Site improvement

Twitter

Wayne — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:21:41 -0400

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.

Just edit your account settings here on TuscanyCircle, and you'll see the Twitter configuration options. Yes, this means the Twitter interface is user-specific. Your own Twitter account is updated with your blog posts. (~~There is no TuscanyCircle-wide tweeting.~~ See here.)

By the way, the "Share" button below posts already supports Twitter if you like to tweet your favorite posts.

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New category for persecution

Wayne — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:26:10 -0400

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).

The creation of this new category reflects what I believe to be a significant devolution of our culture that decidedly puts Christians last. No longer are we a majority (by any reasonable measure). We're certainly not protected like all the other classes of people who are seemingly entitled to persecute us. We are fair game for all, even while we're denied the same privilege. We're insulted (in my case, by my own parents!). We're treated as intellectual inferiors (despite copious evidence to the contrary). We are indeed victims of evil.

Note, though, that this is not a celebration of our victimhood. We will not turn ourselves into a protected class (like blacks, Muslims, and sexual deviants). We will not pervert our values to protect ourselves. We will celebrate our Lord Jesus Christ at all times, including times of persecution. We will sing for joy even in times of trouble, for we know what lies in store for us. We may mourn the loss of our nation, our culture, and even our churches (the incorporated form) and we may still strive for political improvement (albeit futilely), but we will rejoice in יהוה (the LORD) forever!

When you blog about the persecution of the Lord's own, consider throwing in one or more of these elements:
- we're on God's side, making us right, and by His blood, righteous;
- we still revel in the Lord's grace and mercy, even in our trials;
- even persecutors may repent of their evil and enjoy everlasting life (e.g., Paul).

This can be a time of doubt and defeat, unless you keep your eyes on the King! Keep the faith, and even our public recognition of persecution of the faithful can be used to build up faith, our own and others'. As long as we have the ability to share righteousness online—Lord tarrying, such rights will not last—edify one another in our common Defense against evil.

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Abuse

Wayne — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:58:43 -0400

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.

I'm sure you saw the latest moron to have his comments deleted, because he chose to abuse TuscanyCircle rather than further a discussion, search for truth, or appeal to reason. His email address has also been banned, along with his entire ISP (the latter may be freed in time). I also have several other tools at my disposal to deal with abusers of TuscanyCircle (e.g., various levels of locking down the site). Would-be abusers should take note of just how much information can be gleaned from an IP address, an email address, and server logs. You are revealing more about yourself than you'd like to, if you're going to be an abuser. I am all too happy to defend this site and those who post here legitimately against the likes of you. If abuse gets out of hand, I have no problem defending my property rights face to face. Would-be abusers, consider yourself warned.

As for the rest of you, the legitimate participants, I hope my efforts to keep TuscanyCircle free of noise makes it a more valuable site to you. One of the tools you have at your disposal is the ability to flag content that qualifies as abusive. I'm not big into censoring, per se, so don't bother flagging stuff you find merely offensive (get over it). I've loosely defined abuse above, and if you believe posts are abusive, feel free to flag 'em. I'll review flagged content and take the necessary actions. On the other hand, if you'd like the chance to rail against stupid abusers (pardon the redundancy), let me know, and you can join in the fun of tearing them to shreds.

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Bad Bots

Wayne — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:44:54 -0400

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.

Many webmasters have allowed their automated traps, such as the one I just installed, to go ahead and block Yahoo. Why? Yahoo's bots hit the webmasters' sites up to 4 times more often than Google's bots, yet the traffic directed from Yahoo is about a tenth that of Google's. That makes Google about 40 times more effective/efficient than Yahoo.

I am also taking this tact. If Yahoo's abusive bots don't respect robots.txt, then they will be automatically blocked. My own logs indicate only a tiny amount of traffic sent from Yahoo—far too little to justify wasting any of my valuable effort. I won't miss them. Of course, if this means their site-search becomes less valuable, too, I'll just remove them from the list of engines (right-hand menu, just below the local site search).

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Dry Bones comic

Wayne — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:52:42 -0500

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!

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Email Notification

Wayne — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 14:52:51 -0500

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.

Email notifications do not scale well as the registered user base grows, meaning notifications can become a resource hog. RSS is preferred because of this. Also, RSS feeds can be customized nine ways to Sunday, whereas email notifications are very much out of users' control. However, as long as the list of users opting for email notification remains a manageable size, I'll keep this handy feature available.

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Logging into TuscanyCircle

Wayne — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:38:34 -0500

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.

Besides offering convenience, this option allows users to bypass purposely the secure log-in, if they desire. Reasons might include an avoidance of certificate warnings (if you don't know how to load CAcert's root certificate) or poor SSL support in their browser (e.g., some minimalist mobile browsers).

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God's Name

Wayne — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:26:39 -0500

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

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Limiting posts' scope

Wayne — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:32:50 -0400

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. You can use email notification, also available only to trusted users, to supplement your RSS feeds containing public posts.

The list of trusted users is maintained by yours truly. It's a small group of users who have enough of a history with me for me to trust them on TuscanyCircle--i.e., they won't abuse the site or teach errant doctrines without being open to instruction and/or correction (I don't want to lead people astray), etc. To be fair, some may be relative strangers to other trusted users, but it would be likewise in most any small group setting at church, say, in the beginning.

Holler with questions.

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Email Notification

Wayne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:10:20 -0400

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.

As email doesn't scale well, I'm not opening this up to all registered users (let alone anonymous ones) but am restricting it to trusted users. (If I set things up correctly, only trusted users should see this post, too.) This should keep the number of emailed users to a reasonable limit.

Unfortunately, you don't have nearly the flexibility you do with RSS. You cannot choose per-post or per-category notification, for example. It's all or nothing. You can choose posts and/or comments, though (no "shoutbox"). The emails will only contain the title and a link to the content.

Let me know if you have questions.

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