Administrivia

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.

I don't know why they are broken, but we're looking into it.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you are reading this through RSS because you can't get to our site, please don't take it personally. We are under attack by some really bad, bad spammers and site scrappers (at least that's what it looks like at the moment).

I don't know how long this is going to last, but we're working on it.

Welcome to the new culturekitchen WIKI. What is a |wiki? Glad you asked :

A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". One of the best-known wikis is Wikipedia.

I have to run out the door, but wanted to give the heads up to our RSS junkies that culturekitchen has a new design --and one that now puts it in line with her sister sites.

Comments?

Questions?

Concerns?

Just leave them in the comments.

What!?!? You're getting rid of your blogroll?

Not so fast, no.

We are getting rid of the static blogroll in order to introduce not one, nor two but three directories of links.

1. Recommended stories

We will have a reincarnation of my long lost sideblog. If you go to the old culturekitchen home page, you will notice a sidebar with short blog posts. The sidebar is not coming back per se, but I can't wait to go back to pointing to you the good, the bad and the ugly I stumble across during my daily perusing of the net. These new posts will be now all indexed in a "recommended storylinks" page.

2. Recommeded blogs

We also have the recommended links directory back. Almost a year ago I started writing short reviews of the blogs I enjoy. If you go in a little while (I am still re-indexing the links) to the weblinks directory, you will see the thousands of hits I have sent the way of blogs like Republic of T or Women of Color Blog. It took me almost six months to rebuild the directory, but finally I can resume my blog reviews.

3. Links Directory

In order to maintain our mission to promote other bloggers and to create a strong networking relationship with our peers, I am happy to announce that culturekitchen will not have a static blogroll anymore. In its place we are creating a directory of links to the different blogospheres we belong, as well as including a list of resources and other important places on the web. And for this part of our networking puzzle, anybody who is a registered member of our site will be able to suggest a link for inclusion in our directory.

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.

¡En español, carajo!

I am happy to announce that finalmente, I have created the best possible grammar UI (user-interace) that will make it easy to use accented charactes in Español, Português and other romance languages.

Accents are not easy to introduce in a blog post. You need to know how to convert them to HTML (or also called "Ampersand") characters. I have customized the editing toolbar to include all the accents, as well as the cent and Spanish exclamation and question characters.

Just click on the Help button and you'll see the complete selection explained :

How do you use it?
To create the HTML version [ español ] of the word español, all you have to do is write the word espanol, highlight the letter "n" and then click on the tilde ( ~ ). When you publish, the character will appear correctly interpreted.

Nezua has identified a problem with accessing [workspace|workspace]. There also seems to be a problem with the drop-down menus.

Just wanted you to know I'm looking into it. I've been doing development work, which is why I have not been blogging for a while. Coding consumes every waking moment whenever I plunge into it, but it's for a good reason.

If you want to know what's coming to our site, you may want to take a look at Hollywoodistas.com. With my new template and Michael's new design, we're looking to deal with usability issues with the new design. I'll have a longer post on the new design.

In the meantime, please use this post to let me know what other problems you've had with the site, any ideas on how to make it better and, last but not least, throw a praise or two my way. After all this development work, I always need a hug

Another way to promote yourself and your blog is to write a short blurb at the end of each comment you post.

Spammers know this and that's why this blog has been under attack from them for years. What they don't know is that we have instituted a site-wide NOFOLLOW rule for all of our comments. What does it mean?

We get about 2000 comment spams a day. On a slow day. Many unethical SEO companies try to embed links in our blogs so they can poach and use for their splogs our reputation and high-ranking in search engines like Google.

So, I have taken the drastic measure to block all search engine traffic from our comments section. ALL OF IT. This means you will not get any search engine benefits from links in our comments, but you will get whatever traffic is generated when someone clicks on a link to your organization or blog.

With that clarified, let's get into the nitty gritty of creating a comments footer. We have added an entry form in your account settings to simplify the process.

How to update your Comments Settings

1. On the left-side of the blog you will see a box with your name. That's your navigation block.

Click on "My Account" to go to your profile page.

Membership at culturekitchen has its privileges. One of them is being a member of a blog that, as someone told me recently, "scares people because it's so brainy".

Yah.

We are the thinking woman's (and man's) blog. Welcome to the thinkidrome.

Heh.

I owe the blogs hard thinkitude to my sluttish attraction to good writing. I have always made it a point to drag into this here blog the bloggers I love to read elsewhere.

Call it blogmiscuity, but it works.

A good way to promote yourself and your blog is by writing a short bio at the end of each article or post you write. We have added an entry form in your account settings to simplify the process. Once you fill it out, it will automatically update all your posts (even previously published ones) with your new mini-bio and information.

How to update your Author Box

1. On the left-side of the blog you will see a box with your name. That's your navigation block.

Click on "My Account" to go to your profile page.

2. Once on your profile page, click on the "Edit" tab to change your profile settings.

3. Scroll down the page until you find a closed tab that reads "Additional user info". Click on the little triangle or the words to open it.

4. Once opened, write in a one-line bio --please keep HTML to a bare minimum. If you don't, we reserve the right to edit and/or remove this feature from your membership privileges.

Slowly but surely I am updating the editorial and style guidelines. This section on style is still in progress, but please take a look at it.

When you write a comment, start a forum topic or submit an article at culturekitchen, you are not just contributing your writing. You are also taking part in the publishing process.

In this book you will find the dos and donts of prettifying your work.

Wow! The forums are starting to get h-o-t. Check out what's happening over there, will ya!

Have you noticed the new design?

I debugged the modderfrugger for Internet Explorer. So you better tell me it's working on that craptastic turd of a web browser Bill Gates has brainwashed you into using. 'Cause if it's not, I am going to have to bitchslap you into using Firefox or buying a Powerbook so you can switch to Safari.

Bow to the BlogDiva, bitches. Bow to the blog diva.

Last week was one of the most intensely intellectual and emotional weeks I've had so far this year. It was a great week for exchanging great ideas with some of the most interesting net evangelists doing advocacy work in the United States.

Whether it was talking about impeachment in Philadelphia, describing the state of the feminist blogosphere in Barnard University, inspiring ethnic media publishers and policy advocated to turn to the blogosphere or brainstorming with the political technorati at Rootscamp; it all has been incredibly good and intellectually stimulating.

Yet this week was also marked by the emotional jolt of Lorraine's loss. The death of her boyfriend has been so overwhelming to me that I haven't been able to read her posts about it.

It's the first week though that, due to all the traveling I had to do, I really reckoned with the reality that my kids are better off now in school than with me homeschooling. I have been in denial since September about them being in school and I am just starting to grieve our separation.

So, why am I writing this? Well, I almost never get to write anything personal these days. At least that's how I feel. But also, I wanted to talk about what I do when I'm overwhelmed and grieving : I use cooking and web design to do what some people describe as work meditation, when others talk about active meditation.

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

Just a quick heads up.

Thanks to Mary Hunt and everybody else who let me know about the design problems in Internet Explorer and it's satanic-spawn, the AOL browser. I've switched back to the old design. If you are a Firefox user and want to switch back to the new-yet-undebugged version, rea this post. It also has information on how to contribute to our site by switching to Firefox.

The second request is a bit more involved. I urge you to watch Hacking Democracy on our site and invite others to do so as well. Use the send button at the bottom of the post, to spread the word about Diebold's voting machines.

People need to be ready to fight for their vote not after but BEFORE they go to the polls.

That's it, at least for now

I switched to the old design for the sake of all the AOL and IE users who insist on not using Firefox. You unfortunately are in a majority of visitors to this site.

Please, please, please switch to Firefox for momma's sake.

Look at it as a donation to our site : For every Microsoft IE user that switches to Firefox through our button, we get one $1 from Google.

That's right people. Leave that horrible, non-standards complaint browser, and you'll help pay for our work in the process.

If you are a Firefox or Safari user and want to use the new design, go to your account and switch to template culturekitchen_red.2.

How do you switch to a different design? Go to this forum topic to find out.

And as before, if you would like to follow my web design process, you can switch to culturekitchen_red.3 (especially for those who are using the the evil empire's browser.

Thanks for everybody who has alerted me of the problem reading this site on those incredibly crappy IE and AOL browsers. I am working on fixing the problem.

In the meantime, though, would you consider please, please pretty please, switching to Firefox?

Thanks. You're just peaches.

UPDATE!
I'll leave this post on the top of the site until we deal with all you IE users. Unfortunately, the solution is more complicated than what I had thought at first.

Earn your webangel wings. Switch to Firefox.

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?

1. Go to your home page
2. Click on edit
3. Scroll down to find the Theme Configuration.
4. Click on culturekitchen_red.2

This is the design I am working on at the moment. Please note that it is far from finished; but if you want to see what I am obsessed with at the moment, you can switch to this design and see it change right before your very eyes. If all the changes make you crazy, then switch back to the original (which is culturekitchen_red).

Use this post to log your questions or comments on the new design. All imput and opinions are most certainly welcomed.

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 :

I have not ignored all the people who have asked me to comment on the Clinton-Bloggers Harlem fiasco. I have been doing an awful lot of commenting across blogs and responding to emails. Ironically, it's been a socially intense two weeks. For those who thought a digitally lynching would make me disappear ... heh. Sorry.

There's a lot of good stuff written out there. I want to highlight Sunrunner's awesome, "Jane Hamsher: The Left's Answer to Ann Coulter?". All throughout those posts you will find really awesome comments by kid oakland, Jeffrey Feldman, Donna, not your standard poodle (oh how I love that sig!), MBW, Nannette, belledame222 and Kai. There's lots of other people and apologies if I didn't highlight everybody, but these commenters can be found all across at least 10-15 posts on the matter. Thanks all for adding to the conversation.

I do have follow-up posts. I will make good use of Monday morning traffic for them to appear on the blog. It also will give me some more time to smooth out my not-so-final comments on the matter.

Our hosting company's routers are back up and running.
And so is, it seems, Al Gore.

Sorry about the hiccups but we had to go into the DB garden and pullo out about 3.5 million log records, half of them brought to us by evil spambots.

You may be seeing some weird resettings, like the number of people online and all that. It's going to take a bit for the systems to get back into accurate track.

So if you are having problems with anything, just remember, give us a hollaback.

I had to shut off a few features on the site, especially after we got slammed with traffic during the Brangelina saga. Now that things have calmed down and I have figured out what was crashing the server, I can turn features on and do some promotions.

So that means that all the people who joined culturekitchen as far back as April and had not been granted member privileges, now you've got them.

I have promoted some members to contributor status. And I have set in place a community promotion system or "mojometer" that allows all members to vote to move posts by non-editors and/or contributors to the front page. Yes, it's not just me who can move stuff to the front. In one way or other the whole community can do this now.

I will be writing about it later today, just giving you the heads up.

If you have not been granted anything other than unmoderated commenting rights, then please, holler here in the comments. And also let me know of any technical difficulties you might be having. I know Lorraine was having trouble posting this morning but I can't find what was happening.

Anyhow, hollaback y'all!

I'm on it. I have no idea what is going on with the database, but I am on it.

Because every single media outlet will link back to you as well.

We're experiencing some incredibly heavy traffic. Please be patient with us. In the meantime, check out at Perez Hilton's how Brangelina have, all by themselves, devalued the fabled exclusive.

Ah ... the power of the internets.

I am having fun with the weblinks feature. I will be slowly ditching the static blogroll that we have right now in favor of our more dynamic links page.

For one, it's easier to manage and classify. I can also grant weblinks posting permissions to as many people as I want whereas with the blogroll, only the administration can really get to it and change it.

But also, if you take a good look at the end of the bottom links of the post, not only is there a link to the blog itself but if you'll notice, it tells us how many hits we've sent people's way. At the end of the year we will be able to appraise our impact in the blogosphere as a referrer of traffic.

Nifty, huh?

SITES'S UP AGAIN!

I guess we're getting pounded. It's not everyday you can get inside a grey lady's breaches.

Makes me sad though. She must be totally demented and out of it. Can you believe the plumbeous lady still has no idea I am in there and posting to that blog?!?!

The life of a site is on its statistical pages; but to this day there is not one web metrics or statistic package decent enough to truly be able to measure the influence and reach of a blog.

For one, most metrics programs out there are interested measuring only the number of unique visitors and page views. Visitors and traffic may describe how many people on average visit your site, but it really does not tell the complete picture. How people get to you through the web is as important as the amount of pages being read by a visitor.

I am using some statistical tools created just for Drupal-powered sites. These are still rather unpolished but with them I can see who is linking to us, through which categories or terms people are stumbling upon our site, and even who are the most active members in the site.

Traffic hitting specific users this past week :

1. liza (5030)
2. JJ Ross (2749)
3. sea (329)
4. Wulingren (277)
5. Nance Confer (253)
6. mole333 (253)
7. Tara Parks (240)
8. Lorraine (232)
9. drmmrgirl77 (125)
10. Jeffrey Langstraat (82)
11. LynnS (64)

This is insane. People are googling y'all and hitting your pages here.

Hey'all ... yes you 3 people who read this blog

In the coming weeks I will be doing so major updating of bio, resume, projects, et cetera. Also, the focus of this blog will be almost exclusively on he blogosphere's business and technology trends; and how could they become applicable to the creation of socially convergent networking communities.

So stay tuned ... and yes, you can register and leave a comment anytime you want.

Before I surrender to my soccer mom duties, since I have a backlog of posts, I am putting up the first of the daily open threads.

So poor Halley Berry is gonna feel my scorn today.

Do you know why I decided Catwoman was a shitty movie even though I never went to see it?

Leave you hot and heavy gracias, mercis and thank yous for Lynn, our Systems Administrator.

She's been working round the clock for the last 36 hours, to keep the migration to the new box as traumaless as possible. Unfortunately we've had about 5 outtages during the process but she's just jumped at it like the fearless techsheroe she is.

To make sure we show her the love, I got her this weird little video of her favoritest game in the whole wide world, Second Life.

We should be back in full blogging force tomorrow morning.

In the meantime --and if you get this through RSS-- get your groove on with one of my favorites : Jarabe de Palo's Bonito.

Sorry people. Forums are broken. Please use the blog form to post.

Thanks!

PS : Oh. Welcome!

Find out how to make your life easier when blogging about content you find on the web.

[via Blogging made easier with a bit of code | culturekitchen]:

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 :

There are many ways to contribute to culturekitchen than just blogging. Here's a run down of some of what's available on the site :

1. Quotes
   When I don't have time to blog about a bit of news, I use the Quotes form to take good excerpts out of articles and have them rotating in the QUOTES block that appears towards the bottom of the left side column on every page. Some have images, some don't.

   It just occurred to me to use it to also excerpt good posts from other bloggers outside of our site. So use it, please, especially if you don't have time to blog about a good post you've read from blogs we don't have in our blogroll.

2. Image Galleries
   After the last fix our image galleries got all screwed up, but when they are working, they work marvelously.

   If you'd rather open a photo-essay gallery instead of a blog, just make your case and we will do that for you. We have here a wonderful source that gets massively hit through the search engines ready for the community.

3. Recipes
   Yes! After a test run, the recipe module is working again (that's a shout-out to Jeffrey). A girl doesn't just live of ideas. She needs a good, hearthy portion of Chocolate Mousse Pie to feed her soul too.