Category: Housekeeping

Email notifications

Every once in a while, someone asks me if they can get notified by email when I post something on this blog. There are several solid email notification solutions for WordPress that charge a fee — but I can’t justify spending any more than I already do on this website. And all the email notification solutions I’ve found take time to set up and maintain — but I’d rather spend the limited amount of time I have on writing blog posts rather than on maintaining an email list.

These days, most of the web is devoted to making money. Websites are either trying to promote a business or a nonprofit, or websites are trying to show you advertisements. Those people who make money from their websites — by showing you ads, or by promoting goods or services, or by soliciting donations for a nonprofit — are more likely to have a marketing budget and staff time they can devote to their website. But on this website, it’s just me, with no marketing budget.

I wish RSS were still a viable option for reading blogs, but it’s not. I guess your only option is to check this site regularly for new posts.

But even if there are no email notifications here, there are no ads, either. And no gobbling up your personal data and selling it….

Blog index

I’m in the process of bringing the index to this blog up to date. I maintained the index up until 2012, then let if fall into disuse.

You might wonder: who’s going to bother looking at an index when you can just use the search function? But I feel that a blog index can do two things. First, just as when browsing a physical library, a reader might stumble across topics they didn’t even know they were interested in. Second, I think the index will serve as another additional little piece of search engine optimization, exposing search engine bots to yet another mention of obscure names and topics.

If you happen to use the index, and come across any problems, please email me or leave a comment.

Slight change

For many years, the tagline of this blog read: “A post-modern heretic’s spiritual journey.” I finally decided a more accurate tagline is: “A post-modern heretic’s journey through ecological spirituality.” Maybe that’s too specific… but for now it feels like “ecological spirituality” is a better descriptor.

Update, 1 Aug 2023: I changed the tagline back to the original one.

New approach to defeating evil spammers

I’m trying something new.

For some years now, this blog has used a WordPress plugin called “CaptchaBank.” This plugin forced you to solve an arithmetic problem before you could comment (and I have had to solve an arithmetic problem before I could login). It was a great plugin that kept the spammers at bay. And it wasn’t based on Google’s horrible “reCaptcha” which steals your data and has an appalling user interface.

Alas, Captcha Bank is no longer being maintained. I finally had to deactivate it.

Fortunately, Cloudflare has released a new form of Captcha which they call “Turnstile.” You can read about it here. They don’t steal your data. And Cloudflare is a company that I have at least a moderate amount of trust in (as opposed to Google, which sadly I can no longer trust at all). So I installed a plugin that runs Turnstile on WordPress.

With luck, everything will run smoothly and you won’t notice a difference. But if anything goes wrong, this will explain why you’re unable to comment. If that happens, please let me know (you can find my email on the About page).

News

It’s public now. I’ll be resigning from the UU Church of Palo Alto as of July 31. I’ll post my resignation letter below the fold. The congregation that hired me hasn’t posted this on its website yet — when they do, I’ll post that info here.

Continue reading “News”

Outage

I apologize for the brief blog outage. My indefatigable web host moved this website onto a more secure server with additional hardening against attackers, and some minor glitches happened. That’s the price we pay for website security these days. (Some day maybe I’ll convert this entire site to static HTML, which would reduce energy consumption as well as making the site more secure….)

Website update

The last time I did a major update of my main website was around 2009. It was looking pretty old and creaky. So I did a complete redesign, and it’s now responsive and html5 compliant.

On the content side, I added some significant new content, including an essay on change management in congregations. I did delete some old outdated content, but I think no one will miss it (if there’s something you do miss, let me know, and I can put it back up).

Thank you Abby, for giving me the impetus to learn about responsive websites (and happy birthday, too!).

Check it out — https://www.danielharper.org/ — and if you see any problems or if you have any comments, please leave them here.

Health break

I continue to make progress in recovering from the pulmonary embolism of a year and a half ago, but I still get tired easily. And I’m finally learning that sometimes when you’re tired, you should rest a little bit rather than trying to maintain the fiction that you’re perfectly all right. So I’m resting.

If you’re looking for something to read, there are some new and thoughtful comments on this recent post.