Progress
3

Stand by for changes

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 …

Progress
4

Author Buzz Updates

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.

close up photo of plastic bottle
spam

My ongoing war on spam

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 …

shallow focus photo of man holding floor brush ceramic figurine
spam

Should we block Google’s Gmail?

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 …

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Features
4

Is IndieWeb coming to Author Buzz UK?

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 …

blue metal tool
Progress

Big update finished

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.

blurred motion of illuminated railroad station in city
Progress

This update should make things slightly faster.

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 …

fast car
Features

Mobile content and faster sites

Announcing a way to make your Author Buzz site faster and a way to target mobile users with speically written content. Today we have added two exciting new features – one of which was written by Google. Faster content for better SEO Google make no secret of the fact that …

fast car
Progress

May’s updates

This months updates include speed boosts, CSS fixes, and better cache use. Improved: ab-in.uk has more aggressive caching (and should be even faster) Fixed: A minor CSS error was making some buttons look broken. Tweaked: Cache system – let me know if anything breaks Updated: Many themes and plugins Removed: …

fast car
Progress

Now updating

I have just finished writing and testing a new approach to rendering the front page that should make it faster. The first (of three) updates is about to be uploaded. If anything goes squiffy, it will only be for a few minutes.

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