Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook

Ever been “scraped”? It’s the name (oh no! another funky new name for something Internet related!) for a blogger whose content has been stolen and that content republished by another blogger. And without crediting the originator. These scrapers surf the blogosphere, looking for content for the specific purpose of stealing it to “create” their own blog or website. It’s a disgusting, heinous practice. Search engines like Google and Yahoo, penalize websites for “duplicate content.” Your website or blog has a decreased chance of getting indexed (and therefore visited by readers) if there is more than one copy of your work out there. So scrapers are the bottom of the pool of scumbags, worse than card-sharks at poker tables.

I came across a great website that tells bloggers how to fight back. Hurray! It may come in useful for you if you are a blogger. You can check it out here. There’s a downloadable pdf form, too. Many thanks to this blogger for bringing this to the forefront! Scrapers should — and now can– be stopped.

Amic Email Backup
I was initially very impressed with this program. It’s is a speedy little program that will backup all your emails, whether it be Opera Mail, Eudora mail, Thunderbird, or the ubiquitous Outlook Express. It will backup all your emails and settings with the click of the mouse. It stores the information in a small file and keeps it in the My Documents folder. You can move it to a safe place (like a flash drive separate from your computer’s hard drive) in case of a computer crash or reformat. I love that you can schedule it to backup automatically (I have mine set to every 2 days but you can backup every month or two or three).

When the day comes and you need to restore, you click on your stored file, and Amic begins. The process of restoring your email is another simple click away. IF IT WORKED. It didn’t work for me. The backup process went smoothly, but when I tried to restore, an error notification popped up telling me the file was corrupted.

This could be a great little program. I use Windows Vista, so perhaps this was the problem. I have not tried it on XP yet. If you are looking for a quick little program to save your email, this is free, at least. If it works for you, please let me know!