Housekeeping
A few things around the site to mention and discuss:
Chinese in the feeds
This was my bad. I misconfigured a plug-in, and it started to grab some random Chinese Twitter feed. I’m going to be traveling a lot in July, well outside of traditional internet access, so I’ll be needing to use an alternative method (like Twitter) to post from the field. I’m still debating whether it’s best to generate traditional posts, or just a persistent header (like I did for Sundance).
Follow-Up Email plugin
AndrewJS wrote in about troubles with this plug-in:
Your WP plugin that emails people regarding new comments for certain articles seems to be overly ambitious lately. I left a comment on your Finale PDF thread and checked that box, but am receiving follow up emails for several other articles also that I never subscribed to. I rarely leave comments on your site, and I checked those other articles just to make sure I hadn’t commented on them. This included the Marvel thread and something about a Screenwriter’s Dinner, and one or two others. They all poured in overnight at once. Seems a bit odd.
Is anybody else having troubles with this plug-in? Is anyone else using it? I’m happy to troubleshoot it if people are finding it useful, but if not, the simplest solution would just be to remove it.
Live preview on comments
Some readers are having trouble with the live previews on the comments. If you’re one of them, shoot me an email at ask@johnaugust.com. Be sure to include which browser you’re using (e.g. Internet Explorer). Some readers have had success by breaking long comments into shorter sections. That really shouldn’t matter, but if it works, go for it.
Articles
May 30th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Yes, I’ve experienced the overly ambitious email notifier. When you had the scene competition, I checked the box to receive follow up comments. I received both what I asked for and more - a few comments on other posts I hadn’t subscribed to, like AndrewJS. However, it seems like when the comments stopped coming in on the scene post, so did the unrelated comments because I haven’t received any in the last few weeks. It’s a slightly irritating issue, but not so bad that I think you should remove the plugin. It was really nice reading the follow up scenes in individual emails rather than having to sort through the long list of comments to that post. Is it something you can turn on and off by post? Because I think it’s most useful for those posts where you get like 200 comments.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
I use Feedburner’s e-mailer to handle all that stuff. It seems to work much better than any plug-in I’ve used in the past.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:31 am
Oh, what pleasure has washed over me when, upon logging into my Google Reader to catch up on ~237 articles from the last 2 weeks, one of them mentioned me and my little tech trouble. An honor, thank you sir. I would like to second the opinion above by Christina — it was a convenience to have comments delivered to my email, and a few stray extras were an acceptable sacrifice for this luxury. I shall be checking that same box here in two seconds…