misbehaving.net

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes here at misbehaving.net

It's been pretty quiet around here, we know. And yes, we're painfully aware of the ocean of spam that has rushed in to fill the gap.

So here's what's happening.

First, we're cleaning out the gunk. That's a slooooow process, because TypePad only lets us remove 50 comments at a time, and each batch of 50 takes several minutes to process. But I'm hoping we'll be done by the end of the weekend. I spent most of my morning doing this, and I think it's done. Yay!

Second, we're now requiring TypeKey CAPTCHA authentication on comments. I recognize this is a less-than-ideal solution, with serious accessibility problems. But it's better than turning comments off entirely, and it was either CAPTCHA or TypeKey. My suspicion is we'll lose more voices with the latter than the former, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Well, that didn't take long. Two spam comments already, despite the CAPTCHA implementation. So, back to the authenticated comments approach. That means you'll need a TypeKey ID in order to comment. Sorry. :(

Third, we'll be turning off trackbacks for all new posts, and removing have removed the display of trackbacks from the individual entry pages.

Fourth, we'll be removing we've removed the list of "misbehaving elsewhere" blogs on the right side of the page. The problem is that there are so many women who ought to be on there, and simply not enough time in my day to deal with keeping it up to date. I'd love for someone else to take this on, or even create a wiki with that content. Towards that end, I'll save what I've got and pass it on to whomever asks.

Once we've got things a little less out-of-control on the maintenance front, I think it will be easier for all of us to be motivated to post more often. I hope so.

More Misbehavior -- Welcome to Our New Authors!

We're delighted to announce that we've added some new authors to misbehaving.net. If you look over the sidebar, you'll see that Fiona (aka "Foe") Romeo and Hilde Corneliussen now appear on the "misbehaving here" list. They've been in our "misbehaving elsewhere" list for a while, and we're delighted to have them as part of the group of authors.

Both bring international perspectives to the group.

Foe is a Senior Development Producer at the BBC, working in Creative Research and Development on a scenario planning project looking at children's digital lives to 2014. Previously at the BBC she led product development in the identity group (in this context identity refers to a single, secure membership account and associated persona). Prior to joining the BBC she produced women's and parenting sites for the UK's leading ISP and localised Flirtboat, an EU-funded multiplayer game.

Hilde is a researcher at Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen in Norway. Her research interest is about gender and technology. In her Ph.D. thesis (2003) she wrote about how men and women deal with gendered meanings associated with computers. Currently, she is focusing on the Norwegian computer history since the late 1970s, trying to find out how the computer has become gradually interwoven in the Norwegian culture, and how gender is a part of this story.

We're looking forward to their contributions here on the site!

My Desk

Kaye Trammell is making a nice collection of pix of where we blog.

Here's mine. My teapot, my teacup, my pansies, my pencils, my mouse ...
my Sony Vaio didn't make it into the picture.

Site Suggestion Overload!

Wow...we've gotten a ton of great suggestions for the "misbehaving elsewhere" section of the sidebar. I'll be adding names and links this weekend.

It's probably going to be a long enough list that keeping it in that sidebar might be a challenge. So, there are a couple of possibilities.

1) We could go to a three-column layout, and put the names in one sidebar, and the blog miscellany (comments, trackbacks, rss, etc) in another.

2) We could randomize a display of n names on the first page, and provide a link to a separate page with the longer list.

3) We could do some other really clever thing that I'm not thinking of right now, but that you're about to suggest in the comments...