Good things come when I get around to it...

The good news is that the site is now running on a shiny, new, entirely written by me PHP and MySQL backend. You probably won't notice it, but I will because it makes life much easier for me to manage the site, which translates to more posts and irreverence from yours truly. The bad news is that some things are likely to be broken, such as the comments which are now disabled. Since there aren't many comments to begin with, you probably won't notice that either. After some sleep and consulting with my Perl manuals, hopefully the comments will be working shortly along with everything else on the site.

Update: Things appear to be working fine again. And now back to our regularly scheduled web site...

Go somewhere else!

I got my first comment spam last week! I'm so excited! It means my web site has now passed from just some random pages to one that people actually care about enough to use to their own advantage. You call it annoying, but I call it progress.

So to all you comment spammers out there, I highly recommend you don't try it. I offer the following:

• All links in comments use rel="nofollow" and all comment pages plus my comment RSS feed are in my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from counting the links in page ranking.
• All HTML tags are removed from comments. Too bad.
• I have filters and I'm not afraid to use them.
• The only people you're pissing off are the scarce numbers of readers I have. In other words, you're not reaching a big audience.
• Comments like "Your site colors suck!" don't mean shit to me, and the other readers of this site know that already.

Don't bother to spam here. Seriously. It's not worth the time -- yours or mine.

Also for the record, I've tried very hard to make this site more compliant with accepted practices for blind and low vision readers. Hopefully this hasn't created any readability or navigation issues as a result. I know the photo pages still need some work, but otherwise the site should be much better than it was before.

Let the feedback flaming begin...

So I added a comment script to my web site. It's ok... uses <object> to show the full text of the article, but it's at least minimally functional in terms of letting people throw around the feedback.

There's also a new RSS feed that includes these comments. Check it here: The new RSS!

As you might expect, this is a work in progress so please let me know if there are any problems, errors, or cosmetic issues with the new comments.

UPDATE: So I think the script works correctly now. And it doesn't use <object> any more so BOOYAH! That is all...

UPDATE: Still issues... hold off on comments for now.

UPDATE: Comments are totally working now. Much thanks to Jack at Calamarco, my web hoster, for the assistance.

So you want to talk to me?

I hate spambots. That's why I use a javascript email obfuscation method I read about here to protect my email address.  Try clicking the "e-mail me" link in the menu first.  If you don't have a javascript enabled browser, email "dave" at the domain of this web site "themeat.org" and it will get to me. Thanks for helping me stop the spammers.

On the cookies for this site.

So I now use a cookie on this site. It stores the following information:

• Your choice of stylesheet (that you can select from the menu)

And that's all. In no way will I ever collect information from you without getting permission first.