A friend once complained to me, “I don’t understand it. My boss is a jerk. How come every single boss I’ve ever had has been a jerk. What have I done to work at so many jobs where the boss is a jerk?” He’d worked at a lot of jobs.
I’d met some of his bosses. They weren’t jerks. The trouble wasn’t with my friend’s bosses — the trouble was with my friend.
You see, I have this theory: if you find that people are saying the same thing about you over and over again, there’s probably a grain of truth to it. If your friends all think you’re bossy, maybe you’re bossy. If your family thinks you’re too competitive, maybe you’re too competitive. Or — to take an example from my own life — if people complain that you only see things in black-and-white, maybe you’re not doing a good job of conveying your ability to see shades of grey.
All this is just a long and drawn-out way to say: I hear you. When all of my readers are saying the same thing, how can I not?
The truth is, I like this layout, too. It feels like home. I’m not fond of the architecture behind the scenes, but I just spent the past eight hours performing renovations. I upgraded Moveable Type to the latest version. I installed new spam protection. (I haven’t received a single piece of spam since doing so. More precisely, I’ve received 55 pieces of spam in the past 9 hours and 21 minutes, but the spamfilter has caught them all, even the goddamn Tramadol ads!) I took the time to funnel every single feed through Feedburner. (I think. If you read via feed and you’re not being routed to Feedburner, please let me know. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just ignore this.)
I even spent a couple hours creating a new front page. I think it’s pretty nifty. (I haven’t tested it on Windows yet. If you see anything obviously broken, please let me know ASAP.)
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it. It helped me see the clear direction I needed to take.
Now I’ll see what I can do about adding more content to the site! (Starting with the flotch. It’s back!) One thing you’re going to see, though, are parallel postings. That is, I may post something at both Get Rich Slowly and foldedspace. Or at both Animal Intelligence and foldedspace. The stuff I parallel post will be “best of entries” of which I am particularly proud. It’ll save me a little effort and give you more to read!
I would like to point out that I’ve also updated the Flickr photos for the first time since the 6th of September. Actually, they’re both photos from Tiffany, but still. It’s a start. And I updated the “on this day” for the first time in months. (Man, isn’t that a slog?)
Ah, I think I’ll just put my feet up and sit a spell. I thought this old place was going to be torn down. Now go get some wood for the fire and bring me a book from your library while you’re at it.
Theres no place like home.
[Editorial space added because URLs still break the sidebar. Need to fix that.]
I’m subscribed to
http://www.foldedspace.org/feed/
and it appears to be working fine. Thanks for resuscitating the Flotch!
When you started your post today I thought you were going to say that your readers were your bosses and that we are a bunch of jerks!
Really happy to see the flotch again.
Well, all of the feed URLs embedded in the HTML for FoldedSpace are not going through FeedBurner. This probably explains Bill Hooker’s experience above. I don’t know if you want to change the tags to point to FeedBurner, or what. (Those tags are what Safari keys off of for the RSS icon in its address bar, BTW, so anyone using Safari RSS is likely to be routed to the feed directly, rather than to FeedBurner.)
So what’s the advantage of going through FeedBurner rather than having your own feed?
There seems to be some layout problems with IE 6.
I am glad to see the old site back.
Here’s how bad the spam problem was:
In the past 26 hours, I have received 350 pieces of comment spam. All of them were caught by the new spam filters.
In the 26 hour prior to that, we can assume that I received about the same number of spam messages. But a full 10% (36 total) made it through the filters, and had to be removed by hand. That might not seem like a lot, but it drags the soul into the mud. It really does.
It’s been about a year since the old Moveable Type install crashed and I started over with this one. In that time a total of 18,968 pieces of spam were caught by the filter. I’d say about 10% more (roughly 2,000 messages) made it through, and had to be removed by hand.
Yay! for the new spamfilter.
I like the new front page! I might even remember to check the Animal Intelligence blog once in a while. Since I’m usually only reading along here parallel postings don’t trouble me in the least. Heh.
My deep sympathies on the spam. While my own blog comments are pretty free of spam for the time being, my e-mail is a pile of spam all the time. I have a spam folder with 12,000 messages in it and those are just the ones that made it past the filters to be delivered. I’ve got my spam filters set so tight that sometimes replies to e-mail I’ve sent or other legit e-mail gets caught as “spam” but if I let up even a little bit the flood begins again. Even with that I still hand-remove mass emails and other unwanted communications that don’t strictly count as spam every day, eating up hours a week of time. Glad to hear your new spam filter is working!