I’ll be traveling this week (mostly Washington, D.C.) and may not be able to respond to inquiries or moderate comments until I return. I’ve set up a number of items to auto-post in my absence, though, so check back.
Posts tagged as:
blog mechanics
Comments on this site are often automatically held for moderation, and appear after they are approved. Unfortunately, in a relatively small number of cases they get caught in the spam-comments filter. For reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, the software seems to take a dislike to certain commenters and throws most or all of their comments into the spam file, even though I never see anything visibly wrong with the content of the comments and even though the software is supposed to assign positive weight to being a previously approved commenter.
When it runs heavy, comment spam can amount to many hundreds of spams a day, which defeats the hope of sifting through them individually in search of legitimate comments, and means I just wind up deleting them in bulk. When the flow is light, as at the moment, I do try to make this effort, and sure enough two legitimate comments just showed up that had been wrongly marked as spam over the past day or two.
If your comment never posts, even though it’s innocuous or constructive, there’s a good chance this is why.
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I’ve upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress in response to reports of a serious attack on older versions (if you’re running any version earlier than the new 2.8.4, go read about it immediately).
Every time I upgrade, there are user problems for a while, which for readers with some browsers take the form of a front page frozen in time at the last post just before upgrade (in this case, “NYC: tobacco shops can’t give away coffee“). I’ve tried to avert this problem with more careful attention to the cache file, but if you notice this problem (or any other) with the site, please email me at editor – at – thisdomainname – dot- com.
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I expect to take this week off from editing the blog. I’ve prepared some posts to auto-post through the week, but comments will either be turned off or held automatically in the moderation queue (where they may not be reviewed for several days). If you’ve got something you want to say and find that comments are closed, hold the thought and check back next week.
No, we haven’t begun accepting advertising, but we figured we’d put in a good word for Hosting Matters, whose hosting services we’ve been using for years and whose support staff over that time have helped extricate us from more than one baffling technical impasse arising from software oddities, DOS attacks and so forth. If you follow the linked graphic, or just click here, you’ll find the details of a promotion they’re doing for an “unmetered” hosting plan (not quite the same as “unlimited”, as they explain) which provides a lot of availability at a low price for those who manage growing websites. If you sign up through us, we also get some sort of credit on our own hosting bill, which I suppose puts this in the category of blog posts that the Federal Trade Commission is so keen on regulating.
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This happened back in January last time we upgraded WordPress, and I’m afraid it’s happened again: some users of Internet Explorer and Safari are reporting that the front page of the site is stuck for them in its July 5 form, as of just before the update. I think I’ve fixed the problem now by restoring the missing cache file, but you may need to do a forced refresh (SHIFT button while clicking “reload”) to see the results.
If you’ve tried SHIFT + reload and still get the July 5 version, let me know via email (editor – at – thisdomainname.com) or post a comment.
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If the site is temporarily unavailable, it’s because I’m updating to the latest version of WordPress. Back soon, I hope. Update 11 p.m. Eastern: Looks like it worked, if you see a problem let me know.
Spoke too soon: there was a caching problem which has prevented many readers with IE or Safari browsers from seeing newer posts (details here). I’ve put in what I hope is a fix.
As we’ve begun filling in tags to the thousands of posts, the “tag cloud” became less and less interesting and more and more distracting on the front page. We’ve moved it to a back page and replaced it with three hand-made lists of tags:
- Categories, with tags roughly corresponding to the categories from the old website;
- Favorite topics, featuring tags corresponding to popular reader favorites from years past and today; and
- Good copy, attorneys and law firms you want to read about.
Are we leaving anything out in those tag lists you’d like to see there?
Don’t hesitate to drop me an e-mail with a link if you see something that was improperly auto-tagged or is missing a tag that would be useful.
Continuing our WordPress site overhaul, we’ve added two new ways to navigate through Overlawyered to find relevant past material.
Our new browse by tag page lets you zero in quickly on posts that relate to your topic of interest or locality. We’ve assembled an uneasy mix of the old post categories, automatically generated new tags on old posts (e.g., “Detroit” will yield stories linking to the Detroit News even when there is no local angle) and tags newly selected by Ted and me, with the balance, we assume, gradually shifting toward the latter over time. We’ve tended to avoid autotagging the most common terms as well as the very largest cities and states; remember that you can still try our regular search function.
And here’s a neat trick: by tinkering with tag URLs, you can combine tags to find a subset of posts with overlapping tags. For example, the URL http://overlawyered.com/tag/illinois+family-law/ calls up all posts that are tagged with both “Illinois” and “family law”. (Note the required placement of the plus sign and hyphen(s).) Likewise with “Bill Lerach” + “politics” or whatever other combination of tags you like.
Finally, we’re experimenting on individual posts with suggested “Related posts”. These are auto-generated by the tag program based on shared tags, so they will inevitably be less than perfect, but may make a helpful place to start.
Yes, I’m working through this lovely Memorial Day holiday on this.
1) Thanks in part to a very helpful plugin from developer Alex King, most individual post URLs from the old site now redirect seamlessly to the new. (Some still don’t work properly, but we’re probably not going to be able to fix that).
2) URLs are shorter with the “index.php” now gone. Again, this should redirect seamlessly so it shouldn’t matter if you’ve bookmarked an address that uses the longer version.
3) The new crisis is that monthly archives in the new site are fritzed. At work on restoring them. Update 5:45 p.m.: back working now.
P.S. And now we have a site map too.
1) As part of our continuing WordPress transition and overhaul we’ve added those blue “Share/Save” buttons to the bottom of each post, but they seem to slow down the time needed for page loading, which had been so quick. On the other hand, we’d really like it if people used Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. to let more people know about us. Are any regular readers likely to use this feature? Is there some simpler method of achieving this goal?
2) We’ve lagged behind the technology curve when it comes to tagging our posts, and we’ve now got years’ worth of archives with no tagging whatsoever, which handicaps both our outreach to new readers and our internal ease of navigation. Any suggestions on speedy ways to rectify this? Are there “social” tagging methods in which we can take advantage of readers’ each doing pieces of the job? Or assuming we can handle the security aspects, are there readers who’d like to volunteer to tag posts from within WordPress for us?
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Update: Since it’s awkward to keep two blogs going at once I’ve now switched the WordPress site to function as the “main” blog. Old post addresses generated by Movable Type (which lack the “php” suffix) still appear to work.
Earlier: Looks like I’ve fixed the problem of imported MT posts being misattributed to the wrong authors. I’m also trying out a new design “theme” (XMark by Lisa Sabin-Wilson) which fixes some glaring problems we had with the previous test theme (such as italics not rendering properly) and looks, in general, blog-friendly. At the moment it’s not a great fit for the accustomed look and feel of the site but it seems to be highly customizable, and should be considered a work in progress.
As an experiment, we’ve made commenting somewhat easier and you may notice that your comments appear immediately.
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* Comments on the main site are still broken, sorry. Update: Comments now working since WordPress changeover.
* Yesterday was one of our biggest Instalanches ever, with about 7,000 Glenn Reynolds readers coming over to visit this post.
* You can see our rapidly evolving WordPress “sandbox” here. One vexing problem we’ll need to fix: most of the posts from guestbloggers are being attributed to the wrong contributors. That problem is evident in this recent post, which was really authored by Jim Copland; the case names don’t render properly either. The posts in the sandbox may accept comments (which may or may not survive in a reconstructed site) but any permalinks are not really permanent and are apt to break soon. Comments about the reconstruction itself are best added to this post. Update: Sandbox removed since WordPress version has gone live.
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Given the vulnerabilities of Movable Type to attack — comments are down once again and I don’t know at this point when we can get them back up — it looks as if we’ll have to join the crowd in migrating over to WordPress. (And I had really wanted to spend the week on other projects.)
Those who might want to share relevant MT-to-WP conversion experience are welcome to check in through email (since comments are busted).
The site crashed under spammer attack this morning — I’m told the link from Instapundit with its resulting heavy traffic was just a coincidence — and we’ve had to shut down comments and search temporarily while we try to get back on our feet. Update 1:15 p.m. Eastern: search back up (although all old saved searches are broken, you’ll have to re-search on individual terms), comments still down.
This may be inside baseball for those who lack interest in blog mechanics, but since it is excellent news for Overlawyered and its readers, we’ll boast about it: volunteer Andrew Grossman has stepped forward to accomplish for us something we’d been dearly hoping to accomplish, namely installing redirects that will get several years’ worth of older (2003-2008) posts to display in current URL format. The underlying problem is that we’ve been through three iterations of Movable Type and each had a different way of creating the URL format for a post:
http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/001600.html (first method)
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/11/rr_didnt_warn_not_to_walk_on_t.html (same post, second method)
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/11/rr-didnt-warn-not-to-walk-on-t.html (same post, current method — note use of hyphens instead of underscores)
Simply discontinuing the old versions would cause thousands of old links, both incoming and internal, to break. But the continued existence of the old versions led to several kinds of problems: they could no longer be formatted properly, so they looked ugly if not unreadable; moreover, users of Google and other search engines would encounter two (or, more recently, three) textually identical versions of the same post, which was confusing at best. Hence the need for redirects.
Aside from his having done us this service, another reason to commend Andrew Grossman to your attention is his day job as Senior Legal Policy Analyst, Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. His writing interests there include “federal criminal law and the problem of ‘overcriminalization’ — the practice of turning minor civil offenses into serious criminal acts,” and other topics equally well matched with ours here, including the likely boon to litigation from Congress’s CPSC expansion, the ill-conceived ADA Restoration Act under consideration on the Hill, and Judge Posner’s summary approach to dubious expert witness testimony. We hope he’ll be guest blogging in this space before long.
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As mentioned, I know very little about RSS, Atom, feeds, etc. but just try to take the minimum steps needed to make sure readers can follow the site that way if they wish. This note from a reader in Australia is not the first to indicate that our software upgrade and site redesign of recent weeks may have caused some disruption:
I hope you’ll accept my apology in advance, but it just occurred to me today that I hadn’t had any feeds from you for quite some time now. I use Bloglines as my newsreader. I tried to resubscribe to Overlawyered using a different type of feed and that seemed successful, but when I looked at what had been supplied with the different type of feed, all of the material was from mid-March. Are you able to throw any light on this? Is there some problem with Bloglines and Overlawyered? Is there something I can do to restore the feeds? Thanks for any assistance.
Knowledgeable comments welcome.
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Blog comments by law firms
by Walter Olson on November 9, 2010
When are they commentary sincerely reacting to posts? When are they mere spam? And how should one draw the line? Dan Filler wonders at Faculty Lounge.
P.S. From UK lawyer-blogger Charon, Q.C. a while back: “Fed up with law firms putting ads in comment section of my blog. I am now editing and re-directing all such to dodgy websites.”
Tagged as: blog mechanics, legal blogs, open threads and commenter posts
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