I upgraded the WYSIWYG editor on the site today.  It now has a spellchecker (yay!) and should work on newer versions of IE.  I think.  

Please let me know if you run into any trouble.  If you can include browser and platform information in your comment it would be most helpful.

Thanks!

-Floyd

By the way, a week or so ago I added a new email notification feature that I think is really handy.  If you go to:

My Account >> Edit >> Email Preferences

and check the box and save you can get a notification any time someone replies to a thread you've started.  I'm finding this a great way of keeping track of responses to blog entries I made weeks or months ago that otherwise I'd miss.

That bring up to 3 the types of email notifications you can have here.  The other two are "Notifications," which sends you a digest of all of the days activity by email, and "Subscriptions," which allow you to subscribe to all updates on a given thread or content type.  Having of these options is quite confusing, I recognize.  Every time I think about doing away with one type of notification or the other to make things simpler I talk to someone who says they really like getting that type.  So I'm not certain what to do, long-term, but it is worth experimenting with the different types of notifications to find the one that fits your reading habits best.

I recently set up m.thefreshloaf.com so that I could monitor the site while away from the computer.  It isn't perfect, but it works fairly well on cell phones or other portable devices like the Kindle. 

I'll be surprised if there is a huge audience for this but, then again, it could be handy if you want to pull up a recipe or a photo of one of your recent bakes when you are over at someone else's house.

There has been a marked increase in the amount of spam (particularly with "adult" themes) that is posted here in the last week or so.  Dstroy and I and the other members who can moderate content delete these posts as quickly as possible, but sometimes that is not before they get sent out in the site digest emails or they show up in syndication.   My apologies if you've been on the receiving end of some of those: not what I want to find in my Inbox before I've had my first cup of coffee either.   Know that we try to kill them and close the accounts that posted them as quickly as possible.

Using the "flag as offensive" link at the bottom of such posts would help me.  I think if 2 community members do that, the offending posts will get unreleased and will disappear for the rest of the site visitors.

I could make it more difficult for spammers to sign up, but of course that would make it more difficult for new folks who legitimately want to participate in the baking discussions to sign up.  So I'm hesitant to make it too tough.

Hey hey!  If you are seeing this, you've made it to our shiny new server.

Please report any issues you experience as comments to this thread.

The new server is up. I have a copy of TFL running there. If anyone wants to give it a whirl, go to tfl.thefreshloaf.com and give it a try.

You are welcome to create content there. It will get blown away when I import the content for real and transfer TFL over to the new machine. Probably... tomorrow evening?

Try the new image upload too. Click the tree, the click the little file system thing next to the URL. It should let you upload.

If you are going to upload test images, please keep track of whether you are on the new or old server. The new server has serifed fonts everywhere, which should make it easy to keep track of which machine you are on.

Let me know if you run into any issues.

Oh yeah... BTW, I haven't looked at it on Windows yet. If it is totally hosed, uh... well, I'll fix it soon.

Based on feedback I've been getting, I've set up an Advanced Topics forum. Feel free to get as wonky and food geeky as you'd like in there. I will only intervene in the discussion if people are getting truly nasty or personal.

I've also created a couple of new front page blocks about half way down that monitors this section and the Professional Concerns forum, which should make it as easy to keep an eye on those sections as it is the rest of the site.

I made a few layout changes today. I'm trying to make more efficient use of space without reducing readability.

I also enabled user icons. You now can go to "My Account" and upload a small gif or jpeg to represent you. It will show up on any forum or blog posts you make, as well as in your comments.

Let me know if you run into any problems.

I applied a bunch of system patches, did a server reboot, and upgraded to the latest version of Drupal today. The server took about 5 minutes to come back, which is longer than usual, and just long enough to make me worry that I was going to have to spend the rest of my day emailing back and forth with tech support. Happily, it looks like everything came back fine.

Please let me know if you run into any problems.

As you may have noticed, in the past couple of days I've replaced a few of the ads on this site with ads for Food Buzz.

The folks at Food Buzz approached me a month or so ago to talk about sponsoring the site. After chatting with them I agreed because it seemed like a mutually beneficial relationship. Food Buzz will include The Fresh Loaf as one of their Featured Publishers, thus increasing the exposure of this site. Presumably that'll increase traffic here and expose more people to the great content we're creating here.