Now that I’ve moved the blog to a private hosting company, you can register to become a subscriber to the blog using the links on the right. This offers a bit more than the email subscription that has been available for a while. Becoming a subscriber means you can create a profile with some information about yourself, which will be available to people who read your comments (if you are logged in). It also gives you some (not many) controls over forum notifications. I may add more features as I discover them.
I will keep the current email notification feature for those who prefer to keep using that.
By the way, if you have signed up for email notification of new posts using the button on the right, this apparently does not mean you get notified of every new topic or reply in the forums. You can subscribe to individual topics over there, but not to whole forums. And, if you have registered, then there are some controls on your profile page as I mentioned above, although they don’t look terribly useful.
I’ve been poking around to find a plugin that will manage this better, but haven’t found one yet.
In lieu of email notifications, I’ve added RSS feeds to the login menu on the right for entries (posts), comments, and forums. You will need an RSS reader to read them. If you are using Mountain Lion on a Mac, you will find that Safari no longer opens RSS feeds. NewsFire, available from the App Store for $5, seems to work well. I couldn’t find a free one that worked, and even some of the paid ones don’t, so tread carefully. Perhaps others can post their experiences with other platforms.
I’ve set the rss feed so that it should be long enough to contain all the comments, although I am having trouble getting my feed reader to download them all. Another thing you can do is = go to a particular post, add /feed/ to the url, and paste the result into a feed reeder that allows you to search the entries. For example:
http://commoncoretools.me/2012/04/02/general-questions-about-the-standards/feed/
will give you a feed of all the old comments on the General Questions post.
The comments RSS feed was not working because of 2 malformed comments, which I have removed. You should now be able to see all 930 comments by pointing your RSS reader to the Comments RSS link on the right. If your reader is capable of searching the feed, this should be more efficient than using the blog search feature (don’t ask me why WordPress has not yet improved this search).
My inequalities comment must have been one of the malformed ones, becuase I can’t find it anymore. What did I do wrong?
I don’t really know, all I know is that removing it worked! Were you cutting and pasting from a Word file? That might have introduced some weird characters.
Bill, I have been trying to post on the Forums for a couple of weeks now. Usually when I click the “Submit” button, it gives me an Error message that says “Are you sure you want to do that?” Then, after submitting a couple of times and getting it to seemingly post, I go back to check any replies on my comments and my initial comments are gone. Is it just me having problems or is it a system-wide issue? Thank you!
Nevermind this last post. I think I’ve figured out the issue. Once I try and comment and it recognizes my email, then everything works fine. So I guess I need to login first before trying to comment.
Eric, thanks for this info. I’ve been worrying about the complaints of sporadic errors, but not really knowing what to do about them. It seems that having a login account is a way to cure this problem.