Couple of updates


The news comments are turned off until I have time to fix the hole that allowed a sleezy spammer to post using an html injection technique, yesterday. I've a major change in the works... More on that later.

We've managed to block the referrer spam so the statistics, although correct technically, are actually much more useful, as they reflect actual people, rather than people, bots, and spammers. We don't block all bots (Googlebot, Slurp (yahoo), and the MSN bots, among others are passed through) but we don't count them in the statisticals.

On the plus side, the site is running faster than it has in a couple of weeks.... Due to some code optimazations and the traffic blocking.

We did a slab pour a hidden River resort last week, to add an outdoor kitchen to the food pavillion. There are pictures from the pour and a couple of shots from the newly expanded Ritual circle.

You have to be logged in to view the picts, and you can find them in the "Hidden River" picture gallery.

We have also added a Birthday module that does all sorts of fun things; you can get a daily Horoscope, send Birthday emails to fellow Phamly members, see what the distributon of Phamily is By Sign, Age, Gender, and such.... It's a lot of fun.

I'm compiling a list of moon names Here is the current list. I Pulled these from a variety of sources mostly online: Additional Suggestions are welcome and appreciated - leave a comment..... or send me a weblink

I am working on a lot of calendar and calculation events to fill a request made on the eGroups. Unfortunately, to fulfill this request, I have to make some assumptions about a calender and the Year.

The first and most important was "When Does the year start?" the Julian (Gregorian) calendar is the one we use day to day separately from the Pagan world. It starts on January 1st. - okay - that is a no-brainer... buit when does the PAGAN New year occur?

For Some it's Samhain - October 31st that more or less is based on a year and a day principal. (29 lunar months per Solar year, plus the day that is not a day - Samahin itself.) The problem with this usage is it's sort of arbitrary.... Why The end of October? Why not a new or Full moon after harvest, or a Solar event? What's more tat Day that is not a day makes it hard to decide if Samhain Ends the Year, or Begins it. So I decided a different way:

Thanks to all of you for participating in the User Points Contest - the winner for July is Missy with over 300 points (and a lot of really good recipies!) is Missy! She wins her choice of any tee shirt in our collection.

The website is handling record traffic loads now (averaging around 2000 Pageviews a day) and over 720 users (more than 50% of which are regular users (meaning they stop by the website at least once every 2 weeks) and doing it quickly, the new hardware is quite capable.

Our Newsletter has been published weekly for the last two months, and is working very well, It's been a manual system (I send manually) but I think we will be on an automatic system within the next two weeks, so it will be a hands free system at that point.

With the traffic loads as high as they now are (and climbing, we average around 200 pageviews a day more than last month) I want to point out that this is a great opportunity for exposure for you and your interests, Company, Coven or Cause. Feel free to submit an article and or a web link. Articles are not only read on the website, they are sent out in the weekly newsletter. And our community is very responsive.

You might also consider starting a thread in outr online forums to discus topics that are of interest to you.


That's it for now,
blessings,

--Wade