Category: Housekeeping

I’m trying something new.

For some years now, this blog has used a WordPress plugin called “CaptchaBank.” This plugin forced you to solve an arithmetic problem before you could comment (and I have had to solve an arithmetic problem before I could login). It was a great plugin that kept the spammers at bay. And it wasn’t based on Google’s horrible “reCaptcha” which steals your data and has an appalling user interface.

Alas, Captcha Bank is no longer being maintained. I finally had to deactivate it.

Fortunately, Cloudflare has released a new form of Captcha which they call “Turnstile.” You can read about it here. They don’t steal your data. And Cloudflare is a company that I have at least a moderate amount of trust in (as opposed to Google, which sadly I can no longer trust at all). So I installed a plugin that runs Turnstile on WordPress.

With luck, everything will run smoothly and you won’t notice a difference. But if anything goes wrong, this will explain why you’re unable to comment. If that happens, please let me know (you can find my email on the About page).

My ISP is experiencing some problems with the server on which this blog resides. Looks like someone else’s site is Doing Bad Things to PHP across the server. You may see brief temporary outages of this blog until my ISP manages to solve the problem. (For what it’s worth, since the problem is with PHP, my static website has not been going down.)

It’s public now. I’ll be resigning from the UU Church of Palo Alto as of July 31. I’ll post my resignation letter below the fold. The congregation that hired me hasn’t posted this on its website yet — when they do, I’ll post that info here.

Continue reading “News”

I apologize for the brief blog outage. My indefatigable web host moved this website onto a more secure server with additional hardening against attackers, and some minor glitches happened. That’s the price we pay for website security these days. (Some day maybe I’ll convert this entire site to static HTML, which would reduce energy consumption as well as making the site more secure….)

The last time I did a major update of my main website was around 2009. It was looking pretty old and creaky. So I did a complete redesign, and it’s now responsive and html5 compliant.

On the content side, I added some significant new content, including an essay on change management in congregations. I did delete some old outdated content, but I think no one will miss it (if there’s something you do miss, let me know, and I can put it back up).

Thank you Abby, for giving me the impetus to learn about responsive websites (and happy birthday, too!).

Check it out — https://www.danielharper.org/ — and if you see any problems or if you have any comments, please leave them here.

In the depths of curriculum development. Coming up for air soon….

I continue to make progress in recovering from the pulmonary embolism of a year and a half ago, but I still get tired easily. And I’m finally learning that sometimes when you’re tired, you should rest a little bit rather than trying to maintain the fiction that you’re perfectly all right. So I’m resting.

If you’re looking for something to read, there are some new and thoughtful comments on this recent post.

You may have difficulty accessing this site over the past couple of days due to a move to a new server. There will be a couple more short down times for software upgrades. Back to normal by the weekend.

After five years of the same look, I’m finally updating this blog. The new appearance is the most obvious change, but I’m also gradually updating some of the static pages as well.