Due to numerous complaints regarding the color scheme, I am developing an alternative.

This version is already available to anyone using Firefox. In the VIEW MENU change the PAGE STYLE to "blue" to use this color scheme. I am considering a switch to this as the default.

I am considering a change to the order in which blogs are presented on the home page. Instead of doing it chronologically by when the post was written, I am considering a sort order more like how it's done in forums. This involves sorting based on a combination of the timestamps for the publication time and last edit time of the post, and the time of the last comment. The advantage of this is that all new content, both blog entries and comments, would be easier to find.

Although I could implement two different sorting systems, that would be extra work with little benefit. I am considering a change to this method of sorting as the only option.

Due to a catastrophic server failure, all data had to be restored from a backup performed at 10:30AM EST today. New comments and posts from 10:30AM to 5:35PM EST are lost. Possibility of retrieval is unlikely. To avoid further incidents of this type, an emergency relocation to a different server has been performed.

re:
Data appears to have been migrated successfully. Due to a lag in DNS, you may get redirected to the hyphenated version of "blog-stalk.com" for the next two or three days. The duration of this depends on your internet service provider. When you regain access to the unhyphenated form of "blogstalk.com" a login may be required because cookies that manage your login are specific to the URL.

Blogstalk will be down either tonight or tomorrow night for maintenance, depending on when I have time/energy to do this. I probably shouldn't be doing something like this on a Monday but this is somewhat urgent. Expected downtime is less than an hour but could be much longer if there are complications.

Blogstalk has been inaccessible for many hours and now functions only intermittently. This is due to problems with mydomain.com. They provide DNS services for blogstalk.com, which is analagous to what a phonebook does. Domain names like blogstalk.com get translated into IP addresses like 75.125.121.198, which is what your computer needs to find the site. Mydomain.com provides that translation service for blogstalk, but they are currently under attack by hackers. I cannot switch to another company until I am able to log into the mydomain.com administration system.

Both Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter seem to be unable to deliver ads to the target audience that I specified. I tried an experiment to see what would happen if I target advertising only to New York. The goal was to get enough members from a single region that I would eventually get people who know each other to join separately. This strategy was based on my hypothesis about how social networks develop. In Google Adwords, I set advertising to be shown only in the United States, and added restrictions on every state except New York.. In Microsoft Adcenter, I specified that ads should be shown only in New York City.

No new members from New York have joined. However, I have several new members from Asia. Five from India, one from Burma, and one from Malaysia. If my regional settings were working properly, these new members should not have seen the ads. I am not sure how the regional targeting is being done. It looks like maybe they deliver advertising based on the geographic target area of the site on which the ad is shown rather than the location of the person who views the ad.