The world that we live in

Just to show you what I have to go through to sort out the comments, here are some priceless samples.

On an article I wrote about Le Marche supermarket opening in Oshiwara:

Submitted on 2008/08/05 at 10:19pm

hi i am in bahrain now.my house in jogeshwari . can you sent me your food item price list.and i want to order to my credit card from here
its possibli please advice .
Thanks

On numerous posts about retail jobs:

Submitted on 2008/07/30 at 12:09pm

i am interested to join reliance fresh in a to z dept….

and

Submitted on 2008/06/23 at 11:29am

please sir job me

And so my quest to week out the odd comments and spam continues on….

Yes, long time no see, but if you open too many blogs that’s what happens. This was my retail blog and it was well focused just on retail, but the problem is that I was never able to keep up with the comments and questions and requests for information, especially when all the information was right there in the blog post. I found it so funny that most of the commentators thought I was the owner of the retail companies that I was writing about! Well, that would be quite a day!

The thing is that I love using the WP platform, but all these other things were just such a pain to deal with, that the blog kind of got abandoned for a while, well, quite a long while. Today, I’ve come to sort out the comments and stuff and I see that I have 450 comments waiting to be approved. I’m sorting through them page by page and hopefully will get them all done today.

As for the future of this blog, well, I really don’t know about that. Let’s see what happens!

I’ve been getting tons of comments on all of my blog posts, but most of them are either asking me for information that is already in the post or are looking for information that is easily available on the Internet. I am always happy to get feedback from readers, but lately all the comments are only about asking me for a job or an address or for the VP of a company. Just because 200 people ahead of you have asked me for a job, does not mean that I actually will do so. I do not work for Reliance, Bharti, Subhiksha or any other retailer and have no contact with them whatsoever to get you a job or to place your products or to rent your premises. Please do contact them directly at the addresses and telephone numbers and websites that I have listed. Other than that, enjoy reading, do give some feedback and discuss the events in the retail industry.

I finally got around to approving all the comments that were waiting in the moderation queue. Well, I didn’t or rather coudn’t approve all of them, but most of them were okayed. I still cannot get over the fact that, just because I write about retail, people visiting my site think that I own a retail company and can “get” them a job and so on. I just wish that people would read the main post before commenting, as most of the time I am giving links that are already there in the main post. On the other hand, it really is great to get so many comments and feedback from readers. Even though I post much less here, I have more comments. So, it all comes back to the content, which of course is the raison d’être of blogging.

Ever since I added stuff to my sidebar, changed things around and started responding faster to my comment moderation queue, I have seen a rise in my daily visitors. It shows that if one just makes the most basic of investments of time and effort towards a blog, the results can be almost immediate. I usually post 2-3 time a week here, so that is an area that requires some improvement as yet. But since I don’t want to write about anything and everything out here, I’d rather not fill the blog just for the sake of filling it. More and more, this blog has become a career blog of sorts, since I have been writing a lot on different choices of career, schools and colleges to go to and companies to work for. My readers are not all happy, since earlier I used to focus entirely on retail, but I think it’s a good idea to have a wider perspective of career options rather than just one focus.

If you’ve noticed, I have made several changes to my blog in the past week. To my side bar, I have added a description of myself and my work, a cloud tag, depicting the topics that I write most about; a section on recent comments; the top clicks; and most popular posts. It’s really easy to play around on a wordpress blog and just in a few clicks create a new look for a blog.

I have also changed the author name from the generic admin/Administrator to my own name, well sort of, Shel. So, that’s quite a few changes to my blog, right. I plan to make several more changes in the near future as well.

I’m also getting comments non stop on how to get a job with Reliance Retail or Pantaloon etc, and I have repeatedly said that I do not work for them, I have no connection with them, I certainly do not hold interviews for them etc etc. I can however provide information on the retail industry in general and on retail companies in specific, so if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place. Else, too bad and you’re likely not to get an answer individually from me.

I’ve been having a problem with my internet all day today. It’s very odd, the wireless works fine on the other laptop and works fine when I take my laptop closer to it in the other room, but seems to not want to connect at my workstation. So I’ve have a slow day working today. Slow and frustrating, since I’ve spent so much longer doing my work. I have put in a complaint, but haven’t got a response from them as yet. Let’s see what happens.

As I’m getting more into blogging again, I find that with so many new blogs around the entire concept of blogging is changing. When I started blogging in September of 2004, yes it’s been over three years since I’ve been blogging, there were very few bloggers, and even fewer people in the mainstream understood what blogging was. I was totally addicted to the concept of blogging from the word go, but within a month, I found that I was at a loss of what to write about.

I didn’t want my blog to be too personal, and I wasn’t quite sure what I really wanted to blog about, apart from the general stuff that most people put on their personal blogs, reviews of movies, restaurants etc. I wanted to do more than that, so slowly I began to create a niche for myself and segregate my blogs, yes by then I had multiple blogs, to cater to specific topics.