Now that my vacation and study leave are now truly over, and I can no longer pretend otherwise, I’m back to my usual schedule for writing posts, which goes something like this — Monday: Congregational life — Tuesday: Stories from real life — Wednesday: Congregational life (and marketing) — Thursday: Theology — Friday: Book review — Saturday: Anything goes — Sunday: Meditation. My evil alter ego Mr. Crankypants and new guest blogger Isaac Bickerstaff may, however, disrupt this schedule without warning.
Category Archives: Housekeeping
The spam saga continues…
After a sudden spike in comment spam, I had to add some new defenses. You could unwittingly trigger my new anti-spam defenses (especially those of you who post comments from university computer systems), and if that happens you may have to take one of those “captcha” tests to prove that you’re a human and not an evil spam robot. If the worst happens, and you are unable to post a comment, please let me know via email (danrharper AT aol DOT com) so I can tweak the settings on my defenses.
New look, upgrade
I finished working on my sermon in the late afternoon. By then, the gloomy clouds had settled in and the rain had begun. It was too gloomy to go out, so I stayed home and finally got around to fixing a couple of things on this blog:– (1) I installed and debugged design changes I’ve been working on for a month now. The new layout should make it easier for you to find what you need on the sidebar; behind the scenes, I cleaned things up to make site maintenance easier for me. (2) I finally finished the upgrade that I botched earlier in the week. The design changes made everything go smoothly. But when I was done I discovered that I had not installed the most recent upgrade. So I still have an upgrade to do, but that’s enough for one day — further maintenance will have to wait until I have my patience back.
Upgrade problems (all my fault)
WordPress came out with a security upgrade a couple of days ago. This afternoon, I sat down to install the upgrade. I tried to get fancy. I lost some data. (Thank goodness for back-up files.) But I had to head off to a meeting this evening, didn’t finish cleaning up the mess, so things might still be a little screwy in odd corners.
Today’s problem is what’s known as a PICNIC — Problem In Chair, Not In Computer. It’s not a WordPress problem; it’s a Dan problem. To be fair to myself, much of the fun I get out of keeping this blog is experimenting with new Web tools like CSS and PHP. Thank you, dear reader, for putting up with my experiments. And I will finish cleaning up the mess tomorrow — well, maybe over the weekend — anyway, it’ll get done Real Soon Now.
Hidden upgrade
Over the past week and a half, I’ve been cleaning up some technical problems on this Web site. One problem in particular has been bugging me:– I wanted to make it easy to print entries from this blog, because every once in a while I want to share something I write here with someone who doesn’t have computer access. In a sense, this represents a problem in accessibility.
The blogging software I use, WordPress, comes with a default setting that strips away all formatting when you try to print from a Web browser. So I wrote a new stylesheet specifically for printing. Which should have been an easy task.
But it wasn’t, and it took me a couple of hours to debug the new stylesheet. You see, most Web browsers do not comply with the CSS2 specification — which means that if you try to print a page from this blog from Internet Explorer, say, or Safari, things won’t work quite right. Most importantly, printing from Explorer or Safari will mean that when there’s a link in the text, all that will print is the text you see on the screen. But if you print from CSS2-compliant browser like Firefox, the address of the link will also print out. (I have made the rest of the site printer-friendly, too — with the same caveat.)
Two conclusions: (1) Everyone should use Firefox as their primary Web browser (besides, it’s free). (2) Until we see better compliance with basic Web standards, creating Web sites will continue to be overly time-consuming — which creates problems for small non-profit groups and small congregations.
Do-It-Yourself:
Printing with CSS — general principles, from “A List Apart”
CSS styles for print in WordPress
Looking back over 2006
Average number of unique visitors to www.danielharper.org: 1,879/month
Total number of hits for 2006: 228,899
Number of unique visitors in December (up until 5:00 p.m. on the 30th): 2,520
The main page of “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist” got about 13,750 page views in December, 2006. In general, the blog gets about three quarters of the total page views for the whole site.
I don’t bother tracking how much traffic individual blog posts get (such figures tend to be misleading, since you have no way of knowing which posts someone reads when they just access the main page of the blog). Based on reactions from readers, I suspect that the nine-part series on Teaching kids how to be religious got far more traffic than anything else I wrote this year.
Looking back over the past year, what really stands out is hearing from readers of the blog. I look forward to your comments, your email messages, and the occasional in-person conversations — that’s what makes it interesting and worthwhile for me.
Thanks for your patience…
If you tried to visit this blog from December 28 through about 6:00 p.m. on December 29, you got a WordPress error message. (For the computer geeks out there, it was a problem in accessing the MySQL database, resolved by changing the wp-config.php file.)
Problem is now fixed. Sorry for the downtime.
Note to a reader
Roger:– I replied to your email message, but your internet service provider bounced it back to me, saying your email address doesn’t work. Can you contact me using another email address? (Or just call….)
Upgrade hassles
Upgrading to WordPress 2.0.5 caused some minor errors in the blog’s appearance. My apologies, should have it fixed soon. If you run into something that doesn’t look right, please let me know — either by commenting on this post, or via email.