Category Archives: Housekeeping

Upgrade complete, but still under construction

The upgrade of the blog software was successfully completed with the help of Dennis at Deerfield Hosting. This should put a stop to the attack on my Web host’s database, that occurred through a security hole in the out-dated blogging software I was still using.

It will take me a bit longer to change the appearance back to the old appearance. Please bear with more for a couple of days until I have the time to take care of that finicky project.

And for those of you who are bloggers, let my unplesant experience be a lesson to us all: Update your software regularly! Back up your entire site regularly! For the past two months, I had been meaning to upgrade, I had been meaning to back up the site — it was not pleasant to be forced into it because of a malicious attack.

Some problems on my end

My Web hosting service experienced an attack through my blog, and I am currently going through an upgrade to plug security holes. The blog may be unavailable temporarily over the next few hours, and it may look different over the next week as I tweak the appearance due to the upgrade.

Also, to those of you who receive email notification of new posts — unfortuantely, the upgrade will erase the plug-in I’m using to provide such notification. I will not be able to reinstall it, and until I can find a new plug-in I’m happy with, this will be the end of email notification of new posts.

Housekeeping

I have just completed transferring all posts from this blog’s old site, at American OnLine, to this new site. A few glitches intervened:

  1. A big apology to the people who get notified of new posts to this blog via email. They found themselves with over a hundred email notifications in their in-box in the last 24 hours. Please accept my apologies — and sorry you have to delete all those email messages.
  2. No word yet on how this affected those who have an RSS feed. I had understood that backdating posts means no RSS feed — if I’m mistaken, my apologies to you as well.
  3. One or two posts got away from me, and appeared momentarily on the main blog before I corrected their dates. Sorry for any confusion.

But now the transfer is over — it’s been a mess for some of my readers — and a mess for me as I transferred the old posts one by one, by hand, from AOL’s kludgey blog system. Thank you for your patience.

One last thing — the old AOL site will stay up for a few more months, and then it will disappear.

Web site revision, blog comments

Just finished revising the main Web site. The new, simpler design, should make it easier to navigate. You will find some new content has also been added, more to follow. Your comments and critiques are always welcome; please use the email address listed in the menu at left.

Web site stats for January show an uptick in viewed (i.e., non-robot) traffic: 757 “unique visitors” for the month of December, 883 January. It’s very nice to have more readers — thank you all! — but there’s been an associated increase in comment spam. I’ve been so vigorous about deleting comment spam, I may have deleted legitimate comments in error. If that happens to you, please accept my apologies and send the comment in question to me via email.

Where are you?

This blog’s map [link removed, map no longer active, sorry!!] shows that blog has readers from Alaska to Ireland. Since one of the themes of this blog is “sense of place,” click the link and show where your place is. (Sorry, the blog map does not allow imaginary places yet, although I’m working on it.)

Housekeeping

(1) I’ve added “ecological theology” as a post category, and also included it as one of the blog themes listed in the upper left corner.

(2) I’m continuing to transfer posts from the old blog over to this site, and have now finished up through April, 2005. (First mention of ecological theology on blog was April 22, 2005.

(3) More and more, I’m thinking that this blog is growing up to be a blog on ecological theology, and so as the first anniversary of the blog approaches a slight name change may be in the works….

Server issues

Looks like I lost everything posted to this blog from Monday to yesterday, inclusive — which may include some comments as well. I had a version of yesterday’s post on my computer, and that’s back up. However, other posts and any comments from the past three days are gone. My apologies, and I’m working to resolve the issues with my hosting service.

Update, Feb 11, 2006: somehow, those lost posts eventually reappeared after the server switch was complete….