Category: JWN updates

I did a bit more tweaking on the main JWN sidebar this morning. Including, I thought I should put in links to some of the documents I’ve archived on JWN in the past few months, so there’s a whole new sidebar section for that.
Then I decided that in our tour of different world calendars we’d spent long enough reading the dates in Slovak. The next option down was Slovenian, which was very similar. Below that was Spanish, which I thought would be a little bland. Maybe I’ll come back to it later?
So now we’ve arrived at Suomi. Oh my gosh. Happy huhtikuu 16 to all of you.
I think maybe I’d better put something on the sidebar that explains what’s going on here?

I apologize to readers that I have at least two known stalkers operating on the Comments boards of the blog. These two individuals call themselves Razavipour and E. Bilpe (sometimes also known as “Other”). Raza distinguishes himself by lengthy rants frequently posted in all bold.
I have tried to ban their IPs since they have contravened the blog’s clearly posted guidelines for commenters. But they slide around into different IPs and continue to try to clog up the JWN comments boards with their lengthy, frequently hate-filled, seemingly demented, or ad-feminam/ad-hominem rantings.
I apologize for the nuisance they constitute. My tech advisor, legal advisor, and I will work together to see what our further options are. Any suggestions from bona-fide readers will be welcome.
I shall continue trying to delete these people’s unwanted incursions onto my bandwidth whenever I can. Meantime, please just ignore them.

I’m in Maryland. My laptop doesn’t work. I’m just borrowing a friend’s computer to check email and write this.
It felt very frustrating, then I remembered most folks in the world don’t organize their lives according to “instant access”, cyber-time. And their mental health and general effectiveness in running their lives is probably far superior to those of folks who’re foreever rushing around to catch the “latest” of the latest news.
Ommmm.
Actually, today and tomorrow I’m doing Quaker things. So perhaps some cyber-silence is very appropriate.
Back Sunday evening, or Monday. If way opens.

One of the best things about this blog is the discussion on the Comments boards. Amazing to think of this globe-circling, multicultural discussion forum under continual development here. However, my own experience and that of many other people who try to post comments is that they now often take a long, long time to post.
I am very sorry about that.
The reason for the delay is the complex anti-spam software we had to put in to save the site from the barrage of extremely nasty, often very pornographic spam that had started to come in.
We haven’t completely solved the spam problem. But we’ve succeeded in blocking a vast proportion of it. The “cost” of doing this is that all incoming comments now go through the very complex series of anti-spam filters we’ve installed. That can take time.
Someone who’s posted a comment may rapidly jump to the conclusion that the attempt to post it failed, and then try again (and again, and again, and again). If you do that, you end up with multiple iterations of the comment on the board. No big problem in that except it’s a bit of a waste of time for the commenter, and for me when I go in to delete the duplicates– and a bit of a distraction for readers.
So I’m afraid I just need to ask you for some patience. Maybe you could go off and visit another JWN post or another website for a minute or two before you come back and check whether your comment has posted. In my experience the comments-posting system is actually working pretty well these days, even if slowly. So you don’t even really need to go back and check, at all.
Except hey, it’s always nice to see one’s own words in “print”, don’t you think?

It was my youngest, Lorna Quandt, calling home from college a couple of weeks ago. “Hey, Mom, did you know that the dates on your blog are coming up in, um, Spanish or something?”
“Well, ye-es. They’ve been like that for about a month now. But it’s not Spanish, it’s Portuguese. Don’t you like it? I thought it would give the blog a suitably international flavor.”
“H’mmm. Okay. Whatever.”
As you can see, the experiment was a resounding success.
(Actually, along the way there, a journo from Brazil called to interview me about Lebanon. I said, hey, you can take any quotes you want off my blog and use them. He, at least, was suitably impressed when I told him about my adventure in calendar-based multi-culturalism.)
So today I looked through the rather interesting list of language options that the MT software offers under “Language for date display”. I couldn’t make up my mind. When I’d chosen Portuguese I was trying to get my mind back into writing about Mozambique. This time, I just wanted a change.
Well, heck, maybe I’ll just click one further down in the list, I concluded after staring at the list for a while. Then, over time, I’ll have gotten through the whole list.
So, I started six weeks ago with Portuguese. Today I clicked one down from there and am happy to bring you– dates in Slovak!

I apologize that the blog has not been accepting comments since late Sunday night. But now, it is again!
For the first 36 hours or so, the problem was that the webhosting service was down. Then, while it was down, I started out on a big session of IP banning– a heroic but almost useless campaign to ban the IPs used by the spambots that feed really nasty spam into the blog through the Comments and the Trackbacks.
(Meantime, the tech advisor was installing MT-Blacklist, a much more effective way to combat spam.)
Okay, closing the Comments boards to all users including bona-fide users was my fault. In an excess of zeal and a deficit of careful attention during my ban-athon Monday, I ended up “banning” a completely blank IP box, which apparently had the effect of banning all IPs from Commenting.
Well, I think that was the problem. Because half an hour ago after I discovered that blank line on my register of banned IPs and duly unbanned it, suddenly I was able to post comments onto the blog again.
Yay!

I only realized this morning (central Virginia time) that the server that hosts the blog was down, and apparently had been since mid-day or so yesterday.
Apologies for the interruption in service. You should now be able to post your comments. (If you’re a “legitimate” commenter, that is. We’ve also been installing new spam-protection software here.)
I was also totally unable to post any new posts. Which prevented me from crowing about calling it, back on Feb. 13, about Ibrahim Jaafari winning the UIA’s internal leadership race.
Oh go ahead, Helena, crow.
Anyway, let’s hope the hosting service– and you know who you are, guys!– doesn’t let this happen again, eh?

I just posted the December 2003 JWN Golden Oldies onto the sidebar on the front page. Check them out. It was a pretty good month for JWN. Lots there about Iraq, war-crimes courts, and my first visit to China.
Warning: you may find lots of really nasty (including pornographic) spam posted into the comments of some of those posts. Sorry about that. When I have time, I’ll delete that nastiness.
Because of spam attacks like those into old posts, I now have a policy of closing the Comments boards after a certain amount of time. (Maybe two weeks?) So if you want to comment on any of those brilliant — or not so brilliant– old posts, here is the place to do it.
(By the way: I hope you’re enjoying my nod to Lusophonia regarding the date-stamps on the posts. I only discovered the range of language options for datestamps in the MT system recently. What shall it be next, I wonder? Possibly not Japanese.)

Well, no-one sent me any cards but yesterday was actually JWN’s second blogiversary.
Silly me, I meant to post about it yesterday. It’s not hard to remember. Two of my three actual, biological kids have birthdays this week as well.
Now I’ve kind of learned to drive this machine, does anyone have any ideas where I should take it?

Last night, in case you missed this momentous development, I put up three more months’ worth of JWN Golden Oldies into the G.O. pane on the front page here.
These ones come from July, August, and September last year. Check ’em out and tell me what you think!
(Sorry about a few items of spam in some of the Comments there. I am still working at deleting them. My advice for now: don’t click on the hyperlinks embedded into Commenters’ names there without having a good idea of where you’re actually going. But some of the discussions in the Comments boards there are really good, occasional spam notwithstanding)