Offline For Two Days: The Aftermath

As many of you know, I was offline for the past two days, completely offline.

I absolutely hate digging out of it.

Right now, I can barely focus. It’s like my fingers are drunk and tripping over each other. Not good for a blogger, not good at all.

First thing I do is download emails. Hundreds of emails come in, hundreds. Thousands are blocked for spam reasons, then a couple hundred more are then blocked on my secondary spam filter. Then the real emails. Hundreds of those, hundreds. Most of them I can quickly glance at, and delete or file away. Then there are the ones I can do quick replies to and delete or file away. Then there are the ones I need to wait and respond later (I hate those ones).

Then speak with some RBers to make sure everything went OK the past few days. Delete any voicemails that I don’t need to return and move on.

Then the comment spam. I review what I can, delete was is bad. Ben did a great job watching over it when I was gone. So it was not bad. But some slipped through to the other blogs. I then ban some more domains, update some of the filtering, let the spam comments delete and rebuild and continue on.

Then comes the forum administrator stuff, reviewing the spam and posts at my own forum. That goes quickly, since I do very little promotion of that forum. And the mods there simply rock.

Then off to the feeds. Over 2,000 unread feeds. I take a quick breath, mark most of them as read and then review Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land’s caps to get me up to speed. Some feeds I read, based on folders I have set up – so I didn’t mark them all as read.

But right now, I am so out of it.

Off to write more…