Homeschool Journal Dot Net

Hitting the big time

Andrea — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:08:22 +0000

Our sitewide feed here at HSJ has been listed at AllTop in the homeschooling section. This is a human-created directory of the *best* sites out there in each section.

You guys are writing the awesome content, so give yourselves a hand.

Friends List

Andrea — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 18:46:29 +0000

Want to test a new feature? Go to your Dashboard and look at the new submenus. Basically you can keep track of other blogs on the system and when they are updated.

As always, point out any bugs or strange occurances.

Magicland theme fixed

Andrea — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:49:00 +0000

I was alerted to some issues with the Magicland theme, which I have since fixed. The counter code is now in place if you use it, and also the hard-coded items at the bottom have now been widgetized, so you have TWO sidebar and THREE columns in the footer, making a total of five “sidebars”.

As always, if you find an issues in a theme, just drop me a line. I’m swamped but I’ll get to it eventually. (Faster if more than one person emails. )

Curriculum for sale

Andrea — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:53:11 +0000

One of our members has some homeschooling curriculum for sale here, so check it out and see if there’s anything you need.

YES you are allowed to sell things from your blog. Just in case you were wondering.

Stable Status

Andrea — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:34:36 +0000

Hi all, sorry for the long delay in any kind of news. I’ve been working hard at some other things to clear up some time for exciting new things headed this way (and yes, tackingling the huge list of stuff on hold).

The system has been pretty stable since our move to a new server from the same host. The trouble turned out to be a massive hardware failure.

So, since we are good, check out the plugins menu and see some new widgets.

I’m working on that image thumbnail creation and upload issues people are having.

Oh, and thanks a bunch for all the birthday wishes.

Birthday greetings

Andrea — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 02:16:19 +0000

Andrea has retired for the evening. When she wakes in the morning, it will be her birthday. She spent most of her birthday last year on the couch recovering from major surgery. I would like to make this birthday more memorable. Please leave a comment on this post to send her a birthday wish.

We’re in for a rough weekend

Andrea — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:26:34 +0000

Hi there, patient users. We are *still* having ongoing server issues that we can’t quite pin down. Our host is going to help us figure this out and in a couple days is moving us to a new, clean server to see if that helps. When I get a firm timeframe for that, I’ll let you know.

Meanwhile, if things go wonky, user blogs don’t load or general craziness, most of the time it comes back within a half hour.

Our sincerest apologies and we’d like to say this is frustrating the heck out of us too.

Ongoing server issues and stats

Andrea — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 15:07:42 +0000

Sorry *again* for all the recent downtime. We recently upgrade the hosting account to a whopping 768MB of RAM. That’s memory. Check your own computer’s RAM for a comparison. We get our wespace from here if you’re curious. And yes, we have plans to move up to a dedicated server in the near future.

It’s been a while since I’ve done any stat reporting and since I was poking around the backend, I thought I’d snag the results for January.

Unique visitors 38546
Number of visits 105622
Pages 793529
Hits 1694888
Bandwidth 28.55 GigaBytes

We’ve been consistently getting over a million hits a month every month since August. Mostly I keep seeing awesome statistics & math lessons when I look at the charts.

Server issues (again) and Flickr

Andrea — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:20:02 +0000

Sorry for the down time lately - the server has been having “issues” which I need to pin down.

Also, the Flickr plugin was causing issues for many many people - and each one slightly different ti seemed, so I’ve removed it temporarily. Seeing as the original plugin author no longer supports it, I’ll have to fix it myself or find something else. Meanwhile, you can still post flick pics manually. It’s a little tedious, but it works.

Spam word issues and bigger thumbnails

Andrea — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:57:52 +0000

If visitors have been having issues leaving comments on you blog, check to make sure the anti-spam word is showing up when you are logged out. If it is not, it’s a problem with the theme. It should be right around the area where a vistor types in their name, email and website. Just email me the theme you are using and let me know if it’s missing, I can fix it right quickly. As far as I know, most themes are catching it, but I did have to fix one this evening.

Also, while working on another project, I figured out how to change the default thumbnail size. It won’t be so tiny any more! I made it go from a skimpy 128 pixels all the way up to 200pixels. This doesn’t affect photo thumbnails that have already been made, but will be done on any picture upload from this point onward. Enjoy.