Your host spent the last days fixing some minor issues with this blog.
Typepad, the hosting company for this blog, said that some of the software features used when I built this blog 15 years ago have now "depreciated for security reasons". That is their euphemism for "we screwed those up when we converted all blogs to use SSL." It took them seven month and some persistent niggling from me to come up with that excuse.
But using Typepad is the most convenient and cheapest way to run a blog. Their systems are reliable and the help desk, which one rarely needs, is generally responsive. If you want to run a blog I strongly recommend to use them. Their new web design system for blogs is also easy to work with.
Unfortunately I do not use new web design system. This blog uses the older software layer below those new design tools. That requires me to dig through stylesheet and templates coded in an incompletely documented control language. That is why it took me days to fix some minor issues.
You will not notice most of those changes. There are five issues though that you might want to know about.
- Half a year ago this blog received the Serena Shim Award for 'uncompromised integrity in journalism'. It is an encouragement to continue what we are doing. Click the award logo on the upper left of the homepage to read more about it.
- The blog should now resize properly for devices with smaller screen resolutions. Unfortunately I have no way to test this on multiple devices. If you find that it does not work properly on whatever you have please use the comments below to let me know.
- The commentators name, email and web-url can no longer be stored as a cookie to be re-used during the next visit. Most web-browser will now use 'autofill' to put in the values that were used during your last comment. (Using Firefox you can double click within each input field.) I preferred the old solution but it is no longer available.
- In long threads the permalinks for comments on subsequent comment pages were broken. That problem is fixed. The permalink to a comment is under its sequence number. All comments can be directly linked from anywhere.
- The 'Search' on the homepage of this blog finally works and also has a readable layout. The original search used here was based on a Google feature which that company unfortunately terminated a few years ago. The makeshift that replaced it was a crappy version of Typepad's old search feature which one of their people squeezed into the homepage layout of this blog. It was mostly unusable. The new search has its own template and uses a newer underlying engine. It works for blog posts and for the comments. Check it out.
If there are any additional layout or functional issues that need to be fixed please let me know so in the comments.
Are there features missing that I should think of to add?