It's hard to think about school starting soon, when temperatures have hit 100°+ more than 30 times this summer. So far this August, only one day has failed to reach 100°, and it hit 104° yesterday. That's 40°C to you furriners.

So what has that got to do with anything? Well, in the middle of all this non-fall, non-school-like weather, I received a catalog from the local community college. I don't know about other two year colleges, but Dallas's has more than 80,000 students on eight campuses and the tele-college. The catalog reflects the diversity of student needs. One set of courses caught my eye.

As if I haven't had enough challenges over the last week or so.
Mail has not been sending to external email addresses. My simple testing used local email addresses which went through fine and contact email were working so I had no reason to expect anything was wrong. Thanks Kevin for contacting me and letting me know.

So if you signed up recently and are wondering what happened to your registration email, now you know.
Click on the "Request new password" link to receive a password.

I am sorry for any inconvenience caused. This should be added to my signature.

Last week, after the site upgrade we were hit pretty hard by bots, crawlers and spiders while they tried to re-index all of the site content. Luckily things seemed to have calmed down a lot since then.
As a means for keeping tabs on what bots are online when and if we get hit hard again I have created a simple module to log and display visits by robots. If you are logged on and there are some bots on line you will see a 'bots online' box on the left hand side. It provides a simple visual of how many nodes (pages) are being visited by bots over the previous 15 minutes.
The module only detects a few of the popular bots and is not meant to be 100% accurate. In time I can use the information logged to block out some bad bots or refine the module.

Over the last couple of years one of the fastest growing web technologies has been RSS. RSS along with other similar content syndication formats such as Atom have come from nowhere to become a big part of many peoples live. I for one use a feed reader each morning to check the latest news on the web. It's quicker and easier then visiting all the site I frequent to see if anything new has been published.

One of the new features of this site, that may have been overlooked by many of you, is the syndication ability. Just about everything can be read through a feed reader if you know where to look. At the bottom of many pages you will find this syndicate content image: which you can right click and 'Copy link location' to your feed reader of choice.

It's more than ever important that posters check their posts before submitting as the new format allows for far more use of HTML tags in posts by default.

If you wish to show code in your post:
BB code tags must be used, whereas before it was just an inconvenience not using them now means that your code will parsed and rendered as html code so an ul list will render as:

• li item


• li item


• li item


• li item

Rather than:

<ul>
<li>li item</li>
<li>li item</li>
<li>li item</li>
<li>li item</li>
</ul>