Last night, while normal people slept, I completely redid the profile area. Your profile now consists of several information boxes which will try to arrange themselves nicely on the screen. New sections include: After a rocky start, because I had made a tiny but consequential error, the update has now …

Today I will be working on integrating persistent object caching. In theory, you should not see any problems. Also, in theory, the site should be faster and more responsive as a result. Update: It turns out that, with our current set-up, no. As I am on a speed-up and optimise …

I was looking at the fabulous new source of book and author news – Outside News – and noticed that the front page feed needed work. I have added some CSS tweaks to make headlines look a bit more organised. I’m fairly confident this will work for all screen sizes …

Currently, this site has some advanced DDoS protection in place. This is good because it almost certainly reduces spam and keeps the site relatively fast. However, the DDoS protection conflicts with ActivityPub. This is a protocol that allows people on other sites to follow you, your blog, and the news …

I have been tuning up various parts of the site. Here is a list of the changes so far: If anything breaks that you notice please let me know.

We’ve been getting a lot of spam lately. This is partly because Google needs to lock down their Gmail service from being used to generate email addresses automatically. It may also be because we are starting to show up in more search results. Whatever the reason, spam is no fun …

I’m not sure what is going on over at Google HQ but their Gmail services have become a significant enabler of spam. Around three-quarters of the spam I remove from Author Buzz comes with Gmail accounts. It has been quite some time since the last legit signup used a Gmail …

Yes, it might very well be. Once I am confident that this movement (and the technology I am using to join in) is stable, I will roll it out to Author Buzz UK. After all, Author Buzz was created as a social network for authors. So why not decentralise and …

I just finished running a network-wide update. The update went smoothly. Everything looks fine as far as I can tell. However, if there are problems, please report them to the help and support group and I will look into them. Thanks.

Today marks the day when we are sufficiently confident that the transfer from HTTP to HTTPS is complete. To mark this special occasion, we have begun to remove the plugin that was bridging the gap. So far, we have not seen any mixed source error messages. So hopefully we can …