Tag Archives: Site News

Changes at My Notes

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Welcome to our new “cms” (content management system). Web software is made by WordPress. Over the next few days we will phase out our older system. As you find the distinctive new WordPress styles on the pages for My Notes (this page), PHOTO Notes, COMMENTARY and/or COMPUTERS: go ahead and re-bookmark them if you like to bookmark. If you don’t bookmark, we’ll be changing the site page links as we go, so it will be seamless for you.

Bookmarks to the old pages will be redirected for a while. Eventually the old directories will disappear. We hope you like the new look!

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Note to Our Readers

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This is also being posted in PHOTO Notes, as a follow-up to earlier entries here on this subject. Earlier this week we had to turn off Comments. We were hit by a baffling graffiti-spam two days in a row, where a person or bot (not sure which) posts links to objectionable sites. They are offensive and unwelcome, easily deleted, but otherwise harmless.

We were not sure at first why we were targeted. We discovered the problem is as old as interactive web pages, and the purpose is to raise the Google ranking of the offensive sites. Click “Continue Reading” to find out more about this bottom-feeder phenomenon.

We apologize to our readers for any concern this may have caused. We’ve since taken reasonable additional steps to prevent posting of a known collection of objectionable links. We’ll gradually open up Comments to recent postings, although (author’s message) not enough of you were using them.

Please note that, at this point, we have not installed a cuss words filter here (we do have one). There are many cuss words that have perfectly inoffensive non-slang meanings. At some point, common sense has to prevail. When it does not, those of us with authorship privileges can always delete inappropriate comments with the click of a button.

In the continuation page of this article, you can read what a notable authority, Jay Allen of MT-Blacklist, has to say about this phenomenon.
Continue reading →

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How I’m Using MovableType

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I run four MT pages on my private, personal site, ‘Summitlake.com’: My Notes, Photo Notes, Commentary Index and Computers Index. I created these from one MT installation using the “Create New Blog” feature in the control panel. Thus, I’m unsure (after reading the 3.0 agreement) whether this counts as four blogs, or one.

I am really using a blog page as a “smart html page” for the Index pages. I had hoped to allow MT to take over more of this functionality. If I am really at a count of four already, MT 3.0 may not work.

MT is exciting and should be worth it even on a free site such as mine. But there are some concerns.
Continue reading →

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Graffiti Spam hits Summitlake

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We received notification today that someone posted a comment to one of the PHOTO Notes pages containing links for viagra and devices for the enlargement of the male member.

That means we have to turn off the coding that allows you and me to post comments. If you know me, just ask me to get privileges to post Notes material with links and other html.

Besides being a huge and uninvited invasion of personal space, this has nothing to do with “family friendly”: the ads are just distasteful and offensive, period.

Once aware of it, it’s a small matter for us to delete the entry and take other defensive measures.

It’s too bad it happens, though. Help us put people like this out of business by cleaning up their messes before they can get paid for making them. If you spot this kind of tampering on your favorite reputable websites, help us all out by reporting it to the webmaster right away.

Thanks!

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MOVABLETYPE Experiment

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We LIKE the new MovableType technology. We find (after all) that it might lend itself nicely to some of our Department indexes. In the past, department indexes like Commentary and Computers contained two methods of locating content: (a) the autolist menu in the left hand frame panel, and (b) long scrolling lists of notes and short article descriptions, in the right main panel.

You can still access every article and page in the Department with Autolist on the left, (a).

(b) is what we’re changing. We’ll sacrifice some graphics. In exchange, we’ll replace the long scrolling lists with the powerful indexing and archiving features of MovableType. As an experiment, we’ve started with COMPUTERS, which had the longest and oldest index of article short descriptions.

(please see continuation)
Continue reading →

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Site Changes

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The front page loads faster. Much faster, it seems to us. You have probably noted some of the pretty graphics have been replaced by plain text, such as the site and page counters.

The menu on the left side has always been for top-level user and utility pages. There are 22 of them, and they don’t change that often. So we’ll update that menu manually whenever we make a change to the root level directory.

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Name change to “My Notes”

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I changed the name of “My Page” to “My Notes” yesterday. We now also have “Photo Notes”. We may soon have “Commentary Notes”, “Writing Notes” and so forth. I wanted to be consistent.

These Movable Type pages are best suited for quick notes and shorter entries anyway. For now, anyway!

Sorry for the confusion. Our Complaint Department is understaffed, and underpaid — or so they say.

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