I am currently doing maintenance on the blog: I have disabled some of the previous functionality by removing nearly all the plugins. Hopefully this will solve the problems and I can rebuild the site with safer plugins. Please be patient during the process.
Please Note: Authors may of course continue to post new posts. Commenters can comment as usual (with no ability to edit your comments or add rich text formatting unless you know html). Carry on as normal. The site will just look rather bloggish for the next few hours.
I must say Brock has been like a box of chocolates today. Every time I open it up I never know what I’m going to get. However it keeps getting better and better and seems to be pretty zippy too. Sorry you’ve had to do all this extra work though, Petros. BTW, I see “Financial Contributions” has moved location. That’s easier to spot now under “Administrative” (in the black section at the bottom). Good work and thank you!
“ask your questions” is the only Place to stick unrelated discussions. Maybe there ought to be a separate Place called “new info” or some catchy name
Mark Twain…
That is a good idea.
Maybe a thread just called “New Articles of General interest.” The “Ask your FATCA Question” thread has been used by me (and others) for FATCA related articles. I think that still works for FATCA specific issues. However, I agree there are many other stories that would be good to have reference source for later use. Some good ones often get buried in other threads until headlined as a post, but when you want to quickly scroll through to find old stuff, it does become difficult.
For me personally, after finding bookmarking in a browser as too cumbersome, I have been using Bitly to make shortened links that are easier to search on when you want to pull out an old article. That might be something you could look at doing personally too.
Usually whenever I click on a recent comment from a given post I am taken directly to that particular comment, which is very convenient and time efficient.
However, if I click to read a recent comment from any of the “ask your questions” threads or the “relinquishment and renunciation data” and “consulate report directory” threads I am not taken directly to the comment I had clicked to read. Instead, I am taken to a comment page back in time a few days. Hence, a lot of time is lost scrolling forward to find the comment that I had clicked to read.
Is there a possibility to improve this?
Also, I like the proposal from Just Me about creating a new thread called “New Articles of General interest.”
My .02 for what it’s worth.
@John, If anyone knows how to fix this problem, I’d be interested in hearing about it. As it is, I am considering implementing SEO by Yoast, which recommends changing the permalinks in order to optimize the way that Search Engines treat your posts. SEO by Yoast also comes with a redirection program so old links should still work. This could perhaps fix the problem, but I have no idea.
[Notamused (see below) suggests a work around by hitting the comments link at the top of the page which takes you immediately to the page with the newest comments on it.]
Re: workaround. Yes, that works. Instead of manually editing the URL, however, you can also click on the comments link just after the title and it will also take you to the page with the most recent comments.
For example:
1) Click on one of the most “Recent Comments” from the sidebar, e.g. “Petros on Renunciation and Relinquishment of United States Citizenship: Discussion thread (Ask your questions)”
2) After being redirected to some previous comment, click on the link “1,774 Comments” as below, and it will take you to the last page.
“Renunciation and Relinquishment of United States Citizenship: Discussion thread (Ask your questions)
Posted on January 13, 2012 by Petros Posted in Issues regarding US persons abroad 1,774 Comments”
i had a problem where i was redirected to a naming site. It is now fixed, thanks.
@Mark Twain, thanks. That’s one less headache for me.
Workarounds are a sign of ill health and/or inattention. The dysfunction seems to be associated with thread bloat. It’s doubtful that WordPress threads was designed to grow indefinitely. Renunciation and Relinquishment now stands at 1777 postings. Constipation. I already made a suggestion that ongoing items should be broken into chronological sub-segments, and I mostly got trashed for piping up about that and other kludges and wobbles. It was hard not to relish a little Schadenfreude when the Brock bus blew a tire shortly afterward. It does look like this particular ailment could be fixed with minor surgery.
That’s a good work around from notamused. I was fuming (ever so slightly 😉 ) about that little quirk but I didn’t want to say anything because it’s been hard enough for Petros just to get things up and running again. Now I’m thinking (palm slap to forehead), “Doh! Why didn’t I think of that?”
@usxcanada
I have seen your comments before and acknowledged them. I know absolutely nothing about Word Press,so I have no idea if what you say is valid or not, but you seem knowledgeable and will accept on faith that you might have some good points. I haven’t noticed that you were ‘mostly trashed” for previous suggestions, but why “relish a little Schadenfreude over a blown tire?” Whatever the problem, it has resulted in a better site, and I appreciate the work that Petros has put into this. Maybe you could contact Petros personally, and see if you can volunteer some assistance and expertise if you have a better way and want to make it better. I am sure that help would be appreciated,
@USX, you have a point about the size of the thread. However, work arounds, which I’ve been using ever since I’ve owned computers and smart devices, are par for the course in many cases, not necessarily a sign of constipation. Why should the WordPress software get lost when trying to find a permalink? Evidently, the software can’t handle large threads but is that our fault or the software’s inability to handle what seems to be a reasonable request?
My iPhone on/off button stopped working, and it is outside of warranty. Is that a problem? Yes. Is there a work around? Yeah, and I’m not buying a new smart phone until the work arounds no longer solve my problems.
I’m not sure what the solution would be to this problem. A discussion forum probably deserves discussion forum software, but we are using blogging software, which has its own specialties and advantages. We tried adding a forum for a year. But when the year expired–the forum fell into disuse some months ago–no one even seemed notice that it was gone. We were going to add it to the domain, but then the volunteer ran into an obstacle with the website and gave up. So we are left with a blog and no forum.
Today I noticed that the theme that we use from Cyberchimps has an upgrade. Cyberchimps has publically stated that if you have incompatibility issues with WordPress 3.5 that its because you have to upgrade your theme (http://cyberchimps.com/2012/12/having-compatibility-issues-with-wordpress-3-5/ ). So now, three days after I’ve upgraded the theme and rebuilt the site, I should upgrade and rebuild the site a second time, if I don’t want to face compatibility issues. But if you don’t want to rebuild your customizations everytime, here are the instructions for creating a “child-theme”:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
That’s pretty complex stuff for a wordpress novice like myself. Now the people paying me to keep this site going have shown gratitude for my work by covering all my out-of-pocket expenses and probably most if not all of my labour costs (@$25 per hour), and I do not begrudge the work I’ve done, but I do have to fit it into my other research pursuits. Thus, I allowed upgrade issues fall behind, but apparently so did the developers of the various plugins, because it wasn’t until I disabled most of them that we were able to regain control of the site. Here is the explanation from cyberchimps why it is necessary to stay on top of upgrades:
I take from this that we are not the only ones who have ever run into problems trying to maintain a website. Your Schadenfreude over this issue is a source of bemusement for me but hardly anything that I will fret over, though it seems to have gotten under the skin of Just Me. If you have any constructive tips, I’d be happy to consider them.
Thanks for letting us have a look into the complexity of the work you are doing to maintain this site, Petros. Most of us really, really appreciate all you’re doing and your ability to have gotten the site up and running again, quickly and effectively after the sudden instability. Your fixes seemed to have worked well. There is a balance and you seem to have found it.
Just Me, too, was correct in pointing usx your way if there are indeed specific fixes that could be done that don’t involve the use of all of your time in constant upgrading.
Just Me – You speak true. But it seems to have taken a blown tire to get that better site? It clearly is a better site, even with the loss of some previous functionalities. Just look at the response time, a basic parameter. No longer in the background do we hear the grinding and smell the burning. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – such a natural human tendency. So once whatever does break, you do get around to it. You have to. Volunteering is not that simple. Without a lot of commonality / ongoing tech interchange / documentation / etc / having multiple fingers poking around the real innards of even something as simple as WordPress is a recipe for cooking up disaster. I have no way of evaluating to what extent Brock problems have been aggravated by multiple administrators. I see my main contribution to this particular agitational enterprise as the USxCanada InfoShop site. I don’t seek any financial support for the considerable time that has gone into that, so suggestions that I might do more bounce right off a rubber eardrum. The key notion here is networked and distributed. Brock would be far more robust if it existed as a constellation, and harder to take out.
Petros – Thanks for the glimpses into your engine room. Strange coincidence: just in this past week I was poking around with that “child theme” issue. It looks like a bedrock solution, as much as there is one. Familiar dilemma of trading off up-front agonies to preclude even worse down-the-line pains. I share your loathing of frivolous techie tweaks that bust up perfectly usable set-ups. A foundation principle is to avoid paying for the new. A primary strategy is to minimize using anything that does not come as a standard part of the OS package itself, whatever you are operating. Minimize use of third-party applications, apps, configurations, plug-ins, etc. (Do not blame a plug-in developer for not keeping up.) One other thing I concluded from that poking around: my next WordPress site probably would build on the Twenty Twelve theme because (a) it is WordPress developed (b) the predecessors rank among most popular (c) it is newer and therefore may have a longer life. It already sounds like the upgrade frequency issue is giving you a good reason to regret selection of CyberChimp. Curious why you did choose that. Most software has eventual limits of some kind, and it seems foolish to blame the software’s “inability.” My two best suggestions for Brock get repeated now for the last time. Yes, I have already made these concrete suggestions. This time with more detail. (1) Break up the mega-threads into more processable chunks. Control a mother-of-all-threads by leaving the comment stream functional only on the latest chunk, until that in turn gets closed in favor of the next one. By month might not be too big: 1777 / 13 = 137 comments per chunk. Look at using pages instead of posts for the sidebar growers – maybe you are using pages, I can’t tell – and subordinated pages for the successive chronological chunks. (2) For each and every day (or maybe week?) establish a chat farm where anyone is welcome to peep up about anything they feel like. Then castigate wild digression that gets tossed onto any handy thread that has a topic posting. Stuff would be more findable, the general conversation stream more locatable, and the ugliness of scattergun posting to multiple threads could stop. More rapidly becomes less. A final minor snark: a web site can pretty well be a set-and-forget project. I’ve done it. Sites that are years and years old, still doing what they did. It all depends on how jazzy you think your stuff has to be, and how much interaction you think you want to facilitate. And ultimately lastly, WordPress can do just fine for the Brock interaction task. It just needs a little more of the foregoing type of management. That forum stuff sucks.
@USX, Your suggestion of breaking up the larger threads would require too much work. However, we could manage it from henceforth by creating a new page for each one of those unwieldy threads. I will see if I enlist my editors to help (it would creating a new thread and having a link to the old one). This at least stop the misdirection for a few days.
My objection to that solution is that it seems like just another work-around, and that it doesn’t actually solve the problem when the new threads also become large (except by creating a new thread each time it gets big). It seems to me that smarter software would be better solution. SEO by Yoast suggests changing the permalink file name structure. I wonder if that would help at all. Your suggestion that one use a page instead of a post seems to go in this direction–of simplifying the file name structure of the permalinks for comments as well. See http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ (SEO=Search Engine Optimization).
Petros –
I think your move to restart those big threads will pay off. Never having tried to retro-segment a comment stream, I’m not sure how much work that would be, or how feasible in that format. Another approach would be to leave the now-frozen thread as is for access as was, including the linkages – the original put into archive, as it were, which you have done. And then perhaps also to grab that previous comment stream as a single file, chop it into 13 chunks or whatever, by month (or quarter), and to post those chunks together with the new page as a browsable archive. That could be a pretty simple and fast task, assuming the mega-file could be had as raw html and not the pretty presentation side. And then to proceed on a month-chunk basis going forward, with only the one ordinary structure. The simplest chunking going forward might be quarterly [bit of humor possible there, since the renunciation stats are supposed to be quarterly also].
The permalink rupture generated when Brock moved from .com to .ca destroyed linkages at USxCanada InfoShop which I so far refuse to fix. Refusal now compounded by possibility of second rupture!
Work-around and “smarter” software? C’mon Petros. That’s like wanting to complain that you can’t drive a VW Golf straight up a steep rocky hillside – and pox on the manufacturer for not making a smarter car. It’s up to the user to understand the tool and its inevitable limitations.
Simplifying file names. That’s mainly a workaround handy for humans who want to look at and use them. But insignificant to computer processing of the filenames. “Optimization” looks like a facet of PR that has no relationship to how a computer crunches.
Permalinks to post should have worked. The comments during the last changeover received completely new permalinks. That was beyond my control.
I have to admit I struggle to keep up with Brock. I try not to miss comments because I find very useful info nuggets amongst them. My method of doing this has flaws however and requires “checking in” pretty much every time I pass by the computer throughout the day. I used to just get caught up and then remember the last 4 to 6 gravatars in the Recent Comments section to tell me where to pick things up next time BUT the gravatars are gone now (time stamps too). (Not suggesting Petros bring them back because that could mean another of those dratted “plug ins”.) I now must screenshot the top of the comments column after getting caught up (my brain won’t record words, only gravatars). Of course, if I’m way behind all I can do is work my way up from the bottom of the column and hope that not too much has scrolled away out of existence. If anyone has a better method of keeping up with Brock would you mind describing it? I’m lucky to have lots of time most days to read and learn at Brock so my main concern is finding some kind of method to prevent missing something. BTW, it looks like clicking on a recent comment is getting me very close to that comment instead of many days back like before. That’s a good thing.
@Em..
Yea, keeping up has it’s challenges. I am a bit like you, I look for the nuggets and don’t like to miss anything.
I rarely use the side list of recent comments, as by the time I get back, the good ones might have already slipped below the time horizon. Although I do occasionally check.
I do agree that with the ‘date/ time’ stamp now gone, you don’t know what the time span is from most recent, to the one that is about to fall off. Is it 2 hours or 12 hours worth of comments. Don’t know. If it doesn’t clog things up, it would be good to have it back. Gravatars only helped me marginally so I don’t particularly care about them.
I tend to use the Archive button (next to author login) in the header bar a lot to look for old threads with comments I recall. I like the clean listing of post titles by month and day. If I am looking for a posting from the past, I just use the Find Function “CTRL F” and type in a key world to quickly locate something I want, like (for example) all the threads with DATCA in the title.
I almost always subscribe to the “Notify me of follow-up comments by email” below the Post Comment button. That means, that I have to subscribe to every Post if I don’t want to miss any new comments. This can clog up ones email, but I am pretty good at deleting quickly each individual email comment, if I don’t have time at the moment to read it. Later, I just go to the most recent comment notice in my email for a particular posting and read everything that has come in since the last time I checked.
Finally, I do find everything that Petros has done with this new blog format makes for much easier reading, and really like the Resources clarity.
I have re-subscribed by email for all NEW POSTs, and that is working VERY Well in this version. It did NOT work in the last.
I wished we had some EDIT function back for the comments we make on Posts where we are not the author. I have dyslexia I think, and often need to correct what I recently posted. Having that 30 minutes to get your ‘theres’ and ‘theirs’ right, certainly helped.
Don’t know if those tips were what you were looking for, but that is how I am using things right now.
@ Just Me
Thanks for those hints. I simply cannot clog my e-mail with “notifies” though. Our e-mail service was “upgraded” awhile back and it is so slow now that I can make lunch while I wait for it to open and when it finally does open it takes multiple clicks, swearing, another wait, and more swearing to view a particular e-mail. (Believe me, I have had words with this provider but they will not fix the problem and eventually the service techs stopped responding to my “feedback” which they claimed they wanted when the change took place.) I’ve been using the archives more since you pointed it out awhile ago and yes, if miss the EDIT feature too but if it means messing things up with those dratted “plug-ins” then I can live with my mistakes and maybe even a freudian slip now and then. I really do like how zippy things are here now, especially considering what I have to endure in my e-mail box.
if miss the EDIT feature too … should be I miss the EDIT feature too … obviously I relied too much on it before. 😉
@Em…
You say your email server is slow. Have you thought about switching to a web browser based email system, like hotmail, yahoo or gmail. Or doesn’t your service provider have one that you can use? That should solve that slow download and open problem for you. I have given up Outlook and Thunderbird email clients years ago on my last hard drive crash. The browser based systems are as zippy as IBS.
mvh
@ Just Me
Hotmail, yahoo, gmail – NO! Never! My e-mail comes with our cable provider and it’s pretty much the only game in this small town. I will continue to comply and complain. I think what happened is they turned a practical, efficient table fork into a overloaded Swiss army knife trying to make it all things to all people (like smart phoners for instance). It’s what they call “progress”. Besides I don’t want to change my purple gravatar (not red, not blue, just right) and I have a strict policy – no more passwords than my head can hold. 😉
Em –
Just Me had a good suggestion for you. Sorry to see you go so no never so fast. That’s just blowing a big prejudicial hole in your very own foot.
Your beloved purple gravatar is nothing but a piece of default code. You could capture the graphic and reuse it elsewhere if you’ve become attached. Or a techier friend could set that bit up for you. Not a biggie.
Email facility directly connected with a “service provider” tends to be crap. Comes with? Like saying the plastic wrap on a grocery item “comes with” and you should eat it too? The only part that has much value is the internet connection, your pipeline to whoever you want to deal with in freedom. I’ve never used my service provider account ever. Others who do routinely go bouncey because they’ve violated their pitiful mailbox limitation and been shut off. Again, Just Me is right on – in over 20 years of emailing I have never used a client to pull the stuff onto my own machine. And almost nothing has ever been lost, except for a few times hitting a wrong key.
The only game in this small town? You are in cyberspace and you can go anywhere. You are not “cabled” to that abuser. If you continue to “comply” then maybe don’t complain?
Rethink this one? These comments are offered in the same spirit as nudging away at someone absolutely convinced that it is in their interest to remain an extraterritorial US person. (After all, that status “came with” whatever caused it. Green card in your case, wasn’t it?) No offense intended. HTH
@ usxcanada
I meant the “no never” but a lot of the rest was kidding. I’ll try not to do that again.