Announcements

Apologies

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The blog was down for a few hours as a result of a self-inflicted technical problem. Thank God I made a backup before I started monkeying around with those .pm files and whatnot.

Commenting Problems

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Just so that everyone knows:

-If you leave comments to posts on this blog, you may do so anonymously, though it would be nice if you used a consistent name or handle. You do not have to submit an email address or URL.

-We’re filtering comments through MT-Blacklist, which is excellent as filters go, but not perfect. Sometimes it blocks comment submissions for the wrong reasons — i.e., a word or word fragment in your name, email address, URL or comment-text matches an entry on the blacklist. If this happens to you and you can’t solve the problem on your own, please either email me or post a note in the comment thread where you have a problem.

-I’m going to try to install the “copy this number” anti-comment-spam system here. I hope that doing so will reduce the need for the filter and for putting every spam term I can think of on the blacklist, and thereby produce fewer problems for legitimate commenters.

-I may also publish our blacklist, to make it easier for commenters whose submissions are being blocked to figure out why.

-Suggestions are welcome! Thanks.

New Photos

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I posted a bunch of new pics over at my photoblog.

UPDATE: I think that while there are one or two winners in this batch of photos my October submissions were stronger. Also, looking back further, my earliest photo postings seem to have been even more frequently good (by my taste, anyway). I may have lowered my posting standards, but perhaps some of the earlier pics, having been already distilled by my repeated viewing and evaluation of several years’ accumulated photos, were indeed better. Some of the images that I posted recently are only days old, so it could be that I lack perspective to judge them accurately. It’s easy to fall in love with particular images, even mediocre ones, but with time it also becomes easier to winnow the wheat from the chaff. So the “photo of the day” concept doesn’t do much for me, but maybe the photoblog is a good way to organize work to see what stands the test of time. Maybe I should reorganize the blog around a gallery of favorites, kept regularly updated by going back over old work every X months and seeing which images still stand out.