Petestack Blog

[Update: 19 May 2016]
Have to say some of what’s below already smacks slightly of ‘false dawn’, but hopefully cracked it now through a combination of further reading, real-life phone feedback/screenshots and Chrome Developer Tools as apparently the only mobile phone emulator I can trust. So now we’ve got the meta viewport tag, HTML5 replacing XHTML everywhere except the blog (apparently some work to do on validation there), some more thoughtfully-tweaked ‘break points’ in line with what I’ve learned and seen, and things looking/working much better? (more…)

Last month (with many blog posts being filed under multiple categories and WordPress seemingly no longer respecting my chosen ‘main’ category for the post URL) I decided to take the category name out of my custom ‘permalink’ structure to change it from ‘https://www.petestack.com/blog/category/postname.html’ to ‘https://www.petestack.com/blog/postname.html’. Which would have been fine if that’s what I’d actually done, but I stupidly just selected the similar standard WordPress ‘post name’ structure assuming that’s what it did and landed myself with ‘https://www.petestack.com/blog/postname/’ (see the difference?) instead… (more…)

So what do you do after 134 emails with the subject line [Petestack Blog] Please moderate: “February blog post”, not a legitimate comment among them and similar (if not always quite so drastic) spam-to-genuine comment ratios for most posts over the three-year history of the blog so far?

Try installing Spam Free WordPress (a CAPTCHA-free ‘comment spam blocking plugin that blocks 100% of the automated spam with zero false positives’), post something new to attract the bots, sit back and hope (might even be able to relax my 28-day comment ‘window’ if it works!)…

:-/

While the discussion settings (those relating to posting comments) for this blog were set up with pretty tight spam controls and I’m still deleting enough rubbish from the moderation queue to be cagey about opening things up too much, it’s a pity that my original 14 day comment window was too severe to let Richie comment this morning on my recent ‘running books’ post. So I’ve doubled the allowable window to 28 days (might yet increase that further, but not keen to encourage comments on ancient posts!) and am also now allowing comments from authors with previously approved comments to go straight through without being held for moderation.

Now let’s see how things go. :-)

I guess you’ve found my blog. And, if it’s still 25 February, it didn’t take you long!

Got this thing set up yesterday, linked into the site today, and now just waiting for everyone to discover it…

Nothing else to say right now, so leaving it at that for tonight. :-)

And does it do what it says on the tin?

Well, it’s a blog, and to me that means a place for quick reporting of things that don’t necessarily merit a full webpage of their own. It’s not going to be a daily, blow-by-blow account of everything I say or do, but I’m still expecting to keep something a little closer to a diary of my various activities than the very selective write-ups I’ve done for the site in the past. And, while I toyed briefly with the idea of it taking over the role of my existing What’s New? page, it’s purposely been kept separate from the main site structure so I’ve always got the option of ditching it later (consigned, like the old ‘Flypaper’ forum, to oblivion?) without rocking the whole boat!

Anyway, I’ve started it with the intention of using it, so please do check in from time to time to see what I’ve been doing (or feel like telling the world about), leave me a comment if you like (NB admin approval currently required before publication) and we’ll see how it goes…