In which I hate my webdesign like the pest.

Expect changes.

Or not. It might be I start playing around and end up in the same place than before. That happened more than once. I’d really love to have some webdesign made by a pro whose work I love, but there’s no way I can justify that expense for something that’s basically a toy.

Since Akismet got me way to many false positives without even admitting it had a false positive after I painstakenly dragged the comments out of the spamfolder, I’ve killed that plugin in favour for Defensio. Akismet has pissed me off, especially since help can’t be found anywhere or is horribly outdated. And since false positives are more annoying than spam itself, I’m going to try giving it the curb.

So I’ll give Defensio a trial run of a month or two and then we’ll see how well it works.

Anyway, there’s a second thing I’ve changed: Since spammers prefer to target older posts, I will automatically close comments on all posts older than thirty days. That will curb the sheer ammount of spam this blog gets and it’s rare I get comments on anything but the latest five, ten posts.

I hope that will help.

I like writing. I like blogging.

But I dislike translating.

So I won’t.

Novel concept, hm? Stop laughing, it’s at least novel to me.

Having to translate a post from one language into the other is the biggest time drain, but until now I always felt I kind of had to have a German version. Why? I don’t know. Propably perfectionism. Either way, having to write two versions of the same post is the main reason I post so rarely.

Well, Traces of Chaos will stay bilingual, simply because because the story and dialoge is written in German – and I like having a German translation around. But here in the blog? It doesn’t matter. I doubt I have a single reader who does not understand English. I might revise this decision later, but for now I’ll blog in English only.

But in other news? I have a much wider choice in blog templates now!

As you see this webpage is so fresh, the construction’s still going on and the paint’s still damp.

So what happened?

My webpresences have been privately hosted for two years, but now a hardware failure put a stop to this. *sniff*  My former host has been  very helpful in transferring my domains¹, but small but significant parts of my pages were specifically tailored to the conditions on my old server. I had to decide between spending ages fixing the broken plugins and recreating links or starting fresh.

Well, I like new beginnings.

And what’s next?

Right now I’m concentrating on fixing the skin and gallery here on Imaginary Skies – Bilingual blogs need alot of tweaks in the details, even if there are pretty good plugins to take care of the backend by now.

Trarr.net will need even more work and I’m not ready to tackle it just yet. I’m making good progress with the page design and the comic itself, I just don’t know how long it will ultimately take. You’ll see.

Thanks for reading us so far and see you around. I’ve got lots of plans. Maybe I can even execute them.