Last night my sister told me I should write down some of the things I've learned from working online, and put some cautions up for people. Most of this is kind of old, actually, but you never know.

Suddenly I'm wondering if she said this just to stop me from talking. I do tend to go on and on. It's a symptom of living alone, I think. Well, anyway, here's some of what I've learned about surfing.

Before you click:

Sometimes I’ve had to learn -- the hard way — to take extreme care when surfing NOT to click on things without considering the click, first. There are so many links on websites that are bad, bad, bad, placed there to catch you in an endless circlejerk of ads that you have to shut your computer down cold to get out of, or there may be viruses implanted into webpages, that it’s very easy to run head-on into them.

Some lately were links aimed at those who read political news. One, that I must admit caught me, said something like “What The Republican Candidates Would Look Like If They Were Disney Princesses” —which I thought hilarious and stupidly clicked on. (I had time to kill, is my inadequate excuse.) The page it went to was one of those things with a stack of popups that won’t close, so I had to force-quit the computer. Couldn’t even close the browser. Since then, I’ve seen links similar to this, and I know their game now.

If I’d had a PC, it might have installed a virus, maybe.

Other links no one should click on include: A link to a photo supposedly of a drunk celebrity, or of a celebrity in some other unflattering situation; or animated depictions of any real news story. In general it’s wise to avoid outrageous-sounding headlines too, unless it’s a news source you read all the time. But even on trusted news sources, the links at the bottom of the page are suspect. Safer to stay away from their “From The Web” sections. Those lead to progressively sleazier sites the further you go.

And lately I’m declining to read articles titled “10 Things You Should Know About …” this or that. This numbered-list kind of article, on any topic, is now simply everywhere. The unscrupulous are now using the list ploy to pull you in. I’m tired of it. They may not lead to viruses, but they’re dreadfully time-consuming. Most of these articles send you to a page on which you have to laboriously click page by page to view, and they give you maybe a new caption but often the same picture for 3 pages. It simply makes you party to giving page-views to their advertising. And this is the thing, the reason for annoying links you see, or weird websites: It’s nearly always about money. Viruses, too, for a long time were planted by hackers trying to take over people’s computers in order to set them to work sending emails or mining bitcoins for the hacker. People would suddenly find their computer running really, really slowly for no reason; it was working for someone else.

Maybe I should title this post “10 Things Not To Read Online” — and someone will say to me, “Number one not to read is this post!” Hah. Yeah, maybe.