Given the fervor surrounding the upcoming US presidential election, and the fact that I’ve ranted about political matters in the past, I’ve decided it was high time that I create a new Politics category. Quite a few of my past entries would fit there, but were originally filed under Culture. I’ve since moved them to the Politics category.

Holy shit, I actually started using Twitter. You can click that link to go directly to my page, or view my five most recent tweets in the column on the right (below Links).

No more registration! Now you can just comment away, with no more pesky logging in. Hopefully that’ll solve the headaches my commenters were having. (In case you were thinking of spamming me, though, forget it; I’ve got a rather robust anti-spam system installed, and all comments must be approved by me before they appear on entries anyway.)

Enjoy!

Some readers have expressed concern about the slow loading times experienced on this site. I contacted my web hosting provider about it, and here was their response:

“The reason is because the subdomain is a blog and using MySQL server.
We are not doing any server migrations for the time being. We are aware of the growing problem recently and are making changes to better service for everyone. Please be patient as we are making changes and doing everything possible to insure quality service for everyone both now and in the future. Thank you for your patience.”

I knew from the get-go that I’d experience a slight performance hit due to my use of the MySQL database, because that’s actually not stored in the same folders as my site. But the slowdown I’ve received lately is near-unacceptable. (My last blog used MySQL, and was never this bad.) To be honest, the tech support response above almost seems like a blowoff. In other words, they know of problems that everyone is experiencing, and they’re working on fixing it…but with no clear details of exactly what is being done, or when we can expect a proper fix. I don’t like that one bit.

I should also point out that I use a third-party blogging client, ecto, to write my posts, and that client often takes a few tries just to connect to my server. I spoke with the program’s author, and we discovered that the root of the problem was indeed my slow-ass server, not ecto. I thoroughly appreciate the author’s help, and I’m even more angry that my server’s not acting as it should.

In other news, I’ve received feedback that the commenting system isn’t working too well. To comment, a reader has to log in (using the link in the right-hand column), and then apparently the blog software’s taking them to the dashboard page, not the main page or the post they were originally reading. From the dashboard, a reader can easily get to the main page by clicking the “Visit Site” button at the top of the page, but all of the other stats and stuff on the page can be very confusing. (It’s stuff that I need to know, not you.)

I’m currently working on finding solutions that’ll make everybody happy. (Especially me, because these constant technical mishaps really piss me off.) I’m talking with WordPress tech support, and consulting a few other WordPress gurus to help me. Wish me luck, and please accept my apologies for any problems. If I can’t find proper solutions…this blog may not last too much longer. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that!

You may have noticed that over the past few weeks, I posted a lot of entries; usually, one every day! Well, just a word of warning: that’s likely to slow down. Don’t worry, it’s not like I’ll neglect the blog for weeks on end; I just had a lot of angry thoughts swirling around in my brain at once, and creating posts for all of them was the cerebral equivalent of taking a massive shit. So, now that I’m “regular” again, posts will likely only show up a few times a week. Whew!