Category Archives: Discourse.net

April 22 is Enough About Me Day.

Please, if you have not done so before, visit this link and post something about yourself if only to satisfy my curiosity about what kind of people read this thing.

And, by the way, thanks for coming by.

In a comment on the previous post, “Asperger Syndrom DVD Available for Educators”, Brett Bellmore complains about the snap.com preview tool I installed on the blog. I think he has a point.

Back when I installed this thing, it had a one-click on/off toggle that you could invoke from the left margin of the blog. So if you didn't like it, you clicked once, set the cookie, and it never bothered you again.

But that option seems to be gone: at least today, the toggle isn't working right, so if you want to make snap stop snapping, you have to go to their page. That's not nice.

I've disabled the snap, and will only bring it back if there's popular demand in the comments below.

According to The Race to the Bottom: Faculty Blogs and Influence: The Top 50 Most Influential Law Blogs (In Order) this here blog is tied for #17 with Workplace Prof Blog, Prof. Rafael Gely's far more serious production.

As you would expect, many of the top 50 are group blogs.

What shall I do with all this power and influence?

This blog offers you a variety of different feeds for your reading pleasure.

There's the partial feed, which just gives you the start of each posting. Currently that seems the most popular of the services.

There's the full feed, that has the whole text of each posting. This feed has only one third as many subscribers as the partial feed, perhaps because autodiscovery services tend to find the other one.

And there's also the (separate) comments feed which gives you all the comments on the blog (but doesn't include the postings).

I also offer a suite of specialized feeds, one per blog category, and there's a full listing of them below.

Continue reading →

I find Dreamhost to be pretty decent web hosts, although I also could give you a short but pungent list of complaints (timeouts, timeouts, timeouts). But give them credit, when they screw up, they are world champions at writing apologies.

This morning I got a large bill that clearly wasn't due. I wrote back. They said it was my bill. I wrote back. Then I got The Apology:

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we've accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

I'm really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; I've already removed all those bum future charges on your account (######) and already refunded the $####.## charge on your credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there's no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.

Again, I feel terrible about this whole thing.. there will be a blog post soon at blog.dreamhost.com fully explaining how this bug was even allowed to happen..

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won't happen again. There's no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sorry again,

Josh!

And, indeed, a more detailed explanation is now on their blog, at Um, Whoops..

This sort of stuff works on me. It is very hard to stay mad.

Update: More at Unofficial Dreamhost Blog, DreamHost Accidently Bills Customers $7,500,000.

I've been trying a few small tweaks to fix the problem where comments time out just before finishing; the comment posts, but you get an error message anyway. This is why there are so many duplicated comments.

Please, if you do get an error message posting a comment, or if something new goes wrong, drop me an email letting me know the time you posted it and what happened, so I can look at the logs.