It took a little longer than I said. A month as opposed to a weekend. However, a cursory look suggests everything was backed up and has been returned. (I know there are posts with broken images; that was the case beforehand.) Feel free to leave comments, and hopefully I will find some time to write some posts. (And to add a little pizzazz to the design)

Correction: everything ended up getting backed up except one thing. Every single comment ever left by any of my readers, or by myself. Now it looks like I’ve been blogging since 2002 without any interaction with my readers. At least one of my readers left a word-count roughly equivalent to a novel in my comments. I think I have some older backups before the comments went screwy, and I might be able to restore some of those.

Update: I found a backup containing comments that was 18 months old. I think that’s pretty good, especially considering how lightly I’ve used this blog in the past 18 months. I am pleased that the WordPress importer recognized that all the posts were duplicates, but still imported the comments.  (pats WordPress on the head.)

If anyone came to this blog Tuesday or Wednesday they may have seen that the blog was down. Large amounts of ‘attempted spam’ caused the host to first suspend the account, and after my request, unsuspend the account and just block the blog’s subdirectory until I got things fixed.

Since the spam was only attempted spam, I wasn’t aware of  it, but it was still causing a drain on the host’s resources. So I have installed a CAPTCHA. It’s not one of those difficult to read series of letters and numbers, but a mathematical equation you have to solve. Don’t worry, so far the math problems I’ve seen are rather simple, and I think you can handle it.  (For example:  3 + _ = 8.) Would you know what number to type?

Downside: you might not be able to comment after a few beers…but that might be best for all concerned anyway.

In testing the CAPTCHA it came to my attention that while the CAPTCHA works fine, the comments weren’t working. I can’t even view the comments in old posts that I know have them.

No one left me any comments to tell me the comments weren’t working!!!

This weekend I am going to backup my  blog, delete this WordPress installation, reinstall WordPress, and upload my backup. I am hopeful this will solve everything.

I have just finished updating the Biography page on this blog to include a few recent events, and links to my social networking pages.  I have also added a Bibliography page with an extensive number of links to poetry and fiction still available to be read online. Some may notice that there are some published writings of mine that aren’t listed. You are welcome to point this out to me, but there’s a chance the omission is intentional.

I also updated the Disambiguation page.

As should be obvious to anyone who looks at the blog, there have been some changes.

1. I’ve upgraded to the newest version of WordPress.  It’s been awhile since my last upgrade, so it was time.
2. I also changed the theme, and even changed the title of the blog.  Comments welcome.
3. Unfortunately, in the upgrade process, while it appears I successfully retained every post, it also appears I lost all the category tags.
4. The administrative interface is aware of what all the categories are, but none of the posts are tagged with any of them.
5. So some weekend when I am completely bored with nothing to do I’ll start reading old posts and tagging them.
6. I’ve only been blogging since 2002, that won’t take too long.

A month ago, this blog turned 9. In those 9 years, the blog has changed names, and addresses, but all the posts are in the archives, so I am calling it 9 years.

Here’s a poem I wrote 9 years ago: Self-Image

Next year, I will try not to be late for my tenth anniversary.