I find Twitter to be utterly inane, worse than social networking. However, a growing number of people are relying upon Twitter for site updates. Used this way, it could be considered an ignorant man's RSS. To this end, TuscanyCircle now has a way to interface to your Twitter account. When you create a new post (not comments), your Twitter account can be updated to include your post's title and URL. » read more »

I just added a new category to be used in posts: Persecution. This category applies when the topic is the persecution of believers, of the church, or of the true faith. This is not about persecution in general, mind you, but of how true disciples of the Lord are prejudged, hunted, killed, prosecuted, or otherwise injured by God-haters. Such evil sources of persecution may include governments, other [wrong] religions or sects, individuals, and even stupid atheists (pardon the redundancy). » read more »

TuscanyCircle endures its share of would-be spammers, mostly automated. Hundreds and even thousands are stopped daily by layers of security I have in place. The real problem isn't the spambots, but the moronic crack-pots who have some imaginary bone to pick. These are real people—barely, intellectually speaking—and not bots. Many are stopped because they don't provide a valid email address (required, but not shown, even for anonymous comments). Others simply have their comments deleted. A few I will let through once, as their idiocy speaks for itself. When such idiocy becomes a pattern, though, it becomes abuse and will not be tolerated one iota here. » read more »

I added a trap on TuscanyCircle for bots (e.g., spambots) that don't respect robots.txt. Yahoo's Slurp (a webcrawler used by the Yahoo search engine) hit the trap within five minutes! Apparently, Yahoo is very abusive to websites. They have numerous bots, under many user agent names, crawling the same sites redundantly, eating up valuable bandwidth. Yahoo servers should be sharing the once-crawled info among themselves, but they don't. » read more »

I hope you'll check out the new Dry Bones added to the TuscanyCircle's Links block (on the right). I've read Dry Bones for quite a while, but it's been so poignant and true, I thought it worthy to recommend to all to read. Enjoy!

Long ago, TuscanyCircle email notification was removed due to numerous bugs. A while ago, it was restored--after being significantly improved--for trusted users. Now, it's being made available to all registered users again. Go to "account", then "my notify settings".

Email notifications are sent out when new posts are published and when new or edited comments are published. The notifications have just the title and a link to the new content. » read more »

When you go to a TuscanyCircle page for which you're not authorized (when you're not logged in yet), you'll be presented with a log-in form. This is for your convenience. However, note that this is not a secure log-in form (no SSL, not HTTPS). This means, in theory even if unlikely, your password could be intercepted. If you want to use a secure log-in form, use the regular one in the left-hand menu. » read more »

If you want to use the Lord's name in Hebrew in a blog or comment on TuscanyCircle, just use the name Yehovah. It will be replaced with the Tetragrammaton. It looks like this: יהוה

If you want to limit the scope of your posts to just trusted members of TuscanyCircle, select the category named "Trusted" when you create the post. Make sure this it the only category you choose (because everybody can see all the other categories and they're ORed). For example, if you wish to discuss something of a somewhat personal nature, this would keep the post (and its comments) out of RSS feeds and search engines, and off the website unless the reader is logged in and trusted user. » read more »

After some extensive work on the Notify module of TuscanyCircle, and after its long absence, I've re-enabled email notifications for trusted users. If you go into your account (click "account" on the top-center menu), you should see a tab for "my notify settings" or something like that. You can choose to enable or disable notifications as well as include new posts and/or new comments. » read more »