I feel a need to throw a myriad of miscellanea out there to anyone willing to give it a read. This is your classic dumper dive post, where you might find something interesting, maybe even valuable, but what you find might have an equal chance of just being junk. Read at your own risk. No refunds.
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UPDATE: The problem seems to have finally resolved itself. Keeping this post live so you can see the things that you may encounter with going off the “approved platform”.
Just so you are aware, mobile variants of Firefox seem to dislike the SLL certificate for this site and are throwing errors over the place since about 9pm central time when you try to load the site. It may also appear in desktop variations of the site, which seems to have been fixed by clearing the browser cache for the site. That solution does not appear to work with the mobile version, however.
Chrome and Edge seem to work just fine. I have not checked Safari.
From what I have been able to discover, there was a hotfix update to all versions of Firefox to address a “zero-day exploit” around the same time as this problem came up for me. My security certificate is independently confirmed to be valid, but Firefox appears to think otherwise.
It might be a matter of another update, or that Firefox needs to update the SSL certificate definitions that are valid, something I have zero control over. If you are experiencing difficulties viewing the site with Firefox, I recommend using another browser for the time being; on desktop, go to the padlock in the site address and clear cache and cookies for the site when prompted, which seems to force a refresh of the SSL certificates.
Owning a domain is just fun, innit?
Oh! The trials and tribulations…
Can you imagine my surprise when I was denied access to this site this morning?
The error message I received from Firefox and Chrome were similar and made it sound like I might have been hacked. “Lithuania”, “geoblocking”, “security certificate invalid”, and all kinds of unsmiley indications (including a spam contact message overnight).
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This morning I was able to identify the buggy element of the commenting system and now things seem to have settled down on the site in that respect. Or, rather, comments and WordPress.com integration have been behaving as expected all day and I’ll count that as a win.
(more…)First off, I want to thank everyone for their apparently infinite patience as I try to debug the site since it went live just under a week ago. I appreciate everyone’s understanding and the helpful hands I’ve been getting from all across the globe.
You are the real heroes here.
(more…)The site is going through some growing pains that I am attempting to troubleshoot. My current issue is with comment moderation.
Only first-time comments should be held for moderation. However, all comments are currently being sent for moderation. Clearly, this feature is not acting as expected. I am looking into solutions, including considering something other than Akismet (should that be the root cause) or Jetpack for comments — undesirable choices either way. While overly aggressive at times, Akismet works reasonably well. Similarly, Jetpack for comments has to positive feature that you can use the app for comment notifications if you have a WordPress.com account. Otherwise, readers will have to subscribe to “all comments” via RSS feeds or stop by for responses.
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For a while I have been feeling my writing has started to stagnate at the other site the I have been doing the bulk of my writing these past five years, sceadugenga.com. During those years, I’d been a fairly prolific writer on sceadugenga on a day-to-day basis: posting anywhere from one to ten posts nearly every day since 2020, and quite a few days through 2019 on top of that.
Prior to 2019, I’ve been writing a number of different blogs since around 2001 — using everything from static HTML pages to Blogger. Largely I’ve been writing on WordPress.com or a self-hosted site based on their software since 2005.
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