You are hereI love the smell of dust and fumes... (Site Work Notice)
I love the smell of dust and fumes... (Site Work Notice)
Just a quick note: I'm doing some site maintenance of various sorts relating to comment handling, photo pathing and other boring garbage, so you might encounter some busted stuff around here over the next few weeks.
There's a shiny a new spam filter in place for comments. Seems Europe is infested with spammers and scam artists with nothing better to do than search for open comment fields on blogs, regardless of relevance. (PEOPLE!!! QUIT BUYING VIAGRA AND THESE SCUMBAGS WILL GO AWAY!) Unfortunately, for a long time I basically had to block the entire IP space managed by RIPE (the EU version of ARIN) until I had time to find a simple yet forceful solution. The new, aggressive spam filter I installed negates this necessity, and will allow Europeans to stumble here once more. Yay for them! Without giving too much away I can say that English and proper spelling/grammar are important... hotlinks will get you nowhere... and it all works beautifully.
More noticeable on the other hand, will be the broken and MIA photos on this site. Recent circumstantial developments have finally freed me to revamp my file structures the way they should have been done, and need to be. I actually attempted this a couple years ago, but stopped when I remembered that the hundreds (nay, thousands!) of photos hot-linked from here to various other sites, "vanished" on those other sites... and there were too many hot-links to change. Curses! In the interest of goodwill I lived with my own mess for their benefit. Fast-forward to the now and a short long story: those partnerships are now either history or the original hotlinks are that much older, forgotten and buried, so I'm finally able to restructure everything. Of course this means in addition to old hotlinks, I'll end up busting photo paths and stuff I forgot about on my own site too - oops. Eventually the 404 registers will direct me to such orphans, so bear with me... it won't all happen overnight, and this isn't ever going to be my day job.
Finally, I had a few requests to enhance the gallery's sideshow. So I've increased the delay between slides from 5 seconds to 10 seconds, and increased the default resolution to 720px wide. This is already in place, so go check it out!
In the meantime if you see something that doesn't make sense, or seemed to disappear, feel free to drop me a contact line or a comment and let me know!
Glad you're going to reorganize so it works better for you. Reorganizing can be a pain but well worth it when done. Unfortunately I'll have to rebuild every single post on the forums that's worth rebuilding, and that's a lot. I never did understand why the photos weren't just uploaded there but prepared for this. Look forward to seeing your new catches, a couple in particular caught my eye also.
Regarding photos: it was easier that way at the start, and you're well aware how buggy the photo handling there could be at times; eventually my initial way just got to be a habit. Far better to batch upload 20+ at once here and link when/as necessary, as opposed to one at a time there, especially when the accompanying text would be readied later in many cases.
As stated to several people, I'd begun using the forum hosting in recent months for quicker posts anyway, so this wasn't a thing to "prepare for" (?); the law of averages means it didn't amount to much in my case though. I've been quite surprised how much old / duplicate / disorganized stuff I found. And I'm still not done, arrgh.
Good luck to you.
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