I’ll be back when I have more time. Until then, keep smearing colored mud on flat surfaces.

Oh, how I hate those parasites.

In case you’re not aware, comment spam is valuable because Google and other search engines rank sites based on how many other sites link to them. Google tends to filter out any site that’s just a bunch of crappy links, so just making sites solely for that purpose is a waste of time. But a link in a comment from a site Google considers legitimate (this site has a Google page rank of 4 out of 10, which is not too bad for a blog with a limited audience) does count. Enough such links, spread out over the internet, gets a site onto the first page of Google search rankings and decreases the cost of purchasing ads.

That’s worth money, so scumbags write programs to scour the internet, finding sites where automated comments can be entered. They are often written to look kind of like a generic nice comment, such as “Excellent points. Keep up the good work!” with hidden links. If you write a real comment that looks generic like that, it’s likely to end up in the spam filter.

Sigh. Sorry for the non-art post, but it’s kind of frustrating.

Next, I will attempt to clean a bunch of old, unused tables out of the database. That may cause some problems with the blog and I may have to restore from backups.

I apologize for any problems over the next couple of days. I’ve been avoiding this for a long time, but it really has to be done if this site is to work the way it’s supposed to. Please let me know if you have any problems with the site.

Thanks.

Updates

24 April 2009: So far, so good. The blog is running a lot faster now. I’ve recovered some recent comments that were in the database, but had become invisible. The archives page is now displaying properly. All the posts and other stuff seem to work correctly.

2 May 2009: Still working fine (he writes while superstitiously knocking wood to banish the avenging spirits of tempted fate). I wish I’d done this a long time ago, as it was much easier than I thought it would be.

So for now we are back at the old version of the site, which seems to be working just like it always was. I apologize for any problems you may have had here in the last few days. I will test much more extensively before I try anything like that again.

I think I’m back. I should be able to do some posting, catch up with responses to comments, etc. My apologies to anyone I haven’t responded to in a timely manner.

I’m also considering some site changes that would involve a switch from WordPress (blogging software) to Drupal (Content Management System). Support request: if there’s anyone out there who could help figure how to configure wp2drupal module so that content could be migrated, I’d be very grateful.

Thanks to everyone who has come by and stayed awhile. And thank especially to those who have contributed to the blog by commenting or—in Katarzyna’s case—by posting.

I’d like to take this opportunity to reiterate my invitation to others who might want to participate here. If you’d like to blog at ATSH about visual art, send me an email and we can discuss it.

If you put a relevant question into the comments there, I will respond. Of course, my response may be simply to tell you that I don’t know. But feel free to give it a try. It’s not exactly an internet forum, but it will serve for now.

Update

21 June 2008: Of course, the first question (an excellent one) stumped me. More, please. I’ll have a good answer to someone’s question eventually.

I started out, lo these couple of years ago, using the free and easy Blogger service provided by Google. The old version of this blog is still there; I’ll probably get around to deleting it at some point. After a couple of months I got tired of the limitations imposed by blogspot. I had my own domain and host; after a little digging I discovered that my host would install WordPress with just a button press. WordPress imports posts from Blogger, so I installed it and had it do that. I then had to manually import all of my images. That was kind of a pain, but not hard to figure out.

There are a number of free blogging platforms out there; WordPress is one of the most popular. It has its irritations, but it is quite functional and has been extended in various ways by a community of programers who mostly work for free (or for donations).

PHP, SQL, etc.

WordPress works on top of two pieces of software. The first is a database system called MySQL (SQL stand for “structured query language”). The database holds all of text of each post and other information such as the name of the blog, the date and time of each post, etc. WordPress itself is written in a programming language called PHP (which, so far as I can tell, originally stood for “personal home page” and now doesn’t really stand for anything). PHP is used to get information from the database and translate it into information that your web browser can understand. Every time you call up the front page of ATSH, the PHP program gathers information from the database and gives it to your browser. The program knows how many of the most recent posts go on the front page, so it figures out which to use based on their posting date. When you click on, say, a tag such as “egg tempera painting” it pulls every post with that tag from the database and constructs a page with those posts presented in chronological order. And so on.

Themes

WordPress comes with a couple of basic themes, but there are many others available for download. A theme is what controls the look and feel of the blog; the colors, the heading, the number of columns, the interface for moving from one page to another, and so on. Lots of people write WordPress themes and make them available for free. There are others (usually with more extensive or specialized features) that you can buy. I use a free and excellent theme called Tarski.

Plugins

Other people write plugins for WordPress. Like themes, there are many plugins available for free. Plugins extend the basic functionality of WordPress. Like WordPress itself, plugins are pieces of software written in PHP. With most plugins, you install them, turn them on, adjust a couple of settings, and they just work. I have plugins that block spammers from leaving comment spam, for example. Another plugin lets commenters track replies to posts they’ve commented on. Yet another calculates which posts are most “popular” and lets me put a list of popular posts in the sidebar on the left side of the page.

Messing around with plugins

I like fiddling with computer stuff, so I’ve spent some time making the blog look the way I want. With some plugins, that involves getting more technical.

For example, you’ll notice that there is a randomly-selected image in the top corner of the sidebar. I use two plugins to make that happen. One, called Random Image, selects an image at random from posts in whatever category or categories you wish. You can then place this bit of code somewhere:

That that strange-looking string of words and symbols tells Random Image to query the database for a lists of posts in the selected categories I’ve selected and figures out which of those posts are associated with a picture file. It then sticks one of those pictures in the place where I put the PHP code.

The other plugin I need to make this work is called “Executable PHP Widget.” A widget is an item in the sidebar on the left side of the page. WordPress comes with widgets that allow you to type some text to be displayed in the sidebar. Those standard widgets don’t do anything with PHP code—they don’t treat it as programming code to be executed. The Executable PHP widget acts just like a WordPress text widget, except that any PHP code in that kind of widget gets treated as code and executed. I pasted the above Random Image code into the widget, so that the code is executed and I get a random image in the sidebar.

I have no idea how to program with PHP. I didn’t need to in order to get these bits of software to work. That’s one of the great things about software such as WordPress. On the other hand, if you are more scared of code than I am, you can use WordPress without using a plugin such as Random Image. I do think it’s a nice feature for an art blog.

Those are just a few of the details. Let me know if you want to hear more about how this all works, or if this is a waste of time.