…to a more powerful server. It may be happening this evening. If so, there could be some delays before you can find us again, because the new server address will take some time to “propagate” through the internet. See you… soon. . . . [more]

You may have noticed that the Google Custom Search box is gone and a new search funtion is in its place. Searching in WordPress blogs has always been a problem, for some reason, and while Google Custom Search was better than the built-in WordPress search function, it had its serious limitations: it would show comments as XML, and it threw up a great many duplicates and category pages full of irrelevant posts.

I’m trying a plugin, Search Unleashed, that would seem to offer pretty much all we might want. It searches titles, post content, comments and authors of these. . . . [more]

Some of you may have encountered this ugly message instead of the Slaw you were expecting:

It seems that we’re a victim of our own growth in popularity, and the more readers we have who are commenting or otherwise asking Slaw’s php scripts to do their thing, the more we encroach on cpu limits we didn’t even know we had. I took steps last week, when this began to happen in earnest, to upgrade us to a server at our host, Bluehost, that gives us something like three times the cpu capacity. We’re on their list and I’ve been bugging . . . [more]

Well, I got half way there: I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and I’ve introduced the new categories. Of course, you won’t really see any changes — except to observe, perhaps, that the categories have been removed from the right sidebar. The new design and structure needs more work, so it’s back to the drawing board for a bit until I can command the pixels to behave as I wish. In the meantime, and as always, please enjoy the great posts from our contributors — and please continue to respond with comments.

I’ll keep you posted. . . . [more]