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By Dave, February 16, 2009 3:39 pm

Got to playing around with a theme that I am using over at another site and came up with a new one for the Wolfe site. Hope y’all like it.

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By Dave, December 31, 2008 11:23 am

Which we all know Wolfe wouldn’t allow in his house, much less on his table!

I seem to be getting a handle on it. Turns out that most of it isn’t comment spam but rather pingback and trackback spam caused by a high Google page rank. So I have turned that function off for all new posts and as spam is coming in I’m cutting it off on the posts that it links to. Hoping this takes care of it.

Now back to the regularly scheduled nonposting…

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By Dave, December 30, 2008 11:13 pm

Sorry to keep harping on this but it’s a problem that needs to be taken care of and asap. As I am still fighting the spam problem I got to looking at the Users list and noted that most had never posted anything. So I deleted just about all of them. There are a few that have been users for quite a while that actually put down names and some info that I left. The rest are now history. If you have registered on this site and try to log on and find that the user name/password no longer works, that’s why. If you register please make at least one post/comment so I’ll know that you are a real person and not a bot.

Thanks,
Dave

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By Dave,

Just deleted another 135 items marked spam. However before doing so went through them and checked the IP addresses and any that had more than one spam comment got put on the black hole list which I am posting below. If your IP address appears on this list then you most likely have a virus/adware/bot on your machine. If you have cleaned/checked your machine and want to post a comment and are on the list you can email me at depatty at gmail dot com with the IP address and I’ll remove it from the black hole list.
Thanks for reading.
Dave

Black Hole IP Addresses
72.167.164.80
91.84.248.29
67.159.45.96
66.90.104.89
205.234.140.219
208.53.137.178
208.85.242.212
207.58.181.182
67.159.44.159
74.208.16.77
81.0.240.206
85.17.146.140
208.110.82.74
69.9.38.221
76.191.100.11
202.81.162.34
213.251.189.203
67.212.184.146
94.229.69.147
209.200.17.183
68.178.254.130
209.17.190.78

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By Dave,

Haven’t been doing much with this site (or much of anything else onliine) for a while and hadn’t noticed the massive increase in spam coming in here. Updated the version of Wordpress that runs the site to the latest and greatest, and noted that there were over 20,000 items listed as spam. Just bulk deleted them all and put it down to the time it had been since I had last worked on the site. This was Sunday, Dec 28th. On Monday the 29th I checked and there were 470 items listed as spam! Deleted them and then worked on the site off and on during the day and deleted another 66. This morning (Tuesday the 30th) checked and there were another 233 items that were spam. Guess we’ve gotten on some botnet’s list of sites.

Mostly this post is to say that if you’ve tried to comment on a post and it hasn’t shown up, please try again. I’m trying to go through the incoming spam to see if any real comments slip in but with the volume that’s showing up tis easy for me to miss some.

Thanks for visiting!

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By Dave, April 21, 2008 11:44 am

Been trying to figure out a couple of things about the new version of Wordpress and think I have finally gotten my head wrapped around it enough to make the changes I was wanting.

I have changed the way the archives display in two different ways.

First is that they now display from oldest to newest so if you are reading the discussions tis top to bottom as it should be.

Second is that the entire posts show up rather than just an the first few lines.

Let me know if there are any problems with this. I hope this will work out better for most folks.

One other change I thinking about making is to limit the number of posts that show up on each page to 10 verses the 20 it is set to right now. Any comments or feedback on this move can be made in either comments or by email to depatty at gmail dot com.

Later,
Dave AKA Albert Freyer

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By Dave, April 17, 2008 7:13 am

*** Update – Seems that it didn’t auto start after all.  Early in the am and coffee had not kicked in with either of us yet. However, if anyone has any trouble with the site do let me know as there could be stuff broken that I’ve not found yet.

——–

Have had one person say that one of the music files started when he came to the site. I’ve got them set with “autostart=false” but will move them off the front page if this is happening.

Anyone else who has this problem, PLEASE, let me know in comments (no login/signup required, comments are set so a moderator has to approve all) or email – depatty at gmail.com. Thanks, Dave.

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By Dave, April 16, 2008 10:31 pm

At least the initial cleanup work is done, the new theme is installed and at least mostly configured. As you can see if you are reading this, the new header is done and wallpaper up. Most of the cobwebs have been cleaned out and I am working on polishing the last of the door knobs now. All of the existing posts that are on books I have, that are on the site, have been checked and cleaned up or redone. I still have a pile of books that I haven’t scanned and uploaded, yet, but am planning on doing them asap.

For now I’m going to make my daily post over at TechnoPrimitive.org which is my personal site, and then go to bed. Till tomorrow…

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By Dave, April 15, 2008 9:05 pm

Had high hopes of getting all the posts updated today but got bogged down in the bits and bobs. To tired tonight to go further so am gonna call it an early night and start on it again in the morning. Till then…

And now I find that the smillie buttons are not working. Still going to go to bed and wait to worry about that too tomorrow…

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By Dave,

Kind of a redundant title I know but is as descriptive a one as I can think right now, after spending the last two days working on and slogging through this mess.

As of now I’ve managed to get over 200 of the posts tagged and those with cover scans formatted in the workaround custom database fields moved to the new Wordpress standard method of handling graphics. Got around 60 left to get through and I hope to get that done today (April 15, 2008). Then I can change themes, remove some clutter from the database structure, see which of my collection of Stout paperback and hardback books I have in here already, and which ones I need to add in.

In updating some of the cover/book posts yesterday I did a Google search on Johan Blixt and found his new site and email address. Sent him an email requesting a copy of his cover scan of The Red Bull as the copy I had was quite degraded. He sent it right over and it’s now up at The Red Bull. He has a nice page devoted to Rex Stout’s books at http://homepage.mac.com/johan.blixt/stout.html and has quite a few other interesting pages for mystery readers on his site at http://homepage.mac.com/johan.blixt/.
Thanks Johan!

Guess I have procrastinated long enough and need to get back to the updating.
More as I get to it…
Dave AKA Albert Freyer

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By Dave, April 12, 2008 11:40 am

I originally posted all of the parodies, poems, limericks, and songs to pages (for some reason that completely escapes me at the moment) but am moving them to regular posts to allow them to be linked to a category rather than having to add a post to link a page and making the reader click multiple times to get to them. The pages will stay until I get them all moved and will then be deleted. Hope this is clear as mud to all y’all…

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By Dave, April 9, 2008 3:13 pm

The basic update is done and it looks like most everything survived.  At least the bits I have looked at so far.  I was going to change themes too but had forgotten just how much I had modified the one I have been using for the past few years.  Soooooo, I’m gonna stay with it for the present, at least until I can get the gluteus maximus in gear and get the rest of the corpus scanned and online.

Again, if you find things broken please let me know, either in comments or by emailing me at depatty at gmail dot com.

Thanks for reading
Dave AKA Albert Freyer

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By Dave,

Sorry for the long silence on here. Not that I have been that busy, just haven’t been doing any work on the site. No promises, as I seem to always be able to find excuses for not doing things I really should finish, but I’m going to at least update the version of Wordpress that the site is running on. This could break things, and if you find broken links or whatever please let me know either via comments or you can email me at depatty at gmail dot com.

Thanks for reading.

Dave AKA Albert Freyer

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By Dave, September 23, 2007 2:30 pm

Just a quick post to let y’all know where I am on the scanning and updating.

I started with Fer de Lance and just got through with Too Many Women, so as of now there are 27 new scans up. I had thought I would be further along by now but Real Life keeps interfering. Another problem is that I am having to reformat the text in most of the existing posts as I go. I am also adding additional text from inside cover as my hands allow. So getting there, just a lot slower than I had wanted/hoped.

More as I can.
Dave

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By Dave, September 18, 2007 11:25 pm

Just finished updating the scans of all 5 of the Fer de Lance Covers listed on the site.

To view a larger version of any of the new cover uploads, click on the thumbnail in the post, this will take you to another page with a medium sized version of the scan. If you then click on the medium sized version it will take you to a full sized version of the picture. Some browsers (firefox and seamonkey that I know for sure) will not display the full sized version without another click on the picture as they come with ’size picture to fit window’ turned on by default.

Use your back button to return to the original page.

Hope this muddies things up enough for the evening.

Questions, comments, etc, welcomed…

Dave

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By Dave, September 17, 2007 4:59 pm

Been trying to get the scanner to scan clean cover art and getting herringbone and distortion everywhere. Had been scanning directly to .jpg. Tried it at 72, 150 and 300 dpi with the same results. 300 was better but still some distortion showing up. The scanner was making a bit of a squeak when the carriage was returning to home position so I took it apart and lubricated all the moving parts as well as the slides. It now makes less noise than it has since we bought it but still getting the distortion and herringbone patterns. So tried scanning the covers in using .png which works. But they also are huge files. Where the jpg files are between 100k and 200k in finished size the .png files are from 800k to 1.2meg for the same size output. At that point I tried using gimp to convert the .png to a .jpg and all is now well… It just takes me about 3 to 4 times as long to process a single cover.

Onward and upward as it were…

Dave

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By Dave, September 14, 2007 10:39 am

Making a few live tests, trying some things out.

400 px wide thumbnail:

256 px wide thumbnail:

128 px wide thumbnail:

All 3 link to a page with the full size picture embedded (or that’s what I think I did). Now to see…

Update:

Turns ou that the links (above) take you to a page with a 442 px (or with my ruler that’s what I get) version of the picture and if you then click on that you go to the original. I think this is the way I am going to post all the covers from now on. That way I don’t have to do any resizing here at all, just upload the original jpegs and let the software do it’s magic.

As time allows I’ll reupload full size scans of the covers that I have that are posted now. That way I can remove the weird coding I have added to display them now. I remember having a reason for doing them that way but have no real idea of what it was. Need to start commenting my code more…

For now I think I will set the thumbnail maximum side size to 300 px which should allow them to fit into the column side by side. Will have to do a few and see how it works out.

Comments welcome.

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By Dave,

After looking through the code in the templates, I figured out what I needed to get the thumbnails and scans to show up and moved just that part over to the new theme. Appears to be working so am gonna start with this and work on it from here.

Got the Linux machine going again to scan more covers and have started on that. Going to have to change some other things in the new version of Wordpress to get the thumbnails the size I want them to be, so when I get that worked out will start uploading more scans.

Slowly, slowly, eats the elephant…

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By Dave, September 13, 2007 10:25 am

Got the pictures of the covers back but had to go back to the older theme that was showing up as broken yesterday, but seems to be working today. Have no idea but will not look a gift quadrapod in the energy intake orifice. Now just got to put the feedburner tracking code in place and see if it still works.