FAQ

Here are some helpful bits of information concerning this blog. I’ll add to it as the need arises.

  1. How can I get notified when you post something new? How does this email subscription work?
    There’s a field on the right hand side of every page on this blog where you can enter your email address to subscribe. If you do this, you will first get a confirmation email (to verify it was really you who subscribed). From then on, you’ll get a quick email any time I post something new. That way, you don’t have to remember to keep checking back here. Like magic!
  2. How come when I leave a comment, I don’t see it right away?
    This is because I have to approve the first comment left by any given email address.  It’s to help prevent spam and people posting comments that are just garbage.  Once I’ve approved one comment from your email address, it should automatically approve all of your future comments.  So that delay should only happen the very first time you ever post a comment here.
  3. How can I get a cool little icon by my name when I comment, instead of that generic one?
    In order to do that, you just have to register at Gravatar.  It’s free of course.  It’s a site that’s integrated with many other blog sites.  Basically you register your email address there and upload a picture for your icon.  Then any time you post a comment on a participating blog (like mine) where you have to enter your email address when you comment, the blog will automatically look you up on Gravatar and use your current icon.  Hope that made some sense?
  4. What about all those “converted” MySpace blogs I see up until January 2010?
    When I first started blogging back in 2004, it was on MySpace.  I didn’t give much thought to it at the time.  I didn’t expect it to turn into a journal of sorts for me, the kind of thing I’d actually want to preserve.  Eventually I started to realize that not only could (and did!) MySpace’s admins delete anything they wanted to, but also MySpace was slowly dying.  Out of fear that my “journal” would be destroyed, I started saving off all of those old blog entries, comments and all, just trying to preserve them in some safe form on my local hard drive.  But they weren’t doing anyone any good there.  So I decided to manually “convert” them and put them here on my current blog, where they are safe and under my sole control, indefinitely. It wasn’t easy though.  It’s been a process of copying over the content, embedded pictures/videos, formatting, and comments… all one by one.  They’ve all been put in the “MySpace Archive” category.  I started the archiving process in December 2010, and as of February 2014 it is finally done!  There were limitations, however:
    • I’ve recreated reader comments where possible, using the screennames they had at the time I made a local copy of the entry.  Sadly, when someone deletes their MySpace profile, all their comments on all blogs — as well as anyone’s responses to those comments(!) — are lost forever.  So in that regard, I wasn’t able to preserve everything.
    • I’ve done my best to use historically accurate dates and times for entries and comments.  At times though, MySpace would publish comments with the date/time that I approved them rather than the time they were submitted.  So who knows how accurate some of those timestamps are.
    • At some point, MySpace changed their format and comment timestamps started displaying as like “11 months ago” instead of the actual date and time of the comment.  So some of the later archived entries will lack that detail because I didn’t get around to copying them before the switch.
    • At some point, MySpace seems to have started truncating long comments, though I’m not sure if the problem was with what MySpace displays or with how I was saving my local copy.
    • In later versions of WordPress, the Amazon Machine Tags plugin I was using (to replace what MySpace used to show as “What I’m Currently Listening To” or “What I’m Reading/Watching”) stopped working altogether.  I’ve still captured that information, so if that plugin ever gets updated, the CDs and books I tagged on those old posts should miraculously appear again.  But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
  5. Why are some posts password protected?  How can I read them?
    There aren’t many that I have bothered to “protect.”  Once in a great while I write about something personal or controversial enough that only my friends ought to be seeing it.  Often this corresponds to posts I had visible to “friends only” back in the MySpace days.  Don’t worry, it’s probably nothing too juicy.  But if you’re just dying to read one, let me know, and I’ll give you the password.