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We're in the middle of an upgrade

I've upgraded the site to the latest Drupal. If you come on over and look around, you will find some new interesting features. I still have a lot to do, but just wanted to put it out there for you to try and see if you figure out what's new. Also, I am going to change the design a bit. I am adding a fourth colum to the left and pulling to the front all the blogging tools you have tucked away and in your account pages. It's been very confusing to people how to post articles and were to find their blogging tools. Well, with the new collapsible blocks (oops, gave away one of the new features), we'll be able to have more stuff in the front but without the clutter. So let's make this a forum of wishlists. What do you wish for? BTW : I had to flush the cache and the logs to do this upgrade. You will notice it says there's only a few people online. That should be corrected in the next couple of hours. Also, apologies for any inconvenience the dumping of the logs and cache (and maybe anything you were writing at the time) may have caused to any of you.


liza's picture
Submitted by liza on 26 September 2006 - 6:10pm.
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About the site problems

The guys at Webair have been working to get the sites upgraded, the databases optimized but, most importantly, to stop the attacks on my server. 

I get way too many random attacks from spammers, scrappers and other web vermin who deserve to die slow and painful deaths. Hope their testicles and/or ovaries shrivel to the sizes of raisins.

The good news is that we should have the upgrades done by the beginning of November.


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Submitted by liza on 23 October 2008 - 2:42am.
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We're Busy Fixing The Site

There's going to be a lot of noise here in the next week to ten days. We're doing some major repairs and upgrades on the site that will fix the comment and posting problems we've been having in the last month.

And with that, I leave you with a time-lapse video of a construction site of 1 Bryant Park, on 4nd Street and Sixth Avenue.

Enjoy.


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Submitted by liza on 28 April 2008 - 10:40am.
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Anonymous comments are now unmoderated

Four years ago culturekitchen became one of the first blogs to come under attack by spammers, especially pornography spammers. You don't know what rape looks like on a blog until you have had your webhosts server taken down in a denial-of-service style spam comment attack with over 25,000 comment entries with the word rape in them.

That happened to me four years with our old web host company and it's the reason I launched into a world-wide-web search for the best blog platform that could curtail these attacks. I found that platform to be the one I am using now, Drupal. Yet even in a slow day I would still have to delete by hand hundreds of comments spams out of the daily 2-5K we are still getting.

Not anymore ... or so it seems.


New Comments System with Captcha Module

I took Laura Scott's advice to heart and installed a contact and comment entry form confirmation system. It seems to have done the trick.

Now anonymous comments will not only be asked to provide an email (which will remain encrypted and anonymous). You will also be asked to confirm the comment with a special code number provided.

If all goes well, I'll leave comments opened like this as a policy ---yet, remember, the Editorial Team always reserves the right to delete any and all comments we deem unsuitable for not just the discussion but the site as well.


liza's picture
Submitted by liza on 5 June 2007 - 10:49am.
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Flipping the switch on a new site design

This email was sent to users with the following roles: member

 

So what's new?

I switched the navigation and blogging tools menus to the top of the sidebar on the left. Since they are collapsible, you can just open and close them as you need.

Hate it? Love it? I want to know it all.

Before you go on hating though, I want you all to know that this was more than just an exercise in designing a Drupal site. I am trying to find add more space to make more visible the work and interaction of regular members. I want to find ways of making visible the way people interact in the site --so it's not just the front-pagers who get featured and highlighted.  

Here's what I feel about it at the moment: It's busy. I do like the new molotov-guy design. I do think that the actual logo (the word culturekitchen) could be much, much smaller.

What do you think?

 


liza's picture
Submitted by liza on 23 October 2006 - 1:52pm.
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Features galore that just need testing

Come out, come out wherever you are...

I'm not asking you to come out of the closet :lol: I'm asking you to come and play on the site --especially if you are one of the thousands of people reading us through our feeds.

In the past few weeks I have been working on the technology and design of culturekitchen. Check out our growing list of features. I actually have a longer post to make about what I am rolling out this weekend; but right now I need your help with two things :


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Submitted by liza on 19 October 2006 - 10:06am.
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Cautiously optimistic

The good news is, the site is back up. The bad news is, we still have not gotten the new server. Hopefully the transition will go smoothly and the added RAM will have this site hopping.

Hopefully.

Loading times in Firefox on my Powerbook G4 are still slowish. If you have slower machines, can you tell me how bad it is on your end? Safari seems to be the only browser to load with no problems ... although the site looks a bit funky in it.

The image galleries are all out of whack. I will be working on them throughout the weekend. This would be a good time to contribute to my caffeine, acetominophen and Snickers fund.

The real bad news is that I tore down the site I had built using CivicSpace to rebuild it using my own Drupal mix. Pitty. I had real high hopes for CivicSpace. It really is not ready for a consumer market.


liza's picture
Submitted by liza on 31 March 2006 - 9:22am.
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Blogging made easier with a bit of code

What is a blogging bookmarklet? It is a piece of code you put on the bookmarks or favorites toolbar of your browser. When you want to grab a quote fromm an article on the net, all you have to do is :

(1) highlight the text
(2) click on the bookmarklet

What the javacript in the code will do is pull-out the text highlighted text as a blockquote with a link back to the page; including the title of the article (if it is available on the page's source code).

So take this culturekitchen Blog It! bookmarklet and drop it in your Safari or Firefox browser.

If you have a bit of a problem dropping it in, you can manually create a bookmark in both browsers by dropping the code in the URL section of a bookmark.