably be writing more on online writing scams and warnings, along with supplying information on what I believe to be legit writing contests. Contests can be a good motivation to write but they can also become a thorn in an otherwise empty pocketbook.

Thought I’d lighten the mood around here a bit.

Your Blog Should Be Green

Your blog is smart and thoughtful - not a lot of fluff. You enjoy a good discussion, especially if it involves picking apart ideas. However, you tend to get easily annoyed by any thoughtless comments in your blog.

I about fell out of my chair when the results of this quiz reveled the outcome of my answers! What more is there to say?

I finally managed to get my design up after updating a very old version of WordPress to the current stable version. I used Aubrey’s theme, Red Autumn, for a few weeks and my new layout is loosely based on that theme. Aubrey’s Red Autumn theme was based on the default Word Press theme, Kubrick, originally created by Michael Heilemann. Personally, I’m not crazy about the Kubrick theme. Ascetically it’s okay, not my style but better than the old default WordPress theme. There are things about the layout and CSS that I don’t like and I don’t think it’s all that easy to manipulate. A beginner would have far too many problems trying to change the way it looks via the CSS. But apparently there is a new and improved Kubrick in development, renamed K2. Hopefully it will be better than Heilemann’s blog layout, which breaks in Internet Explorer. It looks good in FireFox and Opera but unfortunately, IE is the most widely used browser on the Internet and not optimizing a sites layout and design for that browser is commenting cyber suicide in my opinion.

Yes, I know all the pitfalls and security issue associated with IE. I even wrote about it, Surfing With Windows IE and Another Reason to Not Use Internet Explorer. However, 80% or more of the Internet community are still using IE to surf the Net and I’m not willing to exclude them because they are using a flawed browser.

Anyway, back to this blog’s design. I’m happy with the overall look and layout. There are still a few thing I want to add, a few things I want to change and a few problems I’m unable to fix, or haven’t been able to fix. Mostly because I lack the know-how or haven’t found the right place to fix the problems but I can live with those minor problems for now. I may try to do a WordPress theme from scratch, instead of tweaking someone else’s CSS, someday. But who knows when I will have the time to explore something like that!

The suspect made about $60,000 by installing adware on some 400,000 compromised computers, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Among the systems affected by the botnets were computers at the Weapons Division of the United States Naval Air Warfare Center, as well as machines operated by the U.S. Department of Defense. Read the entire article Here.

Think your computer is secure? If the U.S. Department of Defense can have their computers compromised, what’s keeping yours from being infected with malware, adware, trojans or a zombie to someone’s botnet? Do you know how to protect your computer and if you do have protection, do you know how well it’s working?Are you using Windows XP’s firewall? Wanta see how well it’s protecting you?

Note: It’s just as important that your firewall does not allow anything to access the Internet from within is walls without your permission as it is to deny access from outside its walls. Test you computers firewall Here, but be sure to read the information on the page before doing a test. Steve Gibson is a well know and respected security expert. I trust his testing software without question and have used it for several years now and have recommended it to many that needed to understand how vulnerable their computers actually were and why their computers weren’t functioning as they should.

You can test how secure you computer is with Gibson’s Shields Up! online test. Be sure to explore the information before doing the test so that you understand the results as fully as possible.

You can also read Gibson’s report on a DOS (denial of service) attack and what he did to combat his attacker Here. I read it in late 2001 and up until then I didn’t have a clue about how secure my computer was, nor did I care. I was of the mind that there wasn’t anything on my computer that anyone would want. What I wasn’t aware of was what someone could do to someone else through my computer. I became much more concerned after ready Gibson’s report, which is very well written for such a dry techie kind of thing. How he resolved the problem is commendable, which goes well beyond his knowledge of technology and how to manipulate it. Read it, you won’t be sorry, even if you have absolutely no tech skills. I sure didn’t at the time I read it. I’ve gain considerable skills since then, though not nearly enough to be anything more than a want-a-be computer geek.

Gibson has uncovered many of Microsoft’s security flaws in the past. I wonder if Microsoft is going to make their next big product release a bit more secure out of the box?

Earlier this year, Microsoft intentionally infected a computer with an Internet worm which resulted in it being made part of a botnet. The operation then quarantined the machine and monitored it over a period of 20 days. During this time the zombie was contacted 5 million times by spammers. Read the entire article, Microsoft Takes On Spamming Botnets.

One can dream, can’t they?

Well, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my version of WordPress to the current one. Since mine old one was 1.2 and the new version is much different as far as template design, I can’t use my old design without doing some major tweaking to the CSS and the page templates. So, I’ve opted to use this one for now, which has it’s own problems as you can see (fixed the problem) but I kind of like the red for a change.

I will be creating my own theme from my old design with some changes. Not sure exactly what I will change, depends on my mood at the time. Now all I have to do is find some free time.

BTW, for anyone hesitating on doing the upgrade, especially those using much older versions of WordPress, the upgrade went smooth as silk. Not a single problem, everything is functioning as it should.