Some changes will be made to this weblog over the next few days or weeks. This means there will be times when this website will be completely non-operational, and other times when what appears will not even look like a webpage. These less-than-ideal changes will be temporary, as we upgrade some of the software.
We currently use ancient (in android time) weblog and anti-spam software. While it used to work superbly, changes our host has made, that I will not attempt to explain except to say we now have hanging MySQL queries, are causing problems for folks trying to comment.
So, be advised that our websites will be non-operational at times, but that these glitches will hopefully be temporary.
Update (of same day): The upgrades went a lot smoother on this weblog than I expected. Now I have to watch how it reacts in actual operation. This weblog is the test box.
Update (Saturday, March 21 2009): Made it through the night without any apparent issues requiring manual maintenance! This is a tentative, “Yay!” Even if the current solution is not as good as the old one (it may be better), our need to make the change seems somewhat forced by realities of our current host’s and the recently-increased existence of the hanging queries that manifested as several different interactivity problems.