Paul has been until recently a prep school teacher; he studied theology at Weston School of Theology (now part of Boston College) and liturgy at Notre Dame. I look forward to the fruits of his contemplations!

Update (July 20): I just want to say how pleased I am with the new version of MT.

There was a sacrifice involved in upgrading, because some of the new features in MT4 -- such as the CAPTCHA number-test for comments -- required scrapping old templates. I tossed all the old templates and styles people were using, since using CAPTCHA is just indispensable. I'm sure that losing the custom work was a not-so-pleasant surprise for the bloggers, but I'm happy to help them save material from the old MT3 installation and use it in their new designs.

The new drag-and-drop interface for "widgets" makes it quite a bit easier to add defined chunks of content to the sidebars of blogs and to rearrange the order in which those units appear. Bobbi of RevolutionofLove.com got to work on her own ahead of me, but I sent out a how-to instruction for everyone else, and have been getting good feedback.

The StyleCatcher plugin optional for MT3 is now standard and makes it easy to apply out-of-the-box designs to a blog, with no rebuilding required. I still have to work through how to customize a style with graphics replacing a plain-text header; then there will be a how-to instruction on that as well.

So, readers, be patient while the visuals of these fine blogs remain under renovation or restoration, and feel free to comment as usual.

I've been improving the anti-spam rules on the stblogs.org web server this week, so if you've been seeing many spam trackbacks and comments on any of the blogs here lately, that nuisance should be noticeably diminished, at least for a while.

Things are busy for me now (school work), but I hope to upgrade the blog software this summer and migrate the blogs -- at least, the active ones -- to an external server (i.e., not here at home). That should make the whole operation a bit more reliable for the bloggers and for readers.

From: "Lee Anderson"
Subject: Stblogs.com - A new home for Catholic writers
To: leeanderson2000@hotmail.com
Dear Friend,

Please accept a special invitation for a sneak peek to a new community for Catholic writers — Stblogs.com.

StBlogs.com is currently in Beta, and has not yet been launched publicly. We are still working on exciting new features and free services to raise the profile of Catholic writers and cover breaking Catholic news.

But right now we are pleased to offer you and a select group
of others a chance to register yourName.stBlogs.com and claim your space and place in the newest community of Catholic writers on the web.

If your involvement in the blogosphere has been limited so far to lurking or commenting, you will want to open a blog at Stblogs.com immediately.

Isn’t it time you contributed your thoughts, insights or expertise to the Great Catholic Conversation? Stblogs.com gives you the means to do so…quickly, easily and at no charge.

But what if you already own a blog? That's ok. Let me share 3 reasons why you will want to start a Stblogs.com blog too.

First, Stblogs.com is a Powerful Domain — For years Catholic bloggers have affectionately called their community "St. Blog’s." Today St. Blog’s has entered the lexicon, with Google indexing nearly half a million references on the web!

When readers search for Catholic bloggers, chances are good they’ll end up at Stblogs.com. Shouldn’t you be there too?

Second, Stblogs.com offers Powerful Tools — Don’t take my word for it. Spend a few minutes opening a Stblogs.com blog today, and discover how easy and fun it can be. Choose your own template. Reserve your own Stblogs.com blogname. Publish your thoughts and even upload video effortlessly. Our suite of blogging tools is intuitive yet powerful (and more features are being added daily!)

Best of all, as a member of Stblogs.com, your recent posts and your popular posts may be featured on the Stblogs.com homepage, in addition to our homepage blogroll. This is just one of several free promotional tools Stblogs.com has planned exclusively for our members.

Finally, StBlogs.com is Free — Blogging at Stblogs.com is easy and free…so what do you have to lose? Find new readers by reserving your Stblogs.com blogname and uploading at least a selection of your writings. You are already an established member of the St Blog’s community. That's all the more reason to become a member of Stblogs.com too!

As a voracious Catholic reader and sometime-writer myself, I’m very excited about the launch of Stblogs.com. I’m looking forward to helping cultivate one of the most intellectually stimulating and invigorating Catholic communities on the web.

I'm writing especially to you today because I believe your particpation will help make StBlogs.com all the more invigorating and vibrant. I hope you’ll join us there!

Sincerely,
Lee Anderson

P.S. Opening your free Stblogs.com blog, can be done with a few simple keystrokes by going here http://stblogs.com/wp-signup.php/ And if you have any questions, comments, concerns (or words of encouragement!) you’d like to share with me directly, please respond to this email or write to me at leeanderson2000@yahoo.com

It appears to be an effort by book publisher Rick Rotondi. I wish him all the best in his work, but there does seem to be a strong possibility of confusion between stblogs.org -- a non-profit group domain for Catholic blogs, active since June 2003 -- and his stblogs.com -- a new project that runs ads and looks like a commercial venture -- so I'd have preferred he choose some other domain name. Pff.

If you get a "410" error on a comment, drop me a note, and please include the text of your attempted comment. Also, if you can provide your IP address and the time of your attempt, it'll help me find information in the server's error log. Once I find which pattern is triggering the error message, I can fine-tune the pattern rule to avoid this "false positive".

For somebody as attached to job security and money as me, this is quite a move, but I expect that I'll be able to do all right with some short-term work and some income from my savings. That on-call status means the company can call me if there's some particular need during the transition, but I don't expect it to be an ongoing thing.

So it's time for me to get in some travel, some housecleaning, maybe some school or some training, some back-to-the-basics spiritual renewal, and some exercise (e.g., walking the mile to the parish for daily Mass: thank Heavens they have one at 11:30!)

I have to get one of those guide books to "offbeat" attractions. :-)

After a researcher at Indiana University drew attention to a weakness in airport security, Markey (D-MA) didn't thank him for performing a public service, but called for his arrest. Now, this does give Soghoian some extra publicity, which serves his purpose, but really it's not a good idea for public officials to give out such a message as Markey (D-MA) is giving: that public ignorance about security weaknesses should be maintained. The public is more likely to approve security improvements and their costs if they know that the changes really are needed.

Update: As the folks at BoingBoing report, the congressman (D-MA) has seen the error of his ways, after getting complaints from tech-industry constituents like myself.

A word of apology to commenters and blog authors who were inconvenienced by them. Our web hosting provider at the time, page-zone.com, had enabled the Apache web server mod_security feature in a way that I consider indiscriminate, causing us trouble, and gave up all too easily on an attempt to diagnose the cause.

Commenters and blog authors were frequently getting "no access" errors from the www.stblogs.org server, and it took me a while to understand the source of our troubles, let alone to take corrective action.

To resolve the problem I moved the web server to a home-based machine and dropped PZ's service. The home server has its own weaknesses (e.g., occasional disruptions to my DSL service), but is bringing results definitely better than the service we were getting from PZ in July and August.

For you fellow web admins, here's where the problem was: the package of rule sets that comes standard with mod_security aims to protect the web server by aggressively blocking user actions that might attempt to upload malicious code (Javascript, etc.) to the web site, and even blocks many uses of HTML tags in user-entered data. A few of the rules are a problem for a content management system (CMS) whose very purpose is to create web pages containing HTML and Javascript.

The mod_security documentation actually includes a warning about using those rules on a web server running a CMS, so if only the well-meaning folks at PZ had read the friendly manual, as we say in the IT biz, and followed it, we'd still be their customer. Maybe.

Two benefits from running stblogs.org on a home server instead of that commercial hosting provider: (1) although this server is a modest machine, we no longer have to suffer performance troubles from other customers' activity; (2) I can now modify the system firewall and mod_security rules to block spam-commenters more effectively and quickly. I'm also running the server on a system with redundant disks now, which should help us keep going in the event of an occasional disk failure.

For the curious, the server is a 32-bit Athlon XP 2200+ (1800 MHz) with 512 MB memory, running Mandriva Linux 2006.

His weblog takes as its theme The Face of Christ. Welcome aboard!

Also, I've relocated the site to a new server machine which I manage directly. This will let me avoid some security headaches.

The bad news is that only my personal e-mail address works (I won't post it here, lest the spammers get it). Mail for the lists is going to bounce back to the senders. I'll start setting up the mailing lists again in the coming days.

Some folks have sent me lists of the previous subscribers, so I will re-enter those subscriptions again, and I'll announce it here.

Thanks for your patience and your prayers!

But come to think of it, please pray for the Schmiedicke family and the Delvalle family; they've both lost members in completely unexpected accidents in the past few days.

The biggest loss is all the data from my mailing list server, which has hosted several Catholic mailing lists serving hundreds of users for over ten years. The most popular list is "cathmoms", founded by Maria Compton Hernandez out in Kansas. Sorry, moms: we'll be able to start over, but the subscriber list is lost, as are the archives.

I also lost a few web sites I operated for friends; some of the material exists elsewhere, and so can be restored, but not all.

I will start the system up again so that users can subscribe and resume operations, but it will take a few days more. I'm sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. There are probably hundreds of e-mails waiting to get to my server, asking if there's a problem, if I was run over by a bus, etc. What a bummer.