Tempered Thoughts

I believe I may have outsmarted the spammers. For the moment. By installing one of those word recognition typing thingies. Sorry for the inconvenience to the living humans who comment.

Apparently comments have been broken since sometime in June. June 2007! Why didn't anyone tell me! Well, I believe they are fixed now, retroactively, all the way back to October. Ecto was the culprit, starting when I upgraded it and installed it on my new laptop (Sinclair!) back in June. At any rate, comments should be fixed for future posts. I figure no one wants to comment on anything older than October so I'll leave those older entries broken. Apologies to all my readers. Here I thought I was being too boring and sporadic for you. I kept asking questions no one answered, and I love comments, and I didn't know you couldn't answer. Please say something! Anything! It's like an echo chamber in here without you.

So if you wanted to tell me the results of your political compass test, say, you could now do so on the entry where I asked about it. Or on this one. Or anywhere really!

Now to go to bed. My hand hurts. Tomorrow I vote in Missouri's open primaries. Yay open primaries. If you are in the U.S. and a citizen, don't forget to vote!

Why didn't anyone TELL me comments were broken? Geez! I thought you guys just didn't love me anymore.

I'll fix when I can, not right this minute, unfortunately.

Quick business note, here. Last weekend I happened to notice that a legitimate comment got swallowed by Kurt's Mighty Mighty Spam Filter. I usually wouldn't even know this, but the system emailed it to me instead of just dumping it on the floor (though it did not post said comment, so the filtering part was in order). Why it sometimes emails me and sometimes doesn't is a mystery I have not yet solved. At any rate, after fooling around with the blocker and such, I realized that anything in a comment marked http:// will be marked up by the commenting software prior to posting, and that the spam blocker reads that as two URLs. So, remember when I said limit your URLs to four? Your new limit is one. Feel free to post as many comments as you need to in order to pass along the URLs you're dying to give me. Thanks.

Alright, admit it, you didn't think I could do a whole week of posting daily. We'll see if I can make it two.

So, the snow didn't come last week, and we are actually supposed to hit mid-sixties this week. Thus the thing that had become a trend to me, snow before Thanksgiving two years in a row, seems to have ended. However, there was frost everywhere this morning, sub 30 degree temps, and the windshield had to be scraped.

Today I went into a (small, very organized) used book shop I'd never been in before and found Elizabeth Bear's new book Blood and Iron. I snapped it up with great eagerness, unable to believe my luck. In the last two months I've almost bought it like four different times, but the price tag is just a little too steep for me. To be fair, I did buy the whole Jenny series out and out, so I'm not totally stealing food out of the author's mouth. I also referred to my experience of salivating over Blood and Iron as "almost buying it at the unused books store" which my husband thought hilarious. I'm not sure why. I checked for Dhalgren and Little, Big while I was there, but no dice.

So even with my reading holiday coming up (I mentally think of my visits to my in-laws' gorgeous lakeside home as reading holidays. They don't care at all if I just hole up and read all day, only communicating at meal times. Their house is a reader's heaven of comfy chairs and huge windows with tons of natural light.), I think I may have more books that I want to read next! now! today! than I can realistically take care of over this anticipated vacation. So, I'm thinking about posting a list of a dozen and picking the top five recommended ones to bring with me. Stay tuned. There's always at least one book foisted onto me while I'm there (last year it was The Kite-Runner. Visit before that it was The Da Vinci Code) so I have to leave some space for that.

I keep hearing about the imminent collapse of the world's fisheries. I'm starting to feel guilty about eating sushi.

I need to buy seville oranges, but all the local grocery stores only seem to carry navel. Ideas?

P.S. Deirdra I fixed your comment by dropping one of the URL's and reposting it. Thanks, that studio is just down the street and I'm going to check it out as soon as I can and maybe take a class or two with different folks to see if any suits me.

I sometimes get overzealous with the banning of spam comments. I accidentally banned all comments ever yesterday, when I was really trying to ban matches on a certain url, and I can tell from the log that at least some of you have tried post a comment. Sorry! It's fixed now. I love comments. Especially if they're not from spammers. Feel free to comment away.

iTunes says I was listening to Sleeping in the Flowers from the album John Henry by They Might Be Giants when I posted this. I have it rated 4 stars.

If you read this site through an RSS aggregator, most of this post does not apply to you.

It bugs me right now that geourl is down, so I can't tell it I don't live in Jackson anymore. It bugs me because I want to see who has blogs geographically close to mine, and geourl is the best way I know of to do that, and because I want to be accurate as to my physical location.

I've added Creative Commons licensing information, which I should have done ages ago. And I changed the NucleusCMS, Valid CSS and HTML4.01 validation buttons to be smaller and more pleasing to my eyes. I also added a button pimping Firefox because I think everyone should give it a try. You may be hesitant, but I thought I'd never stop using Galeon either and now I couldn't be happier with Firefox. I also cleaned up a number of the RSS feed options. They're still there and your aggregator should be able to find them but I took away the links because there was just too much clutter in the Navigation menu.

I'm thinking about the fact that I seem to be composing longer entries, but ecto doesn't let me post anything into the extended entry field. Anything over 1500 words is probably too much on the front page, without a cut. I'm not sure what to do about that, except resolve to make shorter entries. Again. One of ecto's good points is the ease with which I can link to things. You've probably noticed how much more I'm linking to these days.

I added some blogosphere stuff, like Technorati and TTLB ecosystem links. Talk about gaining perspective on the size and readership of one's blog.

I added Orcinus to the list of blogs I read regularly.

My allconsuming.net project seems to be proceeding well, you can see the books I've mentioned lately here.

I've been completely overwhelmed by the number of spam comments the Pivot BlackList has caught. I went in to look at the plugin settings and realized that it had silently blocked hundreds of comment spam attempts since I installed it. What a wonderful thing! So wonderful, in fact, that I added a button pimping it to my left column.

I futzed around with the CSS, and I have no way of testing it on IE for windows. I've always wanted to float the right column instead of positioning it absolutely, and it's now like that. I'm not sure I'm happy with the results. More futzing may ensue at some later time.

iTunes says I was listening to Slow Like Honey from the album "Tidal" by Fiona Apple when I posted this. I have it rated 4 stars.

So it looks like I finally have the AudioScrobbler plugin that I referred to in this post working, and you can also see, in the last two posts (which happen to be almost a week apart) the results of the CurrentMedia plugin. I like both at the moment, and think they will be a much easier way of telling you what I'm reading and listening to. I'm hoping having the little book icons there will motivate me to do more reviews as well. I have plenty to say about Persepolis when I get a chance. Perhaps tomorrow.

So in addition to the upgrade and the comment spam blocks, I've also added a couple of other features to the blog. First off, the hit counter is gone. You probably never saw it since it was way down on the left side of the page. I had reason to think (after comparing it to our website stats) that it wasn't terribly accurate. For the curious, it had recorded about 75,000 hits since March 25, 2003. It's gone now, both because I didn't think it was correct and I was tired of it. Now that I have a full text RSS feed, I imagine there's a number of people who read the site without hitting the site at all, so even an accurate count of hits wouldn't have told me all that much. I also added a plugin to ping blo.gs as well as weblogs. This should supposedly be redundant, as blo.gs claims to crawl weblogs but weblogs has been intermittent for me, so maybe this will help with my blog visibility. I added a plugin that gives you the handy dandy mail to a friend link (yet another reason that hits don't equal eyes or reads). I may add a printer friendly link too. Not sure if that would ever be used by anyone and it's a lot of work (I have to design the printer friendly template for the printer friendly page myself) so I'm not sure I'll put that into effect, but I'm thinking about it. I've also added a couple of plugins that may have far-reaching implications for my "At the moment" column on the right. I have one that will let me tag posts with what I'm listening to/watching/reading (but I haven't tried it yet, and I may hate it) and also an AudioScrobbler plugin, which will be really super cool if I can get it to work. I fiddled with it to limited success yesterday, but I failed to get it functional. The cool thing about the AudioScrobbler plugin is that it would automagically note what I was listening to when I posted, which means extra information for you with no effort from me. A formula for success if I ever saw one! As for the Current Media plugin (currently reading/watching/listening to), I like being able to note what I'm reading as I post, and hope that if I do that, I might be better about telling you what I'm reading. For example, right now, the "At The Moment" column says I'm reading Dark is Rising aloud, which we finished about two weeks ago (and what an excellent book to be reading around Christmas, let me just say). It also never said I was reading Threshold, which I've also finished, and doesn't now tell you I'm reading the The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 14. It'd also be a snap to pull this plugin into Sophia's blog, where I could note some of the books she's enjoying (a current favorite for her is Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business by Esphyr Slobodkina) without working too hard. Changing the file that displays under "At the Moment" isn't difficult, but I think it's a better place for some of my less quickly changing hobbies, like computer games and noting what movie I saw last and what books I've given up on. I'll experiment with the new plugin and see if I like it. Comments, opinions and directives about the site are welcome.

Now I'm going to plug several products that I think are just wonderful. First of all, I've officially switched to Firefox as my browser and it's incredible. Secondly, a while back I was listening to Last.fm, a really cool (but not as cool as the defunct Shasradio) online radio station. The folks at Last.fm are the same folks as the ones at AudioScrobbler, which is another nifty cool thing I highly recommend to anyone who has a large and oft-listened to music collection on their computer. Since moving I had been so avidly following my local public radio station - KWMU - (which completely rocks, by the way!) that my music listening habits had fallen by the wayside, but I'm trying to get back into that and you can see what I've been listening to lately by visiting Anarkey's AudioScrobbler page. Hang in there, folks, I've just got a couple more things to rave about and then I'll be done. Earlier, I mentioned RSS feeds and Firefox. If you use Firefox, then you should also be using the Sage extension. It's an RSS aggregator that works with your browser. It has a clean display, is easy to use, and - best of all - tells you when pages you follow have been updated. This works best for pages that update erratically or infrequently, pages that annoy you to check daily because about 70 % of the time they haven't changed, allowing you to forget about them until there's something new there. If you're like me, you have a number of cool links that are forgotten as soon as you bookmark them. In fact, if you're like me, you've bookmarked a number of different things on about seven browsers on about four different machines and end up rediscovering things all the time, things that you needed but forgot where you had bookmarked and so had to search for again. Enter del.icio.us, a web-based bookmark station. As with all things web, this adds the dimension of community, by telling you what other people have bookmarked the same things you have and allowing you to browse their bookmarks. You can see mine at del.icio.us / Anarkey. Bookmark submission is easily accomplished through a toolbar javascript applet. Easy, convenient, always there. A different sort of bookmarking community can be seen at StumbleUpon which is a way to rate pages and find pages of cool things. It uses a set of interests that you set up when you create an account to decide what pages to show you, and whenever you are browsing and hit something extra cool you can click the thumbs up icon on your toolbar and add it to the pool of things for people to stumble upon.

And that is what I've been up to on this here internet lately.

The upgrade has been completed, and as near as I can tell, nothing's broken. I added two plugins. One is a Nucleus wrapper for the Pivot-blacklist created by Marco van Hylckama Vlieg. I also added a Comment Control feature that prompts me anytime comments are added to threads that are over 60 days old. These comments aren't posted, but are placed to a preview section, where I can look them over and approve them. Thus armed, I have re-enabled comments for the time being. We'll see how effective I am against the spammers. Interestingly enough, I never disallowed comments on Sophia's site, which suggests that a site must have a minimum amount of traffic before it's noticed by the bots. It can't be much, as I have a pretty low traffic blog, but it apparently there is a threshold beneath which they can't be bothered.

Standby while I upgrade to Nucleus 3.15 and integrate a few plugins that (hopefully) will help me defeat comment spam.

Because of some jerkwad comment spammer, who started way back at the beginning of my blog but whom I thankfully caught only 20 entries or so in, I have disallowed comments by non-members. If you feel moved to comment, you can become a member. There's still a form that allows you to do that on Sophia's page. I have no idea how well it works, as to the best of my knowledge no one has ever used it. If it seems buggy, you can email me. As you know if you read the blog - as opposed to sending a robot to harvest the item urls for spam, curse you - I had been expressing some uncertainty as to the value of comments here anyways. I would like to re-enable them and I probably will at some point, but for now, while I sort things out, it's just easier to turn them off. Every comment was from a different IP, so all you fools allowing trojan horses to use your machines to send out spam are doing the work of the devil. Cut it out. Use a firewall and some sense.

Gah.

Oh, and I fixed the bug about comment redirection too. Not that you would see it since you can't, you know, comment or anything.

Yeah, I've been tweaking the RSS feed for the site, in anticipation of making the SlithyToves Main Page an RSS aggregator for hosted blogs instead of its own place to post things. I hadn't mentioned it or added a link yet because it was still evolving, but then I did mention it, so now I have to add a link. Depending on your RSS preference you can get :

• RSS 0.91 feed, summary version
• RSS 0.91 feed, full version
• RSS 2.0 feed, summary version
• RSS 2.0 feed, full version.

In other site news, I discovered when looking for a Nucleus plugin that would let me display the full text of articles in my feed that I am a full version behind on Nucleus. Expect an upgrade to version 3.1 soon, with possible interruptions of service that may well entail. I also noticed some glitches on some of my back pages so there'll be tweaking of the css to make those look like I intend them to. Additionally, while in plugin-land I got lots of ideas about things I can add here, so there may be exciting, new features soon as well (no promises). What I'm really looking for is a way to create more inter-navigation between my site, my husband's site and my daughter's site. We're all using the same blogging software on the same box, so it shouldn't, in theory, be that difficult to accomplish. Last but not least, I have been working on the "currents" sidebar, but it's still outdated, so I'll be seeing to that soonish.

As always, I strive to please, and enjoy the site!

While I'm blathering on about the blog, I thought I'd mention that I've had several people I work with come up to me and tell me, usually in a whispered undertone, that they read my blog sometimes. It's flattering and strange at once, as though two very different spaces I navigate have collided. I had an entry or two planned about work, actually, that I'm kind of waffling on as a result of the unexpected following I have there. I'll find a way to say what I want to, though, hopefully without getting fired or stepping on too many toes or giving the wrong impression. I think that some of the reason people seem so shy when they tell me about reading my site is because of the confessional nature of my blog. I tend to let it all hang out here, and self-censor very little. If people feel, when reading this very public blog, like they've rummaged through my drawer and picked up my very private diary by mistake, then one of the goals that I seek to accomplish in writing is met. It is my nature to be honest and direct. Obviously not everything is said here. You won't find my phone number, and there are details I purposely omit or alter from time to time, and I try to protect other people's privacy where I think it's merited, but I do strive for intellectual and emotional honesty. Lately much of that honesty has involved how horribly I feel about the loss of my youngest daughter Simone, but I can begin to imagine a day when I am honest about other things, other events and other emotions.

Thank you for reading.

So last week when I was supposed to be writing, I got sidetracked trying to fix up my page instead. Talk about a vortex of lost time. If your browser played nice with my page all along you likely won't notice the difference, but if your browser didn't display my page properly before (for example, Safari) then you should be rather pleased by the results. I wrestled the CSS into submission and fixed all the HTML errors and everyone who has a browser that even remotely understands CSS should be able to read the page with minimal or no issues. Unfortunately, those of you on version 4 of Netscape are out of luck, though I also have a streamlined version of the page that might be legible to you here. So the good news is that my page now validates as HTML 4.01 transitional under w3.org's validator and their CSS validator. If you can't read it at this point, it's really not my fault, look to your browser. Shiny new tags indicating my standards compliance are at the bottom of the page.

Next I'll be tackling the woefully outdated currents on the right hand column, making the sub pages more like the front page, adding plugins, updating the links section and linking back up some stuff I'd unlinked when I first transitioned to the nucleus blog, and, of course adding back all the ancient diary entries that I never put into nucleus. Look for more improvements soon!

For completeness sake, I'll note that I retroactively added an entry I'd written during Christmas vacations while I had no internet access.

I kind of wish there was an easy way to aggregate entries. To post on a certain topic and then expand it and have the prior entry sort of be subsumed into the new entry and float back to the top of the pile, because I'd written about it again. Unfortunately, I don't know of an easy way to do that, and plus I think that's counter to the sense of what the blog is supposed to be, I think. I like this format, and it has really helped me say and do a lot of things, and that's probably why I'm trying to push the medium even further. The reason I'd like to do this is I have several entries that I'd just like to keep adding and adding and adding to over time. Projects. They have no real ending in sight, but it seems like I could revisit and update and modify. One of these projects is the entry I've been considering doing about my dream house. I love the house I live in now, but I have a hypothetical dream house that has all these very specific criteria, the kind you'd have to build for yourself and when you told the builders what you wanted they'd look at you like you were crazy. For example, my dream house has not only a sunroom, but also a Foucault's Pendulum in the foyer. See what I mean? This is also where it'd come in handy if I had any skill whatsoever with drawing, because I could show you different rooms of it. For a house that isn't and will probably never be, it's really quite detailed. However, I suppose that's the sort of thing that merits its own page, really, and should just be linked off the blog when I updated it. Perhaps that shall be my approach.

In other news, I am now indexed in Daypop and Blogwise (hence the new buttons for each over on the right under Linktasty) and I requested that my blog be indexed in Blogdex too, though I don't seem to have filtered into the gaping maw of it yet. The links section (named Linktasty, as I just mentioned) is the next object of my focus, most likely, and it has already seen the addition of my current blog reading list.

Daypop is really cool, btw, if you've never looked at it. They run a list of the top linked stories in weblogs and it's a great way to see what's going around and being talked about.

I've noticed an odd thing about the ping weblogs function of my blog, which is that it won't ping for anything coming out of drafts. This is problematic because I have started saving my entries midway through to drafts more frequently because of all the losing entries trouble I've had in the past. I'm not sure how to handle that, as I very much like the ping weblogs function and want it to work whenever I post entries, whether they come out of drafts or not.

Seems like there was one or two other meta things I was saving up to say, but that's all I can think of right now, so here goes!

Well, it happened yesterday, as I knew it would. I wrote some stuff about Sophia but classified the entry as "In My Life" instead of Sophia because it was so random and rambling and I talked about so many different things in it. There's some overlap in categories, considering the way I think and write, and I don't really want to stop one entry and immediately begin another just because I've gone off on a tanget. The only entries I want to keep completely separate are the dream journal ones, but even those tempt me to talk about why I think I dreamt something or what happened to me during the day that relates to my dream. Thus far, I've avoided the temptation to blur the lines on the dream journal entries. Still, I wish the software I'm using would let me classify entries into more than one category. I also wish from time to time that it had the ability to not just allow selecting by categories, but allow people to unselect or ignore certain categories. If it did that, I would encourage logins, so people could set the types of items that interested them and be able to filter out the rest. That might be almost too much work, though, so I don't wish it as consistently as I wish for multiple category tagging. Ah well. While I'm on the subject of categories, though, question : does it bother you, as a reader, that I don't show the item category anywhere in the post itself? I'm sure there's a way to do this, but I'm not sure that anyone (except me, obviously) cares about it.

What's his name's blog is good today. Reminds me of my passport travails.

I added my site to the GeoURL database which tries to group webspace geographically. You include meta tags about your longitude and latitude and it places you on a map and shows you other registered sites within 500 miles of you. Pretty nifty. If you clicky click on the GeoURL tag on my main page under the links, you'll be taken to a list of all the physically nearby blogs and sites that have entered themselves into the GeoURL database. There's not much listed in my vicinity yet, but I was thrilled to see Jayroe's Particle Sphere manga listed. Particle Sphere is going to go in my list of links, whenever I get around to making that, which I expect to be no time soon.

I also attempted to get my site listed on DayPop, since that was plugged when I installed my blog software (along with Weblogs.com, which is pretty cool) and is currently listed on my links. I didn't make the cut, apparently, since my site was never included, so they may fall off my list of links, though I may give it a few days and try again, instead.

In addition to the previously mentioned self-promotional efforts, I also attempted to list the blog with Blogwise and if that sticks I'll be adding their icon over on the left near the GeoURL one.

Last, but not least, I upgraded from the 2.0 beta of Nucleus to the full 2.0 version. I was a bit ham-handed with the replacement files, unzipping them into the wrong place not once but twice and so if the blog acts funny in places, please let me know.

Last note : thanks Jerm for leaving a comment on my last meta post for comment testing purposes. It worked as expected and emailed me when you posted it, so it's all good. Hooray.