Some site changes and news for those interested.

Removed, your feedback appreciated
1. The Reuters TV news player from the television category is gone. A recent email informed me that they are about to take that commercial and include ads plus it played on auto-load of the category page which I do not like at all. If any readers really liked this feature, please let me know.
2. Some links from the homepage. Working towards linking primarily/only to reading list (web / OPML) going forward, which will continue to be a dynamic list. It’s easier to maintain a centralized list and I don’t want to use some third party like Blogrolling to manage this list.

Thinking about changes, your feedback appreciated
I’ve been thinking about changing the full post content on the home and category pages to being the title, link and partial content. The concern is purely pagesize oriented. I do realize this creates an additional click for those who just visit the homepage domain, but for those on dialup these pages can be rather long, especially with the pictures and text. For those navigating from RSS they will still go directly to the permalink page which is full text, also the RSS feed will still have full text. My thinking is to get the size of the homepage down so it loads faster which is especially critical to new visitors. There have been times the homepage has been over 300k in size not even counting all the images. That’s way too big for dialup users. For awhile Alexa referred to our page loading speed as “very slow” but we’ve recently been upgraded to “average” with 2.2 seconds being the average load time. I’d like to see that change to “fast” or “very fast” like many of our other sites. Page loading speed is important to me, despite the messy CSS (call that the Windows problem: the result of one too many hacks without starting over).

I am particularly interested in hearing from readers who navigate to the homepage as their regular starting point for this site. Would you like/dislike this change? Please leave your comments below.

Comments update, your feedback appreciated
If you have had some trouble leaving comments at this blog lately — and especially if you have a gmail address — then I have fixed that problem (thanks Matt) with my overzealous comment filtering tool. Even after this comment filtering this blog still receives 250-500+ comment spams per day. Last time I disabled the system entirely it was well over 1,500 a day. Since we have better things to do with our time than delete comment spam, I continue to work on refining our own custom filtering system. My apologies to anybody that is caught in a false positive situation.

If you leave a comment and it doesn’t show up, please consider the following:

1) if you are a first time commenter, those comments are held in a moderation queue. As long as isn’t spam (or looks like spam) and is related to the post, it will likely be approved. Be patient, this can take up to 8 hours or longer if we are on vacation for these first time manual approvals. We check all URLs left in comments and signatures and reserve the right to remove any that point to spam/splog or pron sites. Please do not leave links to pron sites in the comments. We’re trying to be a (relatively) safe for work website. These URLs show up in filters and block the entire site.
2) something in your comment might have triggered our blocking filters. There are combinations of several things — too many to list here (although I’m thinking about creating an image and linking to it with the complete list) — that will trigger our filters. If your comment contains links to any site that has been banned from leaving comments here (those domains that mass comment spam this blog with bots are blocked/banned). Solution: don’t link to sites which are splog/spam and/or questionable in your comments. If we see these comments and the rest of the comment is on topic and sane.

How to contact me (TDavid)
If it’s been at least 8 hours, and it isn’t the weekend or I’m on vacation, and you’ve left an important comment, feel free to contact me about the situation, there might be something wrong. You’ll find my contact email on the homepage on the picture. It’s not linked from here because of email harvesting bots. Just type my current public email address contact for this site into your favorite email client and send.

Last year we started a process of changing public email addresses from time to time. For example, recently my email address for this site has changed. I do this to start over and clean out the spam that catches up. If/when I respond to you personally it will most likely be from my direct unpublished email address. You will be automatically whitelisted to this address and any future email correspondence with me will likely be much faster. I respond to email all the time but the volume is such that I’ve had to setup this slower first contact situation to shield me from spam.

Please give me at least 1-2 business days to respond. I literally receive thousands of emails every day — remember, we have multiple websites, not only this one, not to mention the client websites I work with and work as a technical contact. Thankfully, I do have an assistant who helps manually filter my mail. We also use pretty aggressive spam filtering tools. If your comment is really important or it is a breaking story, call me. Our office phone number is also listed on my picture on the Hmm homepage. Our company name is KMR Enterprise if you do call, so don’t hang up if you hear someone say that. To speak directly to me, just ask for TDavid My assistant is part time in the office so it’s possible I’ll answer the phone myself.

Alrighty, enough of the housecleaning stuff, back to work.

• How easy is it to find your email address online?
• Blog comment spam and SE impact: is it that significant?
• Complimentary comment spammers
• Getting suggestions from a third party site with Should Do This
• TypePad support recommends using proxy to get around their own anti-spam filters
• Text Link Ads acquired by MediaWhiz