Website

I am working on a mobile version of SwampBubbles for the smart phone audience in the Web site. Please post your thoughts on what you want to see here.

One user on the test mobile site I had up for the last few days had to say:

Soon I will have some time to work on the Web site and I want to know what are your comments suggestions ideas. How is the speed of the site? New ideas? What do you like and not like (I don't care if you repeat some outstanding issues). Your comments or suggestions will help determine what I do the end of the month. Is there too much going on? Too little?

In an effort to cut down on the early morning spam on this site, I have tweaked the server to prevent access from those who are causing me a pain. This is mostly on a country basis but some of these tweaks could cause some problems with local access. If you experience any problems accessing the site please e-mail me at admin at swampbubbles.com .

From the Toledo Blade:Toledoan Hostetler, 31, is one of six invited to design a premium 16-ounce bottle for Mountain Dew that debuts as a limited edition on 9/9/09. Silk screened on an aluminum vessel with a pry-off cap, Hostetler's design sports 10 eyes, each about two inches wide. The bottom eye is a closed line of lashes. In an abbreviated spiral climbing toward the cap, eyes open gradually until the topmost eye pops with an emerald iris the size of a quarter.

“The idea is that by the time you finish the bottle you're wide awake,” says Mr. Hostetler, whose contribution is attributed to UPSO, his creative moniker.

(Link)

There may be some downtime later this afternoon going into the evening as I do some site updates and possibly switch hosts.

I apologize for the site problems recently. I am working hard to get everything running smooth. It will be rough over the next couple of days. Please have patience. This should be the last rough spot. Where I will be moving it should allow for unlimited growth.

Ok everyone, I have asked several times to help me make the profanity filter work better for you by asking you to send me problems you have with the filter. I have not received one suggestion/issue. The filtering service is provided by http://webpurify.com. They are the service for PBS sites so you can see why they are a little extreme. But I can exempt words by adding them to a whitelist. I personally have been caught up with it two times but a quick reword got me around it. But we can make the list more palatable for our site by creating the custom whitelist.

I have created a new group for trusted users so that if I add you to it, you no longer have to deal with the captcha. The disturbing trend is that users in India are registering on the site and posting spam comments. Since they can read English, they can get around the spam filters quite easily. The spam filters have blocked the bot spam quite well but the human spam is still there and I don't want to remove the ability to block spam for registered users. But you should not be collateral damage to the spam wars. Since I manually make you a trusted user, it may take a while to do so.

So I have a legal question for all of you. A particular user has been in the penalty box and is told not to post or comment on the site for at least 2 months. Now it is up to 7 months, but this user keeps coming here and posting. So imagine you have a house and you tell someone they are no longer welcome, but yet they keep trying to get in. There is legal cause to file a police report if someone does that to your physical property. Do any of you know of a situation where this has happened on a virtual property? Where someone files a report to keep this person out?

RIP for Michael Jackson i truely love him my son just recently song who's loving you at the apollo that song has won my son 3 apollo amateur nites and he will be back at the apollo on oct. 7,2009 for his final amateur nite performance he was also at the apollo's 75th anniversary gala honoring Patti Labelle, Quincy Jones, and Bill and Camille Cosby singing that song so our family truely will miss this legend his music has inspired my 14 year old son and is winning him lot's of recognition. Thanks Mike Zan and Zac from Toledo, ohio love you

As part of the updates I am implementing, I have decided to give everyone the ability to edit their own stories, events, and blog posts. It will work the same way with comments, you won't be able to delete any of your submissions but you can go back and reword, correct and edit items that you wish. It is retroactive meaning it applies to anything you submitted from the beginning of the site.

Have you noticed any issues since moving to the new server? Please let me know.

So, after a rough few days, most everything is back to normal for this site and the other sites attached to it. I had to move from a semi-shared host to a dedicated server and there was some confusion and miscommunication about DNS settings which made two sites run at the same time for a period of 1.5 days. I have consolidated the comments and content from the old site over here, so everything should be back.

*I thank you for your patience and it should have been smoother than what it was.*

Why can I not find George Kennedy in either the Ohio or the Michigan sex offender sites? I'm just curious if this man is a child pedifiler or did something stupid in his younger years and has that label for life because of it.
Was he from another state?
http://www.mipsor.state.mi.us/
http://www.esorn.ag.state.oh.us/Secured/p21_2.aspx

Or maybe I just need to learn to use the sites more efficiently.

Site currently in Read Only mode. Will be put back to normal once upgrade is done. 5/28 status: just a few more things before it can be put back to normal. Hopefully before 8am EST.

Due to capacity issues I will have to make some temporary changes to make the Web host happy. There may be brief periods of outages today which may extend to an hour or two. The other sites SwampFeeds, SwampStation and Great Open Swamp will be suspended until these changes are made. Please be patient over the next 24 hrs.

Today is a good day to give you an update on some site updates.
1. A new notification system has been installed on the site. If you like to get the latest posting updates by e-mail, the service has been greatly improved. You can now subscribe to individual content types, like stories and polls and it also gives you a comment update too. Basically it is the old system on steroids. The old system has been turned off, so if you are interested in getting e-mail updates or to have them re-established, please do so on the "my account" option on the right then choose notifications.

This is one of the smartest books of the decade! It is thoughtful, entertaining and enlightening. Written by an investment industry “insider”, the author reveals industry weaknesses and hidden secrets,-notably how they pile on fee after fee, effectively lowering investor’s returns by up to 80%. I can warmly recommend this book to any person interested in improving the return on his or her investment portfolio performance. Kneisley’s thoughts are in line with academic research.

 Remember, the site cache is turned on (note the alert on the right) to increase the performance of the site, but it may also affect you. If you notice that you get logged out when you did not, or if you get access errors or if you appear to be logged out or logged back in it is completely normal. Your Web browser is saving a version of the site on your hard drive which is why you appear to jump in and out of being logged out. THE FIX: Just press the refresh button once or twice and things will clear up. No need to log in again or to create more than one post.

Since i posted a story on ladies turning to stripping to make ends meet, i saw this and wondered how people feel about belly dancing? :) i think it is very cool, and sexy, but not in a sexual way. at least that's not how it's intended if it's done correctly. :)

Not much of a surprise Fred Lefebvre hangs up on a caller because of a difference of opinion on the politics of Toledo. Fred said the audio of the conversation would be posted on the website as the caller of the day.

But yet again he does not follow though and it is nowhere to be found. I wonder if Brian Wilson told him not to post it.

It was great to hear a caller stymie the self proclaimed right winger of Toledo.