May 31, 2004

Brief Guide To Various Recent Site Changes

This is no doubt apparent by now, but some things have changed here, most obviously in terms of the visual redesign. That part of the changes was not motivated by anything in particular except the restlessness that often kicks in after having a particular design for awhile.

That said, along with the visual redesign -- meaning before, during, and after -- came some other changes. Here's your quick guide.

Both sidebars now have significantly less content. In part, this is connected to the redesign, in that the site had been seeming too "heavy" to us lately. So while we redesigned the site, we removed what we had come to consider extraneous material -- for example, the local weather, the Powell's list, and our Amazon wishlist in the right-hand sidebar, and the lists of recent posts, recent comments, category archives, and monthly archives in the left-hand sidebar.

Those latter four elements are now grouped together on our separate archives page, which also includes an expanded version of the search box which will continue to reside in the left-hand sidebar.

On the new archives page, this new search form offers various ways to restrict or expand your search beyond the simple method in the sidebar. As for that sidebar search box, however, it now automatically searches both entry content and comment content -- so if you're pretty sure you read something in a comment somewhere, that basic search box in the sidebar will find it.

Meanwhile, the Amazon wishlist link and various site "meta-data" links have been moved from the right-hand sidebar to the left-hand sidebar. Our previous weather and Powell's features have not been moved to any new location on the site, in part because removing them altogether speeds up page loads because we now have two fewer scripts running.

Currently, the right-hand sidebar consists only of our advertisements and our list of regional weblogs. That weblogs list likely will eventually move into the left-hand sidebar, if and when we have our maximum of six concurrent advertisements running.

By the way, we have now migrated to a new advertising service provider. Among the features of the new advertising set-up are: ads with both copy and image, and certainty of appearing on the page (our previous provider had issues with this). Also note that because of these two especially helpful new features to our ads, the rates have gone up slightly.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes we rearranged things a bit so that MT 3.0D is now running under mod_perl, which arguably should also speeds things up at least somewhat when it comes to operations such as posting comments and running searches. However, it also may be causing some bizarre server behavior, so we're keeping an eye on the mod_perl environment in case we need to switch back to the way things were set up previously.

There's also an addition to the list of ways to contribute to this site. While one-time contributions via either Amazon or PayPal remain as options, there is also now a link which takes you to a page from which you can sign up to make regular monthly contributions at any one of several different levels. This is in response to our reader survey, about which we'll have more to say when it completes its run on June 7.

As for the comment spam situation, it seems that a version of MT-Blacklist for MT3.0D is underway and could be expected in "a few weeks." In the meantime, we have been subjected to further swarms of comment spam atttacks, as some readers may have noticed from the "site down" message we've put up when they were underway. We have an interim and very stop-gap measure in place for now which should prevent these swarm attacks from getting through to the comments. Then again, comment spammers are crafty devils, so we'll just have to wait and see.

Finally, in theory there should be a tiny piece of trickery when posting comments -- that being the transformation of the "post" button into one that reads "wait..." after you click it. Just to give another hint that one doesn't need to click the button more than once.

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