A Nifty Trick For Bloggers

Long-time readers of this blog (Hi, Mom!) know that I’ve been wrasslin’ with Mandriva 2011 — or, I should say, my installation of it. It’s crashed its brains out about fifteen times, but it’s loaded two days in a row without incident.

But that isn’t what I’m posting about, except to remind everybody to BACKUP YOUR FREAKIN’ FILES!! If you have an off-line mail reader, backup your mail, address book, and profile. Dig into your browser (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer) and save your bookmarks. Backup any settings on it that you can export. If you have a calendar program — Sunbird, for example — export your calendar file; don’t just backup the folder, export the calendar file. If you write, for the love of all that’s holy, back up your writing. That, I did.

Now, here’s the nifty trick. You may already know it. I may have already told you about it. It bears repeating.

If you leave a comment on a blog, and if you have a blog or web page or buy link for your books that you want people to know about, you can leave a clickable link to it in your comment. Some blogs let you fill in a space with your name and your web site, but some don’t. So you go like this:

I loved your post. You are absolutely right, that Michael Z. Lewin is the greatest living detective story writer! My mother likes his Leroy Powder books best, but I lean toward the Albert Samson ones.

Marian Allen

Fantasies, mysteries, comedies, recipes

When the comment posts, the reader will only see what’s between the two sets of brackets: Fantasies, mysteries, comedies, recipes — and that set of words will be a clickable link to the web address.

Nifty, eh?

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: A character’s computer crashes.

MA