Saturday Progress Report, 2026-05-13

Patient readers, please report bugs, ask for improvements, and share ideas. You can comment here, or use the contact form on the main menu.

(1) Fixed “More…” link in Text column of the “My Comments” table on the My Accounts page so that it is clickable (and goes to your comment). Same for the Subject Line. Hat tip: Alert reader Intro Vert. More like this please.

(2) Installed Akismet,” the same spam blocker that WordPress uses. Formatted two small reports Akismet places beneath the comments it scans to conform to house style on tables.

(3) Wrestled with Cron, the (linux) server’s job scheduler, which does a lot of useful stuff like clearing caches and printing logs. Cron also causes posts to be scheduled at set times, one hopes (see the “Daily Schedule” in the sidebar). However, getting this to work has seems harder than it should have been.

NOTE The About page on the blog lists all of these tasks, and is a good place go to look for site functionality that may not be obvious at first sight (e.g., automagically linked Bible verse citations). There are rather a lot of such tasks, since I wish you, dear readers to have whatever the equivalent of bells and whistles might be for comfort, but also becaue Drupal is a complex best.

(4) Alert reader ChiGal sends the following screenshot, which looks like a chunk of Water Cooler gone very wrong on a mobile phone. I have never seen this. Readers, have you?

(The black arrows at bottom right take you to the top (or bottom) of the page, to avoid scrolling.)

(5) As far as my own work, I’m still getting my head back into the flow of things. (I don’t want to be driven by the news flow, since I value my health and in fact don’t want to a slave to anything, but nonetheless I must pay attention.) I must also become (dread word) more efficient, to get as much done as possible before the Golden Hour, and then have the evening free, when bon bons and peeled grapes will be brought to me, etc. This is happening, and it’s part of the editorial design of both Words of the Day and Water Cooler that it should happen. (I’m happy with Words of the Day. It’s fun and different to write, and I hope it’s fun and different to read. Do feel free to improve my discernment by suggesting words I should be curating!) As these two aggregation posts take less time, that opens up my capacity for posting. This too is happening, although not as rapidly as I would like.

(6) With both CloudFlare and Akisment protecting the site, I’m starting to feel that we can think about opening up registration and commenting more than we have done during this shakedown period. (I was very nervous about being swarmed by bots). We The Administrators still have various moderation functions to perfect, but these are in the works. When we open the blog up, there will be an announcement. In the meantime, please read, enjoy, and comment. Also, I need Plantidotes!

UPDATE

(7) I forgot to add this point, which shows you where it is in my priorities: The “★ Donate” page (top menu) is totally not ready for prime time. Ultimately, even though PayPal embed code is, to me, a ticking package, I will get it straightened out, but for now, “Post! Post! Post!”, developing an oeuvre such that any new user could spend a pleasurable hour here without runnning out of stuff to read, is the most important thing. Then comes administration….

(8) And of course getting SOLR running as the back-end for search (improving both speed and functionality). I’ll be writing that up as the second post on my interactions with artificial intelligence. Since this is likely to take a day, I need to clear the decks before doing it, hence the low priority.