The WoodCast!

World Wide Wood is taking a tentative dip into the Podcasting waters with The WoodCast! There’s just an introductory, 45-second, testing-the-waters episode right now.

Oh, and the WoodCast is powered by WordPress.

Our Netflix Queue

I’ve created a page that utilizes Netflix’s RSS feeds to display up-to-the-minute information on the items currently in our rental queue, as well as recent shipment activity in our queue. So if you’re interested in what we’re watching on DVD here at World Wide Wood, you’ll want to check it out! You can always access the link from our navigation bar under ‘Site Content’.

Feed Information Page

I’ve written up a feed information page for World Wide Wood. This page has some basic information on feeds, a list of the feeds available here, and a description of each feed. So if you’re already a subscriber, you might want to check it out to see if there is a better feed for you. And if you’re not already a subscriber, you can find out what a feed is, what feeds are available, and which one would work best for you. You can always find this page linked from our navigation bar, under ‘Quick Links’.

Just another way to enjoy the content here at World Wide Wood.

Pardon Our Dust

First, in case any of you tried to access our website from 8:30-9:30 a.m. EDT today, I apologize. The machine prwdot.org runs on at Site5 was down. As a reminder, I have an externally-hosted blog set up on Blogger at which I will post updates in the event that there is an outage on prwdot.org. In the event of an extended/catastrophic outage, I can even have all requests for prwdot.org redirect automatically… but I most likely won’t go through that trouble unless the downtime exceeds more than a couple hours. This blog also has an Atom feed, so you can subscribe to it in your favorite news aggregator.

Second, if you have noticed the appearance of our site being a bit funky in your web browser, that’s because I’ve been doing a bit of tidying in the underlying XHTML and CSS code of our site. I have been reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s excellent book Designing With Web Standards, and have been compelled to do a lot of cleanup and reorganizing. If everything is working normally, things should look basically the same as they did before. The changes are almost totally under the hood, so unless you’re a real XHTML/CSS geek, there’s not much to see. (If you do want to see, you are more than welcome to ‘View Source’.)

If things are still looking weird in your browser, just hold down the shift key and click your browser’s refresh or reload button. That should clear things up. If it still looks weird, then please leave me a comment with the version of your OS and browser, and the nature of the problem you are seeing.

Gimme 5!

My frustrations with TekTonic had reached the boiling point, so I decided to switch prwdot.or back to its previous host, Site5. The move is now complete! I’m much happier to be back on a nice, snappy, responsive host. One that I don’t have to spend my time administering. The folks at Site5 have much more time and knowledge to do that sort of thing, and I’m happy to let them do it!

Hooray for Site5! Now I’m off to enjoy some of the lovely weather we’re having.

We’re Back

Apologies to all of our readers and all of the folks who read other sites on prwdot.org. Due to a overzealous system administrator (me), our server got a bit screwed up last night. But the good people at TekTonic were able to help get things back up and running, so kudos to them.

If you didn’t happen to see it, I’ve set up an off-site “status” blog. In the event that our site goes down, I’ll set up any requests for prwdot.org to be redirected to http://prwdot.blogspot.com/. (Hopefully Blogger will be up…)

I also plan to use that blog in general to make notes about site maintenance, etc, so if you’re a regular reader or a user of another prwdot.org subdomain, and something seems to be wonky, or if you’re just bored and want to see if I’m doing anything, head over to prwdot.blogspot.com.

Thanks, and have a nice day.

Category Enhancements

In an ongoing effort to make our site more useful, and to expose more of Movable Type’s built-in power, I have added a few enhancements to our blog categories. Each category now has its own Trackback URL, which means that you can have your blog software send it a ping, if you have some reason to do so. Also, each category now has its own RSS feed. So if you are only interested in updates to one specific category, you can subscribe just to that category’s feed, rather than our full site feeds. Both of these enhancements can be found at the top of each category archive page, for example, on the recently-created Blacklist to Modsec category page.

May I direct your attention…

…to a few new features/links/tweaks that we’ve added recently?

• As Becky mentioned in the previous post, we’re now linking to our good friends Jeremy and Angela Biggs.
• My Linklog has been rebuilt. I’m now using del.icio.us to post links there. There is also an RSS feed for the Linklog, should you want to be alerted as soon as I post a new link. The Linklog will always be available from the left hand side of our page under Our Site. If you haven’t checked it out yet, head over. It’s an interesting opportunity to see the type of things that are percolating in the back of my head before they (potentially) become actual blog posts.
• I’ve added the ability to do a Google Suggest-style search on our blog entries. If you scroll down the left hand side of our page, you’ll see a search form labeled “Search Our Blog”. Try typing in a few letters of a word you’d like to search for. In a few seconds, you should see a list of possible choices pop up, and you can select the one that’s closest to your search word. You can also just do a regular search by typing in a word or words and pressing return or clicking Search. This is all possible thanks to Arvind and Chad’s port of the WP Suggest Search plugin, which I also tweaked a bit.
• Also related to search, I’ve cleaned up the search results page a bit. So it looks all pretty now. Yay.
• Finally, Becky and I have collaborated to create an About page, something our site has been lacking for a while. We’ll probably flesh it out a bit more later, but it should be a good place to go if you don’t really know us that well.

Enjoy the new features, and let us know what you think!

Commenting Policies

We have always required visitors to include, at a minimum, a name and an email address when posting comments to our site. This is done so that we can send you a personal response via email, if necessary. But up until now, we’ve always displayed your email address as part of the comment listing on each post.

Starting today, that is no longer the case. The email address you enter is no longer be displayed in the comment listing. Hopefully this will satisfy the privacy concerns of folks who don’t want their email address available to the general public and/or spam harvesters. Admittedly, I have not heard of one single complaint from someone whose email address was harvested or abused because of showing up on our blog, but just the same I’d like people to be more comfortable with leaving comments.

Of course, if you don’t even want us to know who you are, that’s fine. Just enter in any bogus name or email address, and your anonymity will be protected. Well, mostly. We’ll still know your IP address.

Leave a comment on commenting. Go nuts!

Update I apologize to anyone who has been getting ‘forbidden’ messages when trying to post comments to our blog or any other blogs at prwdot.org. This was due to some weird problems with the cookies Movable Type sends, in combination with a security filtering rule on my web server. I’ve turned off this rule for the time being, so hopefully you won’t run into any more problems with this.

Migration

This evening, I completed the migration of all sites in the prwdot.org domain to a new hosting provider. For non-techies, all this means to you is that if you tried to access our site earlier tonight and got any error messages or saw broken image icons, that’s why. Everything should be back to normal now, but please do let me know if you see anything that seems to be broken.

If you’re interested in some technical details of this move, feel free to read on. Continue reading…