C&C has been off the air since Tuesday morning. Our web host, Bluehost, migrated our site to a new server. However, they botched the move, failed to get the internet pointers pointing to the new location correctly, failed to fix the problem in a timely manner, and failed to effectively communicate with us regarding the outage, its cause, and its duration. Needless to say, we will be looking for a new host before the end of our present term.
We are having technical difficulties with the Yahoo method of logging in to comment. I have opened the native Movable Type system to registration.
C&C Blog may be down for brief intervals this week as we upgrade our system.
C&C's host is moving us to a new server, which should result in better performance. They have advised us to expect periods of downtime of 15-20 minutes this week as they make the transition. These outages should occur after 4:00 p.m. EST.
Some readers may have noticed I have not blogged much in the last week. I was in New Orleans at the annual convention of the Association of Government Attorneys in Capital Litigation. (I am not, of course, a government attorney, but they tolerate me there anyway.) I will have more to say on this conference later in the week.
I have reopened the facility for commenters to register with the blog and establish a username and password. The usual email confirmation process applies.
I encourage frequent commenters to use this method of signing in rather than Yahoo so that comments will be identified with a recognizable handle instead of the string of garbage that Yahoo incomprehensibly assigns.
To register, go to the comments on any post, press "Sign in," then "Sign up" and the bottom of the sign-in page.
Hopefully the gremlins that have caused software glitches in the commenting system will remain dormant until we replace the blog software altogether.
We have discovered that a glitch in the blog software has resulted in post authors not being informed of new comments to their posts. For that reason, some valid comments by commenters who have not been designated "trusted" and thus requiring approval for publication have not been published.
I just published a bunch of them. We will work on either fixing the problem or finding a workaround.
The blog is back up following an outage caused by technical difficulties at our host. Comments submitted Friday afternoon or evening may have been lost. Our apologies for any inconvenience.
I am getting an increasing number of comments, nearly all of them critical, posted to old comment threads where there has not been any activity for a while. For critical comments on active threads, I usually don't need to respond because the regular commenters here will point out where the criticism goes awry (if it does, and it usually does). For an old thread, though, the regulars will not see it, but it is there on our blog and needs to be addressed, taking up time.
If the blog software had the capability, I would close threads to comments automatically after a week of inactivity. Since it does not, I will generally close a stale thread to further comments after answering (or sometimes not publishing) such a comment.