Administrivia

There's going to be a lot of noise here in the next week to ten days. We're doing some major repairs and upgrades on the site that will fix the comment and posting problems we've been having in the last month.

And with that, I leave you with a time-lapse video of a construction site of 1 Bryant Park, on 4nd Street and Sixth Avenue.

Enjoy.

I don't know why they are broken, but we're looking into it.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you are reading this through RSS because you can't get to our site, please don't take it personally. We are under attack by some really bad, bad spammers and site scrappers (at least that's what it looks like at the moment).

I don't know how long this is going to last, but we're working on it.

Welcome to the new culturekitchen WIKI. What is a |wiki? Glad you asked :

A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". One of the best-known wikis is Wikipedia.

I have to run out the door, but wanted to give the heads up to our RSS junkies that culturekitchen has a new design --and one that now puts it in line with her sister sites.

Comments?

Questions?

Concerns?

Just leave them in the comments.

What!?!? You're getting rid of your blogroll?

Not so fast, no.

We are getting rid of the static blogroll in order to introduce not one, nor two but three directories of links.

1. Recommended stories

We will have a reincarnation of my long lost sideblog. If you go to the old culturekitchen home page, you will notice a sidebar with short blog posts. The sidebar is not coming back per se, but I can't wait to go back to pointing to you the good, the bad and the ugly I stumble across during my daily perusing of the net. These new posts will be now all indexed in a "recommended storylinks" page.

2. Recommeded blogs

We also have the recommended links directory back. Almost a year ago I started writing short reviews of the blogs I enjoy. If you go in a little while (I am still re-indexing the links) to the weblinks directory, you will see the thousands of hits I have sent the way of blogs like Republic of T or Women of Color Blog. It took me almost six months to rebuild the directory, but finally I can resume my blog reviews.

3. Links Directory

In order to maintain our mission to promote other bloggers and to create a strong networking relationship with our peers, I am happy to announce that culturekitchen will not have a static blogroll anymore. In its place we are creating a directory of links to the different blogospheres we belong, as well as including a list of resources and other important places on the web. And for this part of our networking puzzle, anybody who is a registered member of our site will be able to suggest a link for inclusion in our directory.

Four years ago culturekitchen became one of the first blogs to come under attack by spammers, especially pornography spammers. You don't know what rape looks like on a blog until you have had your webhosts server taken down in a denial-of-service style spam comment attack with over 25,000 comment entries with the word rape in them.

That happened to me four years with our old web host company and it's the reason I launched into a world-wide-web search for the best blog platform that could curtail these attacks. I found that platform to be the one I am using now, Drupal. Yet even in a slow day I would still have to delete by hand hundreds of comments spams out of the daily 2-5K we are still getting.

Not anymore ... or so it seems.

New Comments System with Captcha Module

I took Laura Scott's advice to heart and installed a contact and comment entry form confirmation system. It seems to have done the trick.

Now anonymous comments will not only be asked to provide an email (which will remain encrypted and anonymous). You will also be asked to confirm the comment with a special code number provided.

If all goes well, I'll leave comments opened like this as a policy ---yet, remember, the Editorial Team always reserves the right to delete any and all comments we deem unsuitable for not just the discussion but the site as well.