Gavin Baker » Administrative

Coming soon: More(?) of me running my mouth

Gavin Baker — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:04:11 +0000

I have more than 50 draft posts queued up on this blog. Some are quite old and stale at this point. Obviously, having so many posts in the queue isn’t helping anyone. If they’re to have any impact, I’ve got to get them posted.

So I’ll try with a public commitment — and encourage readers to hold me to this — to post at least once a week.

I append a ? to “more” in the title because, browsing over the archives for 2009 so far, it appears I’m averaging about a post per week already, excluding liveblogs and brief announcements. So I suppose I’m really just committing to maintain at least the volume and frequency so far.

I’ve got some pretty interesting stuff churning in the draft queue, so be on the lookout. At least, I think it’s interesting — hopefully you will too!

Under re-construction

Gavin Baker — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:03:40 +0000

I’ve upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress per my previous post. It didn’t solve the problem of “hidden” comments (when not logged in), so I’m switching the theme. I’ll be playing around with themes and plugins, so apologies in advance if anything breaks or goes missing; please let me know about any problems.

Hang on, change is coming

Gavin Baker — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:57:32 +0000

Thanks to my readers who’ve emailed to alert me to the problem with displaying comments on the site. It’s not intentional, and I was aware of it. I’m not certain what the problem is, though I figure it’s due either to using an outdated version of WordPress or to the theme I’m using. I plan to update WordPress to the current version at the earliest chance I get; if that doesn’t resolve the problem, I’ll switch to a different theme. I have various personal and professional fires to put out first, but I’ll get to it. Thanks for reading. (If anyone wants to volunteer to handle the upgrade for me, by all means, drop me an email.)

Login here with your OpenID

Gavin Baker — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:13:07 +0000

If you have an OpenID, you should now be able to login with it at gavinbaker.com. If you use OpenID, please feel free to test it out, and let me know about any errors in the comments.

Anti-spam update: Akismet active

Gavin Baker — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:45:42 +0000

After a pointless and frustrating false positive by Bad Behavior locked me out of my own blog, I’ve disabled Bad Behavior and activated Akismet. For what it’s worth, Bad Behavior had slowed comment spam to a trickle, but it’s too annoying to overcome false positives. We’ll see how Akismet does.

If you have problems accessing the site, or a legitimate comment doesn’t appear on the site after a day or two, drop me a line so I can try to address it.

Short downtime now resolved

Gavin Baker — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 08:54:08 +0000

The site briefly went down due to my forgetful failure to pay for hosting. Sorry about that. Everything should be back to normal now.

Anti-spam tools now in effect: Bad Behavior active

Gavin Baker — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 05:26:49 +0000

The comment spammers recently have started hitting this site hard. This wastes my time on moderating comments and wastes my bandwidth with my host. I’ve installed Bad Behavior to address the problem; hopefully it will help.

This shouldn’t inconvenience any legitimate readers. If there is a false positive, you should receive a notification page with information on how to contact me. The Bad Behavior FAQ also has information on what to do if you’ve suffered the business end of a false positive.

I’ve also installed reCAPTCHA, but have it turned off for now. I don’t want to force captchas on my commenters, as much as I support digitizing public domain books. (If you want to volunteer to help digitize free books, you can fill out reCAPTCHA for fun here, or simply join Distributed Proofreaders.) I may turn it on if things get really hairy.

I’m also considering installing Akismet, but I’ll wait until I see the effect Bad Behavior has. (I prefer not to use Spam Karma because it’s not free software.)

Commenters are still required to register a (free) account on the site. If Bad Behavior keeps down the noise, I may lift that requirement, maybe replacing it with reCAPTCHA and/or Akismet.

My goal is to make it as easy as possible for legitimate users to comment here, imposing the fewest barriers necessary to keep the site spam-free. I apologize for the inconvenience and do appreciate when visitors comment.