• The LJ Syndication Journal corresponding to this 'blog only presents public entries. Other entries are placed in a friends-only category, to make them relatively easy to find if you have an account at this 'blog. (There really aren't many a friends-only entries, though.)
• If you have an account with this 'blog, but have forgot your username or password, then just let me know. I can easily recover the username or reset the password. And if you'd like your username reset, that would be easy as well.
• Comments to entries should be made at the 'blog, rather than at the syndication journal; I'm not automatically notified of comments to the syndication journal, and the entries at the syndication journal are erased on a regular basis, along with any comments there.
• There's been a poor, lonely poll at the 'blog, which has received answers from only three brave souls. I'll probably move on to a new question soon.

It is possible for LiveJournal users to effectively beFriend me (in spite of my having deleted my old LJ), by adding external identity profile oeconomist.com to their Friends lists, and by adding the syndication journal oeconomist_rss to their Friends lists.

External identity profile oeconomist.com corresponds to my OpenID, and beFriending it would allow me to read and to comment to Friends-only entries. I have been pondering whether I should allow the profile to abide, because to me it looks uncomfortably like a LiveJournal account, and I of course chose to delete my LJ account in response to LJ policies. But I've decided that the distinction is sufficient that, at least for now, I will allow the profile to remain and will use it.

Most or all of you know about the syndication journal oeconomist_rss; it pulls the non-protected entries from this 'blog and temporarily makes them available on LJ such that they will appear on Friends pages. (The only present way to get the protected entries is to log into the 'blog using an ID and password got from me. Anyone who was on my old LJ Friends list can be assured of being given one upon request.) The syndication journal itself is actually not my creäture but that of 28bytes. Comments to the syndication journal itself are not registered here, and may therefore escape my notice.

Recently, my website has again been slow. I've had to cool my heels waiting for content, and I've noticed that the LiveJournal RSS feed for this 'blog has repeatedly been thwarted by server time-out.

Last night and this morning, for a while, the site was really dragging. And a post that I'd made seemed to evaporate, then reäppear after I'd composed and posted a replacement, then vanish again. My inference is that FourBucks.net at some point was trying to resolve problems, and that the flitting into-and-out-of existence of that post was symptomatic of servers being swapped or of various back-ups over-writing each other.

It would have been better if FourBucks.net had locked things for maintenance, and declared themselves as doing so. Some 'blogger could have written a rather lengthy post and then seen his or her work utterly erased.

Last night or this morning, I installed the the pending up-dates for various WordPress plugins that I was using. I've discovered that various things have consequently been broken. Please bear with me as I try to put things back into working order.

(And please comment to this entry if you note something specifically amiss.)

I am visiting the Woman of Interest, my having left home to do so on Thursday morning. On Wednesday night, the display of my notebook computer apparently fried, so I've not brought it.

I'm very uncomfortable with the general feel of her keyboard; and her computer, being a Mac, uses different meta-key combinations from those now familiar to me. (I used to use Macs a lot, because one of my employers insisted on such, but that was long ago.) So I won't be on-line much before I get home, on Wednesday.

When I do get home, I will have to use my cranky old desk-top computer or rental machines, until I get the notebook computer fixed. So my on-line presence will still be more limited for a while.

Best practice in HTML is to put quotations into Q[uotation] elements, so that the mark-up looks like this:

Sam growled <q>I asked him, and he said <q>I swear on me mother's grave!</q></q>

rather than like this:

Sam growled “I asked him, and he said ‘I swear on me mother's grave!’”

Note that it is possible to have one Q[uotation] element inside of another — a good style-sheet will handle that.

Unfortunately, the WordPress editor seems to have been written by a programmer who believes that Q[uotation] elements must not nest, and the editor tries to fix things when it encounters nesting, by closing the outer element when it comes to the inner element. In the case of my previous entry, it then discarded the original closing </q> tag of the outer element, but (who knows why?) added an extra </div> at the end of the entry. The appearance of the whole page went to H_ll.

I fixed things by by-passing the WordPress software, and editing the 'blog's underlying dB with phpMyAdmin.

I've filed a bug report.

(I still need to arrive at a good specification of the list-bug that plagues my entry on installing Open Office.)

I was looking at the version of Installing OpenOffice 2.4 under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x that is delivered for the LiveJournal feed of this 'blog, and saw that it has a bunch of unmatched closing p[aragraph] tags that simply aren't in the entry as I marked it up. Indeed, I don't think that I used p[aragraph] elements at all in that entry.

Looking at the entry that is delivered to visitors to my site, I see <p> and </p> appearing various places that I haven't put them. But they don't appear when I attempt to use the WordPress editor to remove them, nor are they in the entry as it appears in the raw dB. The problem, then, is in the preprocessing by WordPress.

I s'pose that I need to explore the problem and then file a bug report with WordPress.org.

It is now possible for you to correct or otherwise to edit your comments to this 'blog, so long as three conditions are met:

• Not more than 30 minutes have passed since the comment were made.
• You must have been logged-in when commenting and be logged-in (with the same ID).
• You must be using a machine with the same IP number as that with which the comment were made (which would typically hold if your connection to the 'Net weren't broken in the interim).

When one saves an edit with Edit Comments XT, one none-the-less is returned by it to the comment-editing form, with no real indication that the change has been made; so confirmation is not ideal. One can go back to the main page and from there again click on the Comments link to double-check that the edit was effected.

I think that when next one of my hosting subscriptions comes-up for renewal, I am going to migrate from FourBucks.net to AN Hosting, unless FourBucks.net introduces a more competitive package in the mean-time.

With just one domain and low traffic, the FourBucks.net entry-level package is the better buy. But it appears that when one has two or more domains to be hosted, the AN Hosting becomes the better choice.

Addendum: I will in any case continue using this domain name, and the change should be transparent to visitors.

The Woman of Interest and I each noted that our websites had been slow and unresponsive, so yester-day after-noon I contacted technical support at FourBucks.net. A technician got back to me, reporting that he’d found nothing amiss on their server but noted that our sites draw upon resources on other servers, and suggesting that perhaps the problem was there. This explanation seemed plausible, except that shortly after I received it we found that first cpanel and then simple FTP were slowing to an effective halt. When I checked a few hours later, the sites seemed to work fine more generally. So I think that our support query was vindicated.