PolitiCook.net

New User Registration

The past several days we’ve been hit by robot random user registrations coming from eastern Europe. I’m investigating the possibility that this may indicate a SQL injection vulnerability, but in the meantime I’ve added a CAPTCHA feature to new user registration. That’s one of those annoying boxes where you have to type in the words or letters to prove that you are a real person before you can actually register.

If you are a real person, I apologize for the trouble and hope it is only temporary.

If you are not a real person, go away.

More adventures in Dinking With the Sidebars

On the left side, below Recent Comments, we now have a handy list of static reference pages.

I call your attention especially to the newest one: Top Fruits and Veggies to Buy Organic. I did not compile this list; the original came from the Environmental Working Group, but I wanted it handy where I could find it again.

Hope it’s helpful!

Dinking with the categories sidebar

Do not adjust your dial. I’m trying to set up the categories sidebar so it will nest the categories. At the moment it also pulls in every post made under each category — I’m working on that.

UPDATE: Done. Now if you click on the little arrow to the left of the category name, it will drop down a list of the subcategories under it. As before, click on the name of the category to open an archive of all posts in that category.

If Your Comment Goes Missing …

Last week, my comments were going missing, and AAF found them in our spam blocker.

And I just found comments by Anne and Scotia in there (btw, Anne, I like your link! I used the one I used because I’m just - well, overbooked! ) and de-spammed them.

Just let one of us know your comment didn’t post, and we’ll get in that spam-blocker and yank it out for you.

Draft posts

Quick administrative note for those who may not be familiar with WordPress:

If you write a diary, the system automatically saves your draft at regular intervals. Or you can save it as a draft by clicking either the “save” button (returns you to the dashboard) or the “save and continue editing” button (keeps you on the writing page).

Once you are done with your diary and want it to be visible to everyone, you must click the “Publish” button. Drafts remain stored by the system unless you delete them.

New feature

Now we have AJAX comments. Each comment has a “Reply” button under it. Click on it and it opens a box rather than taking you to the bottom of the screen to post a reply.

I need to dink a bit with the presentation, so don’t be alarmed if things look different at times today.

Onward!

Writing a Diary

Every registered user of this site — Yes, this means you! and you!! — can write a diary and it’s automatically front-paged. No permission needed, no moderation required to make that happen.

We do ask that you keep your diaries more or less on topic for this site: food, wine/spirits/beer (Hey MF! This means you!), politics, gardening, alternative energy, farming, the environment. That’s a pretty wide-open field right there (sorry, farmerchuck, no pun intended).

I personally do not want to see the candidate-bashing that goes on at other sites. If you have news or something good to say about your candidate’s stance on one of these subjects, go for it. If you just want to say “Mine rocks, yours sucks,” well, there are more adolescent places to post that sort of thing.

Anyway, please have at it! We need and want your voices on PolitiCook. This is your place as much as ours. Let’s make it great.

We’re back!

Well, that took longer than I thought. Sorry about that. Politicook.org should point here as well in an hour or so.

Anyone else having withdrawal symptoms?

Dear Dr. Chelo and anyone else who hasn’t received a confirmation email:

Certain ISPs are very, very bad about blocking emails from any domain that they consider suspicious in any way. Some of them, notably roadrunner and sbcglobal.net, go so far as to block any domain from which you have never before received email.

If you register and don’t receive a confirming email within an hour, make sure that your email program is set to whitelist email from both *@politicook.net and *@politicook.org. Then go to the login screen, enter your user name and click on “Lost your password?” to have it emailed to you.

If all else fails, email me directly: Kate at jazz-cooking dot com, give me a few minutes, and I will manually reset your password to “password” so you can get logged in without an email.

Sorry about that. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate spammers and what we have to do to protect ourselves from them?

Site Matters

The site may be unavailable for a short time late this evening (US time). I’m going to change over the domain name so that either PolitiCook.org or PolitiCook.net can be used to access this site. There may be a period of a couple of hours where neither name works. Don’t panic! We’re not going anywhere at all and it won’t be an April Fool’s joke.

Thanks!