bookmark_borderEnd of the Line

No, I’m not stopping the blogging or whatever this is. I’m just taking it elsewhere.

My main website, PaulaOffutt.com, is, at this moment, undergoing some major changes. Big changes. More changes than any other website…. Just joshin’ you.

Where was I going with this post? Oh, right. I decided to do the same here. Except this site’s posts go back to 2003. And I’ve got posts from the html table version (pre-WordPress) that I never put in.

Which means there’s a hella lot of verbage to move.

So I’m not going to move it. Nyah.

Instead, this location (paulaoffutt.com/blog/) will become an archive. All new posts will be coming from blog.paulaoffutt.com (make a note of that).

So. There it is. Give me about a week or so I guess and it will be up.

You can go to the main site (They’re Just Words) and sign up for the Announcement/News/Updates/WheneverIFeelLikeIt list and be notified of when the main site is live, when the new blog is live, and when/where books will be available for sale! (I am so proud of myself for getting that list set up.)

So, farewell Thought Patterns and Hello to….ah geez, now I gotta come up with another name! Dangit.

bookmark_borderBlogging

I was just scanning down the front page, looking at the sidebar to see if everything was still valid and all that stuff. I get to the archive listing and realized something.

I’ve been blogging for SIX years. Yes, six years. I first started in December 2003. I wanted to be a writer and had discovered this place called Forward Motion. There I found like-minded folk and was having fun. I started hearing people talking about this ‘blog’ stuff. LiveJournal was rather new I think so it was a hot topic.

I knew html and already had a website so I started a ‘blog’ there. Later, I moved it to the current format, WordPress because html tables are not easy to make accessible. My first blogging efforts was a true ‘blog’: it was an online diary, a web log.

I can’t remember exactly why I started doing one. Probably because everyone else had one. On the one hand, I wanted to be like everyone else. On the other hand, I disliked not knowing exactly who would “own” my words if I used LiveJournal or Blogger. I did eventually create accounts with both but all they do is tell you to come here.

Six years. Wow. Back then, I was working on Wayback, a wonderful cool huge novel with about a million (okay, 14) main characters. I still love that book. In January 2004, I started working on what is now The Trilogy That Will Never Survive Editing (aka Simple Sarah). In November 2004, I did my first NaNoWriMo, writing a book with a long title: Butch Girls Can Fix Anything. Sound familiar?

bookmark_borderDam the Spam River

Okay, what happened the other day tried to happen again today. But, I happened to be one step ahead of the bastids!

I had already changed the comment form over to one that has a simple pre-filter installed. In the midst of making it look purty, I got the File 500 error again. I checked the webhost’s resource chart and while it said it was still within limits, the time-stamp said it was 45 minutes old. So I went to the database and SpamKarma’s log was stuffed full again. Nearly 700 spam just in the past 24hrs. So I deleted them all and the File 500 errors went away. Yay me!

I set the Settings>Discussions to turn off all Trackback/Pingbacks but all that does is uncheck the box for all future posts/pages. I went to WordPress’s Extension list and found what I needed. “Auto-Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks” is a plugin that allowed me to turn off ALL comments and trackbacks to ALL posts and pages. I could even leave open one that gets regular valid comments.

The comment form I am using now is called cforms and while the look of it is kinda gross, I do like the built in pre-filter. By pre-filter I mean it stops spammers from even submitting a comment. It doesn’t make it to the comment moderation where it clogs up the pipes. I opted to not go with the captcha images because I hate them myself and wouldn’t want to inflict them on others. Instead, it has a set of simple questions that the commenter must answer before the comment will move on. The questions are simple stuff (what is two plus two?) BUT they work. Yes, spammers can make their way around it eventually. But Shirley To Shit they aren’t that driven for this little known blog!

If anyone has any trouble with the comment form, let me know. I’ve not checked the accessibility issues of it (Elena?) yet and hope all is well on that front.