Archive of '* Site News'

My apologies to any of you who have commented in, say, the last six months and didn’t see your comments pop up.

A combination of a deluge of spam and becoming a daddy in late August 2007 conspired to keep me from appropriately separating spam from comment and publishing the comments while wiping out the spam.

I’ll do my best to be better about maintaining this little corner in the future.

Oh, and in case any of you want to see an example of the kind of spam I get here every hour, check out:

http://www.drsynonymous.com/2006/12/06/a-billion-dirty-words/

Seriously.  And I get a ton of hits on that article every day, so I know there really are wackos out there using such well-thought-out search terms as “porncartoon.”

Oi.

I just deleted about 15 draft posts that have been sitting there in the queue for about, oh, a year or two now.

There once was a time when I wrote here more often, and every time a post got interrupted I made a point of making sure there was enough material in it that I could pick it back up later when I had more time.  Unfortunately, all of that material is, well, a year or two old and well out of date.

I’m going to take a shot at writing here more regularly.  The fact is, since I officially became a dad back in August, life’s been a little crazy for me.  I’ve had to narrow myself down to one LARP for a while (because getting out to the city and back takes half a tank of gas, and the wife wanted to get back into DJ), and work still takes up a lot of the life that fatherhood doesn’t.

We’ll see how it goes, I’m making no promises.

One of the nice things about WordPress (the engine that powers this blog) is that it links directly to an RSS feed of news and information on the WordPress home page. If there’s a new version, or some other news directly relevent to the software, I know about it immediately.

Just a moment ago, I checked the feed and on it was a link to a web site that offered to check to see if any URL I was interested in was banned in China. Grinning, I decided to check out whether or not this blog is banned in China.

It is.

I’m laughing hysterically right now. I’m indecent! I’m subversive! I’m a threat to the great Communist Party of China! The People have Spoken!

. . .

Well, it was a nice little ego boost to think so, anyway. For about 5 seconds.

I’ve been busier than a one-armed paper-hanger.

I will do an update on events in my life soon.

For now, I’ll post a Recycled Rant(tm) just to keep things interesting. Enjoy.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the material I post.

I’ve been using those stupid quizzes I take from time to time and cool videos I pick up as I surf around to substitute for content when I’m too tied up with real life to write anything.

Now, on the one hand, these are things I enjoy posting here, because I’d like to share them. On the other hand, I shouldn’t use them as a crutch.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just figured I’d point out the obvious for everybody, just on the off chance you haven’t seen it — there’s an opportunity to rate every post, right at the end. That would be what the five gray boxes at the end are for — just hover your mouse over them until you think enough of them have turned blue, and then click.

You can rate a post either at the bottom of the excerpt on the main page, or at the bottom of the full-length post.

Thanks to says-it.com for the nifty new logo a la The Official Seal Generator.

@whee!

This morning I was poking around in the database that holds all of the data for this wee little blog . . . and I managed to delete the entire database.

Within the space of a few minutes, my web providor was able to restore it to the last backup, which by coincidence was done just after I went to bed this morning.

Martin, you’re my new best friend. Well, drinking buddy, anyway.

I love you, Esosoft. I just wanted to take this opportunity to say, “Thanks!”

This is just a quick FYI for those few of you who subscribe to updates on my site via e-mail:

I will be terminating this service within the week, just to simplify my life. If you want to subscribe to updates on my site via e-mail, Feedburner will be handling that for me from now on.

To sign up, you can use the one-click subscription form on top of the toolbar to the right. A link to their privacy policy (which looked okay to me at first glance) is right beneath the form.

You can also follow this link:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=102562

Either way, you’ve been warned.

I was about to clock in for just a few minutes to share a meaningless thought about Fox News and how useless it is, when I noted that someone I didn’t know had commented on a few of my entries.

Moreover, these comments had made it through the spam filter.  Zounds!  A comment from a reader with whom I am not personally acquianted!  Not only were they comments, but they seemed well thought-out and insightful.  I will admit to not understanding every word of them, but then again it’s almost dawn where I live.

Tomas, not only did you flatter me by reading my site, you honored me by sharing my thoughts with me.  Considering the week I’ve been having, it was a nice surprise.

Thank you.