This isn’t the final form Wave will take. This is the ‘workable’ form.
One thing I’m really liking is the effortless blitz of the spammers (I’ve tossed 26 of them with a keypush and admitted two new members who are most welcome here).
The atmosphere here is, well, sort of like your neighborhood pub. I post, but everybody can comment, and we talk about most everything. If you’re missing any of the former features, you can find them in the buttons up top.
But we remain a work in progress. We’ve got help, and we’re not afraid to use it.
It is a real downer with the pond, and I wasn’t worth much yesterday, but now we’re on track with what to do about it, and we’ll just soldier through.
I think we’re on track for a melt pretty well before St. Patrick’s Day, usually the date by which we’ve seen the last of the snow piles, but these ones are apt to stay around for May Day by the size of some.
But when the spring winds and rains come, that thaws things pretty fast.
We’re cleaning up the house—the white kitchen floor is a disgrace (never get a white floor! but we didn’t choose this) with the tracking of mud and ice-melt: it’s just been unavoidable. But we are firmly resolved on minimal conventioning this year, and getting down to business about a garage sale: we condensed two very large houses into one and moved crosscountry with a lot of stuff we thought we might need and didn’t. We’ve moved to two apartments and a house under what you might call emergency conditions—the police swat team coming up over the garden rock-work in front of our windows looking for our neighbors was fairly persuasive on the last move!
The result was chaos. Boxes that haven’t been opened since Oklahoma City. Time to pare down and get rid of them.
I did a story once about a boy whose mother died millimeters at a time of a motor neuron disease, and the thing he and his father did after she finally, mercifully slipped away was “comb out the memories” — a selective winnowing process which you carefully comb out and untangle your memories, choose the ones you want to keep, braid them carefully together, and let the rest go. Works for possessions, too. I think it will ease you through the loss of the koi to sort through and take stock not only of your possessions but of the steps along the path that have led you to where you are. I’ve been doing that myself in light of recent diagnoses.
just a stupid question because I’m not that internet savvy, but for my websites which are wordpress I use akismet to filter spam, hardly any gets through, and what does is sent to me to moderate. but then my websites/blogs are probably nowhere near as busy as yours – but do you use akismet, or some other filter? costs me £ 9 a year so say 16$
Akismet works as a part of Jetpack, which is free. Akismet Basic, which I’m using for my website, is also free, and does a pretty good job of keeping the spam down.
One thing I didn’t add to my previous post….I removed subscribers’ ability to enter comments. They can read the posts I put up, but not respond. I did that mainly because I was getting subscribers from places that have no connection to our club. Since it’s a club website, and the only information I put out is club-related, I see no need for a subscriber from Bulgaria, France, Ukraine, or China to be in the subscribers’ list. If the club officers decide that they want to make it an interactive medium, they’ll have to let me know. But for now, it’s just a news outlet…..
The feature that’s given me more control of registration is called New User Approve. That way, new users can do the work of registration, but unless they write me and let me know they’re real people, so that all I need do is push ‘approve’ and the registration ‘takes’…they get tossed into the ‘deny’ basket.
We do use Akismet. For this site, the comments are a large part of the content; as CJ suggested it’s like a neighborhood pub where anyone who wanders in can throw in their opinion.
Since only members can comment, the spam problem is with membership signups, and the New User Approve plugin seems to be handling it quite well, although it does require manual intervention to actually allow people in.
I was grieved to hear of your koi deaths.
Reworked site looks generally good, though alas! there’s no scroll on those dropdown menus, so accessing a menu option like “Foreign Series: Spoiler Alerts: Page 2” currently requires viewing the site at a considerable shrinkage to get the clickable option to display. Not entirely sure where the login link went either, though adding /login to the url gets a handy redirect.
At any rate, I wish you satisfying progress and success on both your home cleanup efforts, physical and digital. I’ve got cleanup of my own to do today, and you’re inspiring me to get started now rather than later…
As a temporary fix for this one, I moved the Books part of the nav bar to its own menu, in the sidebar. It’s on the left on the home page, under the closed circle links; on other pages, which currently have only a right sidebar, it’s at the top.
There are worse floors than white. We had linoleum that looked like it had paint drips on it in assorted colors. You couldn’t see dropped anything unless it was at least an inch across. (We had it in two different houses, in not quite the same colors. The second house, we replaced it with the then-new no-wax flooring in a gold-beige pebble pattern.)
Aha! I’m able to comment again. No cogent thoughts on the topic as of yet.
Been wondering where you got off to. Good to see you.
Yay—glad we got you straightened out, BCS.
So sorry to hear of the loss of the koi, but felt I needed to wait a while for the rawness of the loss to recede. The new look of the site is attractive although as previously noted, the print needs to be heavier, larger or darker. I’m looking forward to the arrival of your next book on the first Tuesday in April (4 Apr). I’m in the midst of a reread of Tracker and Visitor in anticipation.
As a temporary fix, you can hit ctrl and the plus sign and enlarge a page for reading.
We’re in the middle of a total redesign.
I just finished a re-read (or actually, re-listen) of Tracker and Visitor. Just as enjoyable this time, and I’m MORE than eager for Convergence.
As with others, I’d find a somewhat darker &/or bolder font somewhat easier to read. But overall, I like the new look.
Yes; as for previous books, I’m hoping to snag a signed copy for a Christmas present. Of course, if I read it while waiting for Christmas to roll around… 🙂
I replaced my old tired linoleum floor with a newer linoleum tile floor. I have to give it a thorough cleaning and get around to sealing it. Right now, although it looks very nice once I mop it, that only lasts a couple of days, and there are scuffs here and there where I used lacquer thinner to remove blobs of the tile adhesive after I laid the tile. The fun part will be keeping the cats off it while the sealer dries.
I like the new look too, the whitespace is a massive relief! The old site/theme was incredibly busy and hard to read.
One minor nit (not theme related) is that Stanza is now dead, a couple of years after Amazon bought the developers. This is in the “Where to get: e-book free readers” section on the right.
I’m hoping that the audio book of Convergence will be out at the same time as the hardback – I’m a bit addicted to Daniel Thomas May’s delivery!
I’m able to login – no problem. But on my laptop at work. I’ve not tried it from my phone or my kindle. I like the new look – MAYBE you can get a ‘newer’ jacket than Intruder up! I’m in the process of re-reading every single one. I figure by April 4th I’ll have read them all and very eager for Convergence!
A-N-N-D-d-d…just to make matters interesting, WordPress just came out with a new version. Version 4.7.3 came out today…
We are updated! And it runs.
I’m not having any problems with the site now. It seems to be working.