Marketing Begins At Home

The blog was not deleted due to a “spat” instead it was removed because it was no longer in use and it was a haven for thousands of spam links. We were surprised by Brian’s post today as Brian contacted us and asked that we point the old Slidell blog to his new Gulf Blog. I had a conversation with Brian today and planned to meet with the team to discuss his request and options for the blog.

The last post on the Slidell blog was in April and the spam problem was getting out of hand (sure handling future spam is easy, but what about the thousands of old posts). The blog was always considered a temporary project and we never bothered to load a spam filter on the comments. There was talk of cleaning the spam out and then locking down comments - to turn it into sort of a historical site. We estimated that 40,000 spam links were hosted on the blog.

We are meeting later today to discuss various options. One favored option was the creation of a single page that told the history of the blog and provided resources for Katrina and possible future disasters. I do want to mention that while Brian did a great job on the blog, he was only one of several contributors on the project.

I feel really confident about being able to manage the spam issue. There is a great service called Akismet that I use to keep spam under control. The offer stands for me to host the content and take the pointer of the subdomain. Which is what should happen. Or you can just turn the site back on. Anything else breaks all the links, which is what I’m talking about above. The thing is, it’s not your content to decide what happens. It was authored by people trying to update their friends, neighbors and the world about what was happening on the coast. I served as an editor and a conduit. Your servers hosted it. It’s unfortunate, but your actions are standing in the way of links and searches working as they should.