The Monday Mail, our weekly feature in which readers help other readers find fragrances they might like, will return from its "holiday break" next week. If you're already on the waiting list, you should hear from me soon; if you're not but you'd like to be, please wait — over the next week or so, I hope to post detailed instructions on how to apply. In my ongoing efforts to make this blog easier to run (and thus leave a little time for other life matters), in the future the Monday Mail will be a strictly reader-to-reader feature, that is, I'm no longer going to make any fragrance recommendations myself. I don't think that will be any great loss since you all did better than I did anyway.
I'm gearing up to move Now Smell This to WordPress under its own domain. Hopefully that will happen in mid-February. If all goes according to schedule, we'll stop accepting new reader accounts (which you need in order to comment) later this month, since the reader accounts will not be ported over to the new site.
And the 2009 Prix Eau Faux, which I'd said would start in early January, will now start after we get settled into our new website, probably some time in early spring.
As always, feel free to comment with questions, complaints and/or suggestions!
R, does that mean we'll have to create new accounts after the migration? I'd be very pleased if we did, as then I could create a better account name rather than the one I ended up with in desperation after my first half dozen attempts were rejected because they already existed! MInd you, if we all do that, we'll end up with lots of 'Vetivera (formerly Vanillagirl)' type names, I suppose. Good luck with the move, anyway!
I'm not sure — my initial idea when I planned to move to WordPress a year ago (that's another story) was to have open comments. We've never done that here because we haven't got adequate spam protection.
Now, however, I'm thinking we may require a login, but if we do, I hope to integrate with OpenID (http://openid.net/) or some other system whereby you don't need to have a special login only for this blog. As OpenID points out, many people already have OpenID logins & don't even know it (from Yahoo, Flickr, AOL, etc).
Wishing you soothing scents, high caffeine tea, and lots of excellent chocolate as you go down into the depths of tech maintenance. Yeesh. And we thought we owed you for sniffing all those celebrity scents…
I think your recommendations were brilliant, Robin. But I understand if you need more time. I think WordPress is a decent option, as well – I use it for a blog or two.
LOL — I am taking care of both tea & chocolate w/ no problem, thanks!
That's nice of you, thanks! The MM posts just turn out to take much more time than I expected in terms of gathering information & getting it formatted, and most unfortunately I tend to “stew” over my recommendations — it just took too long. I think if something comes to me right away I'll add it, but I won't sweat over it if nothing comes to mind.
Hey R, I think WordPress with your own domain name is a wise choice. Regarding spam problems, I do actually still receive TONS of spam on WordPress, although I have a spam filter. I've not tried OpenID on my own blogs, but from a user experience, it's a good option. Good luck!
LOL — the really wise choice would have been to start there in the first place! Moving after 4 years is a PITA.
The Spam is going to be another PITA. We get almost none here. We'll have to see how it works out with OpenID — that might not really be much of a preventive measure.
I don't know a lot about the technical aspects of OpenID, not being a blogger myself, but having spent a lot of time on the internet, I worry that if you allow people to post without logging in, you'll get a tremendous amount of mindless vituperation, which would make me very unhappy. And we all know it's all about me.
Seriously, it's your choice, and I don't think you're a babe in the woods in terms of these things, I just wanted to weigh in with my concerns. This being an open forum and all. I love NST and get a lot of pleasure out of the community here, and would be very sorry to see the level of discourse be degraded.
There's certainly something to be said for restricting comments so that only people who really care enough to register are able to have their say. But on the other hand, there are so many people who've taken the time to register here and now they'd have to do it all over again, which seems rude.
A bigger rudeness, which I will hate to even bring up — a bug in the export program means that every single comment on this site will get attributed to “anonymous” on the new site. This makes me just sick, but there's nothing at all I can do about it
Oh no… That's a real shame. But the bright side is, no one will know all those old, idiotic comments are mine.
And I don't mind re-registering, for what it's worth.
It's a terrible shame. I can edit the names back in, and over a period of many years I might do that for some of the more popular reviews, but still…
Trying not to focus on that since I can't change it. And thanks — I know many people won't mind registering again, just seems sort of annoying. Will give it all more thought — we won't move for at least another month.
Eesh, just read this exchange. I do think that will be a real loss of history and the archivist in me is squirming. Would it be possible to keep up the original NST as a mirror site somewhere, so that even if the names aren't publicly accessible we know they're out there…somewhere, LOL–?
I'm always forgetting how unstable the 'net still is.
A, it literally makes me ill to think about it. I meant to move last year, and this is the reason I didn't. I've come to realize they're never going to fix it, & I've got to move on. I will have a copy of the site on my hard drive, and as I said, as I have time over the years I'll try to edit some of the names back in. I don't know what else I can do…if I could afford it, I'd hire a programmer who could extract the files properly, but I just can't afford that.
Ah. Well I know you won't state publicly how much it would cost, but I just have two words for you: tip jar.
Many of my favorite webcomics artists run tip jars through paypal on their sites. A couple of them have had one-time fundraisers in order to cover printing costs. Might be something to consider for the move. You have a lot of very grateful readers out here…
Somehow this doesn't seem like your style, but I couldn't help making the suggestion. Shutting up now — don't want to contribute to making you feel ill!
A, I'd state it if I knew. Someone told me the price could be in the 5 figures, but I've no idea if that is accurate or not, and frankly am so swamped just trying to get ready to move while keeping this going every day that I haven't had time to look into it — and for that matter, just figuring out how/where to look into it would be time-consuming. It's already going to cost me to move. If someone appeared who could extract the site properly for WordPress migration for say, $500, I'd take it, but 5 figures or — even 4 figures! — is out of the question.
And don't worry, you don't need to shut up. I should have given WAY more thought to where I started blogging, but of course, hindsight is 20/20, right?
Hello Robin, We just so appreciate everything you do for us and for supplying this daily fix! I live in Kenya and work late almost every day. Time zone-wise NST is my reward near midnight – a gem to crown the day, the hot chocolate before bed. I agree it's a shame that ultimately archiving the comment-name match will be time-consuming and/or costly – but it seems there's nothing to do about that now. What you CAN do something about is: pls know that it would be NO effort to sign in again – I think most of us would prefer the exclusivity that would bring — imagine those endless general comments diluting our aldehydes, cyphres and Chanel Beiges!
Love,
Ida
Hello Ida,
Thanks for chiming in (and for you very kind words). Maybe what we need to do is run a poll & see what everyone thinks about the new site & whether or not it should require a login.
I'm for a poll!