Spitting Feathers!

Now that all the Easter chocolatey sweetness has finished coursing through my veins I'm ready to have a rant. I am by nature quite an easygoing creature but in this instance my feathers are well and truly ruffled - in fact I am spitting feathers to put it mildly. What has got me so annoyed? Well I recently noticed the appearance of a non gardening/allotment related post into my all time top six blog posts (see left hand sidebar). Furthermore this was an old post going back to October 2010. I know that I do occasionally stray off topic but by and large I stick to the garden and allotment and would expect the tops six posts to be relevant. Further research and detective work led me here. The seventh photo down is one of my holiday photos, as featured second photo down in my post here. If you look at the bottom of the website the term 'tagged with' appears. Underneath this are are all but one of the words that make up my blog title and the title of that particular post, listed individually. There is also a cheeky reference to copyright dated 2008 so I am dealing with rather a cunning time traveller.

This photo has been used without consent and placed on a website which features some rather dubious advertising content. I have a hunch that none of the photos are the property of the compiler (s) of the site. I am not sure what to do next other than contact Wordpress, as it is the publishing platform for this site. There does not seem to be a named individual or a group behind the site or any email address to contact. I am also cross with myself for being rather naive. Obviously disclaimers and watermarks on photos are not a foolproof obstacle (two other photos that feature on this site had been watermarked) but I will be doing more in this department from now onwards. Thanks to Diana over at 'Elephant's Eye' who prompted me to share this experience. I will report back if there any developments. I will also be attending a blogging workshop soon, where I hope to get the chance to bring this issue up. In the meantime I wonder if anybody else has had similar incidents happen to them and if so how did you deal with them?

I do not have any photos of ruffled feathers and thought that spitting feathers might be a rather unpleasant image. The above photo, complete with watermark, is of a goldcrest which visited the garden regularly during the winter of 2011 - the first and so far only time we have had the pleasure of its company.