Needle Painting Progress and Splog Warning!

Here's how far I got with the needle painting project by the end of the day of the last post (Monday, two days ago)

Then yesterday, whilst watching BBC's 'Land Girls' on the iPlayer, I managed to put in the main bloom

And this is how it looks right now:

I'm undecided on whether to put the spider's web in, or consider it finished here.  I'm veering towards putting it in, and I expect I'll have that sorted, one way or the other, very soon.  I think that element will balance it up nicely and my only real concern is whether or not the Kreinik cord I'm planning to use will be too thick when compared to the Madeira thread used in the book.  I'm thinking it will be OK...

So then I'll have the bloom profile to work on what will be the back of the pouch.

Changing the subject completely from the pleasant one of embroidery to the unpleasant one of copyright infringement and theft - I was splogged recently.  'What is a splog?' I hear you ask.  Apparently, that's the name given to a fake blog where the entire contents are stolen from somewhere else.  I'm not sure if they used one of those software nasties that will download your entire blog/site or hacked into my Blogger account (yes, I've changed my password!), but somewhere between the 11th and the 21st of last month, someone stole my entire blog content - 361 postings and re-published them on a fake blog template, re-arranging the order of some postings as if that, in some way, gave them a right to the copyright sign they had the nerve to put on the bottom!

How did I know this?  My blog is registered with Fairshare, which I recommend all of you do with your own blogs/sites.  They then send a notification via Google Reader for each page or excerpt that is re-published elsewhere.  Some may be perfectly legit and some even come in error (one of the RSS feeds on one of the my other blogs was flashed up once), and mercifully they only sent 39 notifications, not all 361.  Anyway, after a few reports to Google, they have removed the offending site.  At first I feared I would have to send in 361 separate reports, but I asked them if they seriously expected that and did they really want to wade through them all, and back came a confirmation that the splog had been dealt with faithfully.  And indeed it has - I checked!

Why do folk do this?  Well, search me, I wouldn't have ever considered it, but I understand some do it to pinch advertising revenue etc.  This wasn't the case with my blog as I've never allowed ads to be shown on my blog and the thief loaded it onto a template claiming to be about pressed flowers and some Fairshare reports were referring to an already deleted blog about where to stay in Paris, (which seemed familiar actually).  So, I have no idea why and when I feared having to file 361 reports, I just reported the URLs of the postings that got me the most traffic so that they at least couldn't steal my readership.

Apart from the slight flattery that my blog was considered worth nicking, (I mean, who'd want to think that their blog was passed up with, 'Who'd want to read that rubbish? Glad I didn't write it!' LOL), this is of course a case of theft and copyright violation.  I know some are, rightly, very concerned about that, considering the amount of time and work they put into their blogs, so I wanted to share my recent experience in the hope it might be useful.  I'll be adding in copyright notifications on all postings from here-on-in (if I remember each time.....)

© Elizabeth Braun 2011