A quick note to say that the companion website to this blog has moved. I am not a great coder and updating the old site was quite a hassle, given the amount of cruft and tangled code that had accumulated over the years. Also, I had built it with tables, which for websites is as uncool as using Comic Sans. What can I say? I haven’t taken the time to learn CSS. Or anything else beyond very basic html. I’d rather be reading.
So I had a sudden brainstorm: why not use WordPress? It’s so much easier to maintain and there are lots of templates to choose from. So I spent a few hours moving it all over and cleaning up some messy code and – voila!
Only a funny thing happened. The minute I sat back, thinking “yay, I’m done, just need to make some updates,” it winked out. Gone! Because there are so many links and not so much text, an algorithm flagged it as a spammy link farm. Luckily, the blackout didn’t last that long. Just long enough for me to reflect on the fickleness of the cloud. To be honest, I’m glad WordPress takes such measures, and I’m really glad they have humans who check up on what the algorithm is doing.
We rely on giant tech companies these days and take a lot of free services for granted. I have always respected WordPress for its values and good service. This little snafu hasn’t changed that – it’s a good company.
Scandinavian Crime Fiction 
G’Day! Barbara,
Interesting Post, I’m helping a public college update their website and would like to create a “website update alert” function on it to email subscribers of a change to the page. Can you please recommend coding or free or inexpensive software for this purpose? They don’t have much of a budget given our state and national economy and I’m an amateur designer.
The webpages are in .asp.
Thanks!
Thx.
I’m afraid I don’t really know – at the library where I work, we simply post any major changes that we think people should know about to our blog. I wish I knew more about code! Anyone else have a suggestion?