It seems that the LJ RSS feed for this 'blog is or was broken beginning with my entry Another 'Bot-'Blog (posted 26 Feb 2008 at 17:24:32). I'm not sure what the problem is-or-was, but I do note that it uses brackets as text and WordPress makes peculiar use of brackets. I have attempted a work-around by replacing the raw brackets with HTML ampersand escape sequences, though I am doubtful that this response will fix the problem, because WordPress has otherwise demonstrated an obnoxious propensity to replace escape sequences with raw characters.

Addendum (05 March): Using escape sequences for the brackets seems to have fixed the problem.

A 'bot has again commented to one of my entries, linking back to its 'blog; this time at mediadistricts.com. The style of the entries at that 'blog show some trivial improvements over the style that I described earlier. Now the form is

[source-'blog name] wrote an [variable adjective] blog post today on [entry title]
Here’s a [variable adjective-noun]
[random quotation]
[variable text] [variable linked text]

The previous 'blog was registered by over proxy. This time, there appears to be an unproxied registrant:

Roseanna M. Hallman
12328 HOLLYHOCK CT
WOODBRIDGE VA 22192-2001
(703) 490-2260

who apparently has about 86 domains.

By virtue of a 'bot commenting to a prior entry, I discovered a 'bot-maintained set of advertising sites at weblog4all.info, each guised as a 'blog. The 'bot-or-'bots (I suspect that there is just one) find(s) entries in 'blogs or in 'blog-like pages, and then creätes an entry in one of its own 'blogs (eg iraq.weblog4all.info) of form

[source-'blog name] wrote an interesting post today on [entry title]
Here’s a quick excerpt
[random quotation]
For more information, click here

Each page of the 'bot-'blogs also has many links to videos, which are hosted on an advertising-supported site or sites.

Google has discovered this 'blog.

FWIW, 28bytes has creäted a(n) RSS feed of this 'blog for LiveJournal users, and another for the 'blog of the Mock Turtle. The benefit of using these feeds is that LiveJournal users can view non-protected 'blog entries from their Friends pages.

But protected entries cannot be thus read, and there is no automatic alert about there being protected entries. That's because syndication is intermediated by LiveJournal software and servers.

Also, the feeds don't deliver comments made at either 'blogs, and comments to the feeds will not appear at the 'blogs (and will likely be missed).

The string oeconomist (or œconomist) is an old-fashioned spelling of economist. I am an economist; whether I would be seen as an old-fashioned economist would be a function of what one saw of my premises, methods, and conclusions.

I am not the first person to have registered this site-name. The last previous registration expired on 4 September 2007. A check of the Wayback Machine turned-up no archived pages, so perhaps the name were never actually assigned to a site.

Various people have previously used oeconomist as a regular identifier. I am not amongst them. (In particular, I am not (and never have been) the oeconomist at LiveJournal and at Infotrope.)

The site name is registered with GoDaddy. They're not wonderful as a registration service, but they're acceptable.

Hosting is provided by FourBucks.net, so named because, if one orders their package of lowest price and one pays for their services a year at a time, the charge comes to about US$4 per month. I first went to FourBucks.net to get hosting for a different site a few years ago, at the recommendation of Ronnie Ashlock, who used and uses it to host Surlybird.com.

A while back, FourBucks.net was purchased by IDAGroup LLC. When last I knew, they'd not seemlessly integrated support. And AT&T has a proclivity to treat e.mail from FourBucks.net as spam.

The 'blogging software that I'm presently using is WordPress. At the suggestion of Gaal, I added support for OpenID. I did this by installing a plug-in, WP-OpenID. Another plug-in, Post Levels, allows me to assign levels to posts and to registered users, such that when users are logged into the site they are able to read any posts at or below the level of their registration. And YATCP modifies the interface to support a tree structure of comments (so that comments meant in reply to other comments are nested under then and so forth). I also added WP-Polls, mostly just for minor fun. And I will look into Edit Comments XT, to give commenters an opportunity to fix typos and to withdraw things written in haste.