Still Tweaking

How's the new look looking to you? I've adjusted my page navigation tool on top and added some Christmas cheer. Now if I could get done coding and actually post some stuff, eh?

Now With Multi-Page View

One of the major oversights in my initial design of SAFARI (my site's blogware) is that it could only show one page per category. So, given that each category shows the 10 most recent posts, anything older than the 10 most recent posts vanished. Now, I've added a search engine style bar to the top of every category page (including the front page) allowing you to move through all six and a half years of asisaid content, not just the most recent postings.

The new navigation tool is probably alpha grade, and I'd appreciate any reports of bugs you notice, but overall I think it is working well. Give it a whirl and let me know how it goes.

Closing up shop.

Well, this is it. I've given up on blogging. I'm out of words. Farewell!

Blogroll Broken

It seems my blogroll has gone missing. I pull it off Blogrolling.com, so maybe they changed the way they distribute blogrolls. Never fear, my links to finer blogs across the world will return — hopefully sooner than later.

New Look

Well, it was not intentional, but asisaid celebrated its fifth birthday with a new look. Last night I was feeling rather worn out, and so decided I needed to do something different — doing a little web design hit the spot. As I was finishing up, I realized it was a perfect thing to be doing to recall that my personal web site became blogified on February 21, 2002.

Yes, the internet somehow has put up with me opining for five whole years here. Open for Business celebrated its fifth year last October. I'm starting to feel like a regular internet fixture!

Let me know if you see any bugs in the new design. I'm still tweaking it, and it may adjust a bit more, but after two years with the last look it was time for something new. About every year or two I alternate between a green and a blue design, and staying true to that trend (which I do not follow on purpose) we are in the blue era again.

Spam Wars

A couple of days ago, I noted an increase in blog spamming on asisaid. Now, generally speaking, asisaid was ignored by blog spammers in the past, so I'm not sure how long it has been broken, but I've discovered the blacklists I checked against were no longer in service. No wonder the filter wasn't blocking spammers!

I've switched my filters around and merged in more of Brad Choate's SpamLookup (the official spam filter for MT, which, since it is written in Perl, can be easily integrated with SAFARI) so that I check not only the links but also the IP address of the poster. Hopefully this will work. If not, I plan on requiring authentication for commenting (e.g. you'll link your e-mail address with a password and verify that e-mail address), unless any of my regular readers object to that.

Delays

I've been spending too much time lately posting about posts I'm going to do “tomorrow.” The good news is, whenever you read those posts, tomorrow is still, well, a day away, which means I'm never late. But, on the other hand, I do actually want to finish my Barth series, continue my literary criticism series and post my hot air balloon pictures from last night's Balloon Glow. Oh, and answer the meme Eduardo tagged me for.

I went through my balloon glow photos tonight, but I need to make another pass through my favorites of the 650 so that I can avoid posting too many of them. A lot are duplicates with subtle advantages for one or the other depending on which balloon you are focusing on. At any rate, hopefully by tomorrow (there's that word again!) I will have something to show for my visit to Forest Park. I'm also going to at least complete Eduardo's tag by tomorrow. The rest will come “real soon now.” ™

1,000 Posts (Belated)

Well, the thousand post milestone was passed several weeks ago here on asisaid, and while I planned to say something about it, when it occurred, for a long time prior to the event, I failed to say anything when it finally did happen!

Oh, well.

As a bit of festivity for the event, here's a question for y'all: what's the most interesting thing you've forgotten that you should have remembered?

Disabling Comments

For the first time in asisaid's four and a half year run I have been forced to disable comments on a post. It seems that blogspammers, which previously have either been unsuccessful with my spam filter or ignored me altogether, really liked this one post — I had to delete three spams in three days. Hence, I closed the comments on that post.

I hope it is an isolated incident.

Now I'm (more) Official

Well, I think that should take care of my pending business: the permanent Cranium Leakage linkage went up on over to your right a few minutes ago. That means asisaid has given up its life as just another independent blog in the sea of journals and become a major network blog! Click the pretty graphic that the mad scientists over at Cranium Leakage designed to see what the official CL web site has to say. Of course you can also check out my blogroll, which has long linked to three of the four other active CL blogs (which are well worth reading, in my estimation).