The problem is that WordPress interprets a comment that has two or more links in it as spam, even if that person was previously approved to post. That’s adjustable, but I just left it at the default two.
Firefox 5 warning. Normally, I am not ever the first to adopt a new version of anything, but a few days ago, I got a pop-up telling me a new update of Firefox was available. As usual, I was doing half-a-dozen different things at once, and without really thinking clearly, I said go ahead. Bad mistake. Absentmindedly, I thought I was already using Firefox 5, but in reality, I was still in a 4.x version. I should have refused the upgrade to 5.
At this very moment, I am composing this in Word, because if I start Firefox, it immediately begins thrashing the HD (the light never goes off for even an instant), the fan comes on high, and the computer slows to a crawl. FF-5 has been randomly crashing–and I mean it just dies suddenly with no warning and every Firefox window disappears–all together and instantly (I never had that problem with 4.x). A few minutes ago, it did it again. When I restart FF, the solid HD activity begins. I let it go on for several minutes, but I have to kill the process to make it stop with the HD and the high CPU usage. Not sure what to do, because every time I start it, it does that.
There are also some other unlikeable oddities that 5 has introduced that were not present in 4.x.
My advice is to stay away from Firefox 5 for the present. There are problems better left until they are fixed. That is aside from the fact that it seems like it was very recently that I just upgraded to 4.x–although I was not likely an early adopter of 4.
Early or late – The Firefox update cycle ran through level 4 in something like three months. I’m still on 3.6.18 – a very recent update, well after version 4 and I think well after version 5. I have an enormous and well-based prejudice against adopting anything until it’s been out and stable for at least 3 and maybe as much as 6 months, purely and simply because I used to do this stuff for a living. I’ve seen it from the inside looking out, and I’ve had to support it. I wouldn’t even approve anything for release in Australia until the pioneers in the USA had stopped sprouting the arrows in the back for three months, unless there was an urgent need the new stuff addressed. When the rush of patches had slowed to a trickle, then was soon enough.
I installed FF 5.0 and have had zero issues, other than they always mess with the menu bars. I LIKE the menu bar, and I’m NOT using a tablet, but a 23″ widescreen, and therefore have no need to save on screen space. Hell, I don’t even have the window expanded to fit the whole screen.
Why can’t they make two versions, one for the geek heads with the tiny screens, and one for regular people?
I converted to Firefox 5.0 as soon as it came out. Things have been running fine for me. I’ve only found one change, and it is one I really like. When I position the mouse cursor over the X of a tab, and click it to close the tab, the next tab to the right moves into EXACTLY the same place so the mouse cursor is again positioned over the X. Previously if I had a bunch of tabs removing one changed there size, and the position of the X. Now it will not resize any tabs until I move the mouse cursor. A small thing, but for me it saves me a constant annoyance.
However, around the same time I made the BIG mistake of upgrading the Adobe Acrobat reader to 10.0. This has been unstable inside Firefox, though it works well enough alone from what I have seen. Trying to save a pdf I am viewing within Firefox usually locks up the machine. My guess is because the Acrobat plugin always wants to access the Internet, and I always tell my firewall (Zone Alarm) to block it.
I probably would have just continued the old system, but that was impractical once Greg and Brian decided to get out of the hosting business. For ten years, I could just email them when there was a problem, and that problem went away. Without them, I didn’t want to have to try to maintain the forum software myself.
Yeah, I understand your desire to minimise your administrative load, but I wish it was possible to edit posts, quote others properly and have an integrated approach to user posts so I could easily catch up with just the new posts.
Apropos of nothing: I hate failing students. It’s time to grade exams and projects here – I’ve been at it for pretty much two weeks solid – and grading the bad ones is always a total downer. Of course, you can’t just let them float through – that’s not fair to the good students who do the work. Worst are the students who do try, but are simply not capable of passing no matter how hard they try.
I find that I don’t follow forums which don’t have the feature of remembering what posts I’ve already read. That includes most blog comment threads. This blog has an RSS feed for comments, which can be used, with a good RSS reader that remembers what I’ve read, to catch up on all the new comments people have posted on all posts (albeit out of order and out of context). But it only gives the last ten comments, so if there are more than ten new comments, the remainder are silently lost. This is probably a settable thing; I suggest that a hundred would be a better setting than ten.
The best system I’ve seen for having the computer remember what I’ve read is an entirely different system, the Climate Audit Assistant:
But as shipped, it won’t work with this website. That’s partly because this website isn’t on its list of sites to work with, but there may also be subtler issues.
FWIW, I use Google Reader for my RSS feeds. With the all items option set (shows unread in bold) my list for Comments for Daynotes Journal goes back to 3 July. My complaint is that the list seems to always be hours out of date, as in the last item listed for this discussion is the “When Murdoch and Brooks fall on their swords…” message above.
What feed URL are you using, Roy? Any way I retrieve the URL listed for “comments RSS” on the right column of this page, it gives me just ten comments. (But perhaps Google knows some WordPress secret sauce for getting more.)
That’s a link to Google Reader itself; I was wondering what link you gave Google Reader in order to subscribe to the comments feed for this website. (If you just clicked on that “comments RSS” link to subscribe, that tells me all I need to know.) I’ve never used Google Reader, but there should be some way of getting feed URLs out of it.
Sorry, I misunderstood what you are looking for. To the right of these messages, at the bottom of all the various stuff listed (but way at the top compared to this message) is a section titled Meta. Two of the links under that are Entries RSS and Comments RSS. The URLs of those links are the feeds for the blog entries and the comments, respectively. For the Comments that URL is http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/?feed=comments-rss2. I paste that into the Google Reader under the Add a Subscription option.
By the way, if you have a lot of subscriptions organizing Google Reader entries into categories is a really good idea. Highlight one specific subscription and you only see items for that subscription. Highlight a category and the list of items combines all the subscriptions under that category. Within categories it is easy to order the subscriptions so the more important ones are at the top. You can even order the categories any way you want.
Thanks. Yes, that’s the same feed URL that only gives ten entries. I’d wondered if Google Reader had some special way of getting more entries out of WordPress, but on reflection, it’s more likely that they’re simply caching the old entries. Google loves caching things, and in this case it would not only speed up their service but also would account for some of the delay you’ve observed (since they’d be going to their cache rather than to ttgnet.com).
The reader that I use, by the way, is a hacked version of RSSAggressor. The original is at:
It requires Perl, and a bunch of Perl modules from CPAN, so it’s not easy to install. But the mode of operation (where it churns for a while, then outputs a big HTML file containing all the new entries from all my feeds) is exactly what I want.
Can you put a link to Barbara’s journel page on your journel page, like the old system?
She’s already there, on the blogroll.
Sorry, I must have missed her name when I looked.
Wakeboarding Picture. Hope this one comes through as the last one did not using the A HREF tag.
Or maybe the HREF just does not work. If not here is the direct URL.
http://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/Wakeboarding/P7047552_1.jpg
The problem is that WordPress interprets a comment that has two or more links in it as spam, even if that person was previously approved to post. That’s adjustable, but I just left it at the default two.
Nice job, Ray!
Firefox 5 warning. Normally, I am not ever the first to adopt a new version of anything, but a few days ago, I got a pop-up telling me a new update of Firefox was available. As usual, I was doing half-a-dozen different things at once, and without really thinking clearly, I said go ahead. Bad mistake. Absentmindedly, I thought I was already using Firefox 5, but in reality, I was still in a 4.x version. I should have refused the upgrade to 5.
At this very moment, I am composing this in Word, because if I start Firefox, it immediately begins thrashing the HD (the light never goes off for even an instant), the fan comes on high, and the computer slows to a crawl. FF-5 has been randomly crashing–and I mean it just dies suddenly with no warning and every Firefox window disappears–all together and instantly (I never had that problem with 4.x). A few minutes ago, it did it again. When I restart FF, the solid HD activity begins. I let it go on for several minutes, but I have to kill the process to make it stop with the HD and the high CPU usage. Not sure what to do, because every time I start it, it does that.
There are also some other unlikeable oddities that 5 has introduced that were not present in 4.x.
My advice is to stay away from Firefox 5 for the present. There are problems better left until they are fixed. That is aside from the fact that it seems like it was very recently that I just upgraded to 4.x–although I was not likely an early adopter of 4.
Early or late – The Firefox update cycle ran through level 4 in something like three months. I’m still on 3.6.18 – a very recent update, well after version 4 and I think well after version 5. I have an enormous and well-based prejudice against adopting anything until it’s been out and stable for at least 3 and maybe as much as 6 months, purely and simply because I used to do this stuff for a living. I’ve seen it from the inside looking out, and I’ve had to support it. I wouldn’t even approve anything for release in Australia until the pioneers in the USA had stopped sprouting the arrows in the back for three months, unless there was an urgent need the new stuff addressed. When the rush of patches had slowed to a trickle, then was soon enough.
I installed FF 5.0 and have had zero issues, other than they always mess with the menu bars. I LIKE the menu bar, and I’m NOT using a tablet, but a 23″ widescreen, and therefore have no need to save on screen space. Hell, I don’t even have the window expanded to fit the whole screen.
Why can’t they make two versions, one for the geek heads with the tiny screens, and one for regular people?
I converted to Firefox 5.0 as soon as it came out. Things have been running fine for me. I’ve only found one change, and it is one I really like. When I position the mouse cursor over the X of a tab, and click it to close the tab, the next tab to the right moves into EXACTLY the same place so the mouse cursor is again positioned over the X. Previously if I had a bunch of tabs removing one changed there size, and the position of the X. Now it will not resize any tabs until I move the mouse cursor. A small thing, but for me it saves me a constant annoyance.
However, around the same time I made the BIG mistake of upgrading the Adobe Acrobat reader to 10.0. This has been unstable inside Firefox, though it works well enough alone from what I have seen. Trying to save a pdf I am viewing within Firefox usually locks up the machine. My guess is because the Acrobat plugin always wants to access the Internet, and I always tell my firewall (Zone Alarm) to block it.
Lets see if I can do a link correctly.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe%20Mode
Nope, that one is inside out.
Note: You can also start Firefox in Safe Mode by holding down the shift key while starting Firefox.
OK, I got it right that time. Perhaps that will help Chuck get past his busy disk problem.
Does this work?
http://forum.delorme.com/download/file.php?id=9456
I think the pre-WordPress system was vastly better, I don’t see the up side to WP at all.
I probably would have just continued the old system, but that was impractical once Greg and Brian decided to get out of the hosting business. For ten years, I could just email them when there was a problem, and that problem went away. Without them, I didn’t want to have to try to maintain the forum software myself.
Yeah, I understand your desire to minimise your administrative load, but I wish it was possible to edit posts, quote others properly and have an integrated approach to user posts so I could easily catch up with just the new posts.
Apropos of nothing: I hate failing students. It’s time to grade exams and projects here – I’ve been at it for pretty much two weeks solid – and grading the bad ones is always a total downer. Of course, you can’t just let them float through – that’s not fair to the good students who do the work. Worst are the students who do try, but are simply not capable of passing no matter how hard they try.
Miles_Teg loses one of his grinding axes. News of the World to close after this Sunday’s edition.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14070733
How do we insert hot links in this new-fangled doodad, anyway?
Apparently by pasting them into place! LOL!
When Murdoch and Brooks fall on their swords, literally, I’ll consider their transgressions repaid.
“News of the World to close after this Sunday’s edition.”
First the Weekly World News, and now this. What’s the world coming to?
Jim
who misses his Batboy avatar… 🙁
I find that I don’t follow forums which don’t have the feature of remembering what posts I’ve already read. That includes most blog comment threads. This blog has an RSS feed for comments, which can be used, with a good RSS reader that remembers what I’ve read, to catch up on all the new comments people have posted on all posts (albeit out of order and out of context). But it only gives the last ten comments, so if there are more than ten new comments, the remainder are silently lost. This is probably a settable thing; I suggest that a hundred would be a better setting than ten.
The best system I’ve seen for having the computer remember what I’ve read is an entirely different system, the Climate Audit Assistant:
http://climateaudit.org/ca-assistant/
But as shipped, it won’t work with this website. That’s partly because this website isn’t on its list of sites to work with, but there may also be subtler issues.
FWIW, I use Google Reader for my RSS feeds. With the all items option set (shows unread in bold) my list for Comments for Daynotes Journal goes back to 3 July. My complaint is that the list seems to always be hours out of date, as in the last item listed for this discussion is the “When Murdoch and Brooks fall on their swords…” message above.
What feed URL are you using, Roy? Any way I retrieve the URL listed for “comments RSS” on the right column of this page, it gives me just ten comments. (But perhaps Google knows some WordPress secret sauce for getting more.)
The URL is this one. (There is a 50% chance I formatted that correctly – still getting the hang of this system.)
Note that I have to be “logged in” to Google for it to work.
That’s a link to Google Reader itself; I was wondering what link you gave Google Reader in order to subscribe to the comments feed for this website. (If you just clicked on that “comments RSS” link to subscribe, that tells me all I need to know.) I’ve never used Google Reader, but there should be some way of getting feed URLs out of it.
Sorry, I misunderstood what you are looking for. To the right of these messages, at the bottom of all the various stuff listed (but way at the top compared to this message) is a section titled Meta. Two of the links under that are Entries RSS and Comments RSS. The URLs of those links are the feeds for the blog entries and the comments, respectively. For the Comments that URL is http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/?feed=comments-rss2. I paste that into the Google Reader under the Add a Subscription option.
By the way, if you have a lot of subscriptions organizing Google Reader entries into categories is a really good idea. Highlight one specific subscription and you only see items for that subscription. Highlight a category and the list of items combines all the subscriptions under that category. Within categories it is easy to order the subscriptions so the more important ones are at the top. You can even order the categories any way you want.
Thanks. Yes, that’s the same feed URL that only gives ten entries. I’d wondered if Google Reader had some special way of getting more entries out of WordPress, but on reflection, it’s more likely that they’re simply caching the old entries. Google loves caching things, and in this case it would not only speed up their service but also would account for some of the delay you’ve observed (since they’d be going to their cache rather than to ttgnet.com).
The reader that I use, by the way, is a hacked version of RSSAggressor. The original is at:
http://www.frox25.no-ip.org/~mtve/wiki/RssAgg.html
It requires Perl, and a bunch of Perl modules from CPAN, so it’s not easy to install. But the mode of operation (where it churns for a while, then outputs a big HTML file containing all the new entries from all my feeds) is exactly what I want.