We wandered through several vacant homes this afternoon. Well, three vacant and one occupied. Of those, three (not the same three) were absolutely adorable, and one is at best a diamond in the rough, at worst just rough. I didn't take many pictures of them. I was mostly taken by the pretty trees and bushes at each place, although the one occupied home had a china cabinet that I would have loved to own. These two particular clients are rather close to me (rather), and I know that this is just the very beginning of their search. We really aren't even sure of our budget limits yet, so this was more an exercise in how to search. I think we learned a lot in a few short hours. We shall be going out again (and again and again). They will be quite savvy by the time they make their first offer. I'll see to it. The hard part is convincing them not to fall in love with every house they walk in. It's a hard lesson for most prospective buyers to learn.
I have to pause to complain about something that is really getting under my skin. Years ago, I tried signing up for AdSense, in a futile attempt to make a tiny living on this blog. You have to wait until you hit a hundred dollar threshold before they pay out, after getting a few cents per click. You're not allowed to solicit clicks, or do it yourself, and I followed the rules. When it came time for me to get my first check, after five months of waiting, the company "audited" my account and decided to disallow it forever, based on criteria they would not tell me because it was their own corporate secret. I asked them to review it, and they sent me a form email that basically said, "Yeah... no." I thought maybe the reason I was disallowed was that I had bots who were making hits on my account. What that means is that spam sorts of accounts give you post views often enough that you see their web sites as referring sites in your stat pages (where most of my clicks come from Facebook). They're trying to get you to click on their addresses to see who the hell they are, and from what I am told, they're phishers or porn. They appeared to be coming primarily from Russia. Once my AdSense went away, most of these fell off. I still get a hit almost every day on a post I wrote in the first three months, but that's nothing compared to what has started happening in the last month. Some spam bot in France has a grip on me and won't let go. It started hitting a string of four or five posts once a day. Then it jumped up to four, six, nine... The last time I looked, this afternoon, it was somewhere north of 40 a day, on each of about a dozen posts I've written since late September. I really like having an accurate count of how wide my audience is, even if it's rather small. I want to know if I have 30 regular readers or 60, or somewhere in between. I know for a fact I don't have over 600 a day. Not yet. Maybe someday I will. All I want is the truth. I want these spam bots to go away forever. I wonder whether there is a way to block them. Someone with more computer know-how than I needs to come help me. I am not loving this.
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