Posts Tagged by administrivia
Google Analytics on my site
| April 22, 2013 | Posted by annathepiper under Housekeeping |
I finally decided to install Google Analytics, just to try to get an idea of how many site visitors I get on any given day. I’ve had it up for three days now, and have made a few observations I thought it’d be fun to share!
Unsurprisingly, most of my visitors are coming in from US sites. But I also see notable action from Canada (HI CANADA, I love you too <3), and at least in the last three days, I've had visits from the UK, France, and Sweden.
Search terms that have had people land on my site include:
- “a turn of light czerneda mobi”–Because I have indeed recently bought that book, although not in MOBI format
- “carina press contract terms”–A topic on which I could probably actually speak, if called upon to do so
- “gigue du pere mathias”–HA! This is of course one of the few Quebec tunes I know how to play so far.
- “hades and persephone erotic”–Again, HA! I’ve written Hades/Persephone, of course, but Queen of Souls isn’t even on the query circuit yet, and it ain’t smut, either! Sorry, whoever was searching!
- “have lot of books”–It’s TRUE. I DO.
- “kobo vs. nook”–A topic on which I have in fact spoken
- “spotted at great big sea concert”–A phrase which can be said of me at least once a year, and sometimes twice
- “where ti buy fairies writing paper and note books”–Can’t help you there, person who was searching! Sorry!
Two people came in from Goodreads, two from Dara’s journal, one from my friend 
kisanthe
On Friday, or so the analytics claim, I had 11 visits. On Saturday, I had 15. Yesterday, I had 24. So hi folks, whoever you are! Thanks for coming by. Grab a chair, raise a jar, and try the cake vodka milkshakes. They’re delicious.
Comment test followup
| January 4, 2013 | Posted by annathepiper under Housekeeping |
Thank you to all who dropped test comments on the last angelahighland.com post. That was very helpful and I really appreciate it!
Basically I was trying to solve two related problems. One was that I was not getting any WordPress mail when a comment showed up from an address I had not moderated before. The other was that when I DID moderate a comment, I still wasn’t getting any mail.
Issue #1 appears to have been caused by a thing we do on our mail server called greylisting. This is a spam prevention technique, and it essentially means that when it gets mail, our server give its the Dubious Face and says to it, “If you’re a legitimate address, come back in 15 minutes and I’ll let you through.” Most mail coming from legitimate sources will in fact pass this test. Most spam mail will not.
However, our greylisting system had not been set up to whitelist mail coming from other servers on the LAN. And since our mail and our web servers are two different machines, mail was telling all the comment mail generated by WordPress to bugger off. Dara checked the settings, saw that 1) we needed to add the addresses of all our servers and 2) the address that was in there was old anyway, and updated accordingly!
Issue #2 was actually WordPress’ fault. They took out the functionality that sent mail after you moderated a comment in a much earlier revision of the code than the one I’m running. Now, you can argue that that’s a decent decision if you think that getting post-moderation mail is redundant–after all, you already got a mail asking you to moderate the comment, right? So why would you need to see the second one?
However, I LIKE getting that second mail. And apparently others did as well, enough that there’s a plugin to put that functionality back in. I installed it.
And now I’m getting all the comment mail I need, as near as I can tell. If you happen to see this post or the previous one, go ahead and drop a comment anyway–I do want to verify that the fixes we’ve done work past just an initial 24-hour period. And, of course, comments are always welcome in general on any of my posts!
(Do note that if you read me primarily on LJ or Dreamwidth, for testing purposes, I don’t actually need comments dropped on either of those systems–the issues I was testing were WordPress-specific. LJ and Dreamwidth’s commenting systems are generally reliable. Generally. 
)
Again, thanks to all for your help!
If you see this, please drop a comment!
| January 3, 2013 | Posted by annathepiper under Housekeeping |
We’re doing a bit of server tweaking tonight to see if we can solve a problem with WordPress installations not sending us mail when comments are left on posts. This is a test post to see if I can get comment mail to show up correctly in my inbox.
If you see this, please drop a comment! (And if you’re seeing this mirrored on LJ or Dreamwidth or Facebook, can you please click over to the original post on angelahighland.com and drop a comment from there?)
I’d like to doublecheck the tweaking with comments left frome external sites as well as ones I leave myself. Thanks in advance for any help, folks!
And as long as I’m sprucing up the place, here, have a cat
| December 29, 2012 | Posted by annathepiper under Housekeeping, Photos |
|
George came along while I was juggling data around between my blogs and promptly demanded access to the lap. I think he may also have thought I couldn’t update my site without his help. But I’m dubious about his WordPress skills!
Such a Helpful Kitty
Testing as well to make sure that this crossposts okay over to LJ and Dreamwidth, and out to Twitter and Facebook!
Importing some content from annathepiper.org, and other housekeeping
| December 29, 2012 | Posted by annathepiper under Annathepiper.org, Housekeeping |
|
To tie in to my earlier post that I’m going to be shifting a lot of my posting over to this blog, I’m going to prep for that by importing certain content from annathepiper.org over to here. This is currently going to include, but may not be limited to:
- Book Roundup posts, the running tallies I keep of how many books I buy
- Book reviews
- Anything pertaining to geeking out about the bands I’m following, primarily Great Big Sea and Le Vent du Nord, but also Quebec trad in general
- Anything pertaining to music I’m actually playing as well, such as practicing for the local Quebec music crowd’s monthly sessions and such
- My ongoing Tri-lingual Re-read of The Hobbit!
- Movie and TV reviews
Basically, a lot of the higher-frequency geekery I tend to do is going to move over here in the name of having all my post traffic in one place. I’m importing the content to make it easier for folks to find the older posts if they want to see them. And relatedly, I’ll also be adjusting how comments work on this blog so that I can actually take comments on older posts.
I will NOT be deleting content off of annathepiper.org, since both blogs live on my server anyway and I don’t have to delete anything if I don’t want to. And because I’m an information packrat!
Anyway, be advised that this is in the works. Wanted to announce this before I do my next Hobbit re-read post!
Impending site updates
| December 22, 2012 | Posted by annathepiper under Housekeeping |
|
Hi all,
Please be advised that as of January 1st, the primary domain for accessing my website is going to be flipped around from angelakorrati.com to angelahighland.com, to start laying the groundwork for my Carina Press release in April!
angelakorrati.com will also continue to work, but it’ll become a redirect to angelahighland.com. In other words, the exact opposite of how these domains work now–right now angelakorrati.com is the canonical URL, and angelahighland.com is the redirect.
On a related note, please also be advised that starting in 2013, quite a bit of content that I normally post to my annathepiper.org blog is going to start showing up here. This is because I’d like to emphasize this site, and demonstrate to visitors that I AM an active poster. If you’re following me via Livejournal or Dreamwidth, there will be no change in those mirror versions of my posts–they’ll still show up on those places the same way they are now. This’ll mostly just affect people who visit my WordPress blogs directly.
Any questions, do please let me know!
A few quick site updates and one great big announcement
| June 20, 2012 | Posted by annathepiper under About Me, Faerie Blood |
|
First and foremost, re: that poll I had up for y’all the other day, I have reached a formal decision. For reasons I still can’t tell you about yet (but which I will be doing ASAP), y’all should look for the name of Angela Highland to be coming into play on this site in the near future, probably later this summer. I’ve already bought the domain name angelahighland.com, which as of right now redirects on my servers to angelakorrati.com, so nobody has to worry yet about changing any bookmarks. Stand by for further news on this as I can give it.
Meanwhile, given that Faerie Blood has gone out in ebook form to Kickstarter backers and the print copies are Very Very Nigh, I have taken the liberty of updating Faerie Blood's official page with updated information about it. The beautiful new cover is there, as well as links to the four sample chapters I provided to Kickstarter backers. I’ve refreshed the data about my offer to hand-sell ebook copies to people until I can deploy for general release. And I’ve put in a bit about what to expect for how to get the print copies as well. This page will be updated again as soon as the book becomes generally available, so keep an eye on that link as well as my update posts!
On a related note, I’ve also updated the sidebar to properly reflect the Very Very Nigh-ness of the release of the Second Edition, and also just because I wanted to give the new cover some prominence on the front page of the site!
Lastly, I updated my In Progress page with a couple of tweaks to the information on Lament of the Dove, as well as adding Mirror’s Gate since it wasn’t in there before.
And now, I CAN share with you the first of the Things I Haven’t Been Able to Tell You About Yet because important pieces of paper have been signed. Here we go, drumroll if you please:
I have an agent! I have accepted literary representation from Miriam Kriss at the Irene Goodman Literary Agency, who will be working with me on the Other Thing I Can’t Tell You About Yet but will be ASAP! Miriam came to me highly recommended, and I was very, very fortunate to get a chance to query her. Y’all may take it as read that I am MASSIVELY EXCITED, to levels I normally reserve for imminent Great Big Sea and Le Vent du Nord concerts!
Watch this space for more revelations as I can share them, in between updates about deploying all the Kickstarter goodies! This, O Internets, is shaping up to be one HELL of a summer!
Recent Comments