What Steals Your Joy?

Do you feel like you would totally enjoy your work if there weren’t one or two things that stole your joy from you?

In what follows, I’ll give some examples of things that grabbed some of my joy, and at the end of the post I’ll discuss a couple of things one can do to get your joy back. Note that the second example deals with blogging, and those of you who are also bloggers can attest to how frustrating it can be.

My first example is one many of you can identify with: airport security. Traveling with a team of smart people was always a real joy for me, but a chunk of that joy was taken by the hassle of airport security.

Of course, now that I am retired, this is not a factor for me. And you might think a retired person wouldn’t have anything that detracts from their joy. But, I do. For example, I enjoy a lot about blogging, but there are a couple of things that keep me from fully enjoying it: spammers and “sploggers.” (A splog is a spam blog .. more on it below.) I’ll tell you a bit about this, then hopefully you can add your thoughts in the comments on what steals your joy and on what can be done about the joy-thieves.

For a long while this blog received about 200 spams per day. Many large blogs receive more than this, much more. But, for me this was so frustrating that I looked around to see what I could do about it.

I did not find any guaranteed way to reduce spam, but my research indicated that assigning the rel=nofollow attribute to my Feed Reader links might help. I tried it. Sure enough, my spam count went way down, and stayed down for a few months. But I also did several other blog admin changes at that time, and so I cannot be sure that the nofollowing was the magic.

In fact, the spam count has started creeping back up over the past couple of weeks. It’s still less than a 100 per day, but it is rising toward that level.

If all of the spam were just Viagra ads, I would not be so upset. I just delete those, and all is well. It’s the spam that links to my site that is frustrating. I can see the impact of these when I check Technorati to see what sites are linking to mine. Here’s an example of one of the spam-ones:

voyage echoes in the wind wrote an interesting post today on Here’s a quick excerpt Looking at a picture of an iPod Touch does not give you a fair impression of what a gorgeous device it is. I picked up a 16GB version today, and the screen is just absolutely stunning. It

They don’t even give credit to me. Instead of saying they are quoting from a post at Keener Living, they say they are quoting from “voyage echoes in the wind.” Typically the object of this sort of spam is to draw attention to the spammers site, which consists of nothing but bite-sized quotes and a ton of ads. Note that the above quote is the total extent of their post on my iPod Touch. That is typical of what a “splog” (spam blog) does.

Okay, Keener, you say, why does this upset you so much? The reason is that having too many of these crappy inbound links can detract from my overall credibility rating (as determined by search engine algorithms).

Sometimes, for a while, these splogs can even beat you out in the search results. For example, if you do a Google search for “What Does the iPhone SDK Mean To You?” you would expect to see Thomas Hall’s post on this of Monday to rank pretty high. Well, today it does. But Monday evening a splog entry beat it out in the search results (that splog entry was nothing but a part of the lead-in paragraph of Thomas’ article). Apparently Google is pretty good about cleaning the splog results out of the search engine result pages (SERPs), given that the splog entry does not show up today, but it can be frustrating to bloggers nonetheless.

So, there you have it: a description of what steals my joy in blogging. Perhaps a bit long-winded but I wanted to explain what splogs are, because some of you may not have come across them yet. They are multiplying rapidly, though, and I worry that they impact the overall quality of the web.

Now, when something steals your joy, what can you do about it? Well, for some folks, it is probably not an issue. A few of my friends are so upbeat about life in general that they never let anything steal their joy. That’s the ideal way to be, of course.

But what about the rest of us?

For me, venting helps. Just writing this post has made me feel a lot better. Another thing that has helped me from time to time is to just make time to go out for a walk. Even when I was working, if something “got the best of me,” I’d get out of the building for a bit. Immensely helpful. Setting and dwelling on something only makes it worse, not better. And, of course, asking yourself “what does this mean in the grand scheme of things?” can help, too, because you see that the thing that is stealing your joy is often too trivial to worry about.

Now let’s hear from you! What steals your joy, and how do you deal with it?