Category: Site Updates and News

I’m not making any resolutions this year, but I will make a promise to blog more! I’ve also been doing some “behind the scenes” stuff on the rest of the site over my break from work, as well as finally working on my review of “Wolf Hall” (short review – I liked it a lot!). I knew going in that 2009 was going to be an extraordinarily busy year for me but there were times that it still managed to surprise me. (I still can’t believe how nuts parts of October were.) I think 2010 will also be busy, but hopefully not quite as much as 2009 was!

Sorry I’ve been quiet for the past week, it’s been crazy at work (including two extra nights of working until 10 p.m. – thankfully my regular telescope night was rained out because three nights of working until 10 p.m. probably would have made me homicidal!). Next week will also be very busy, but I’ll do my best to keep up.

In the meantime, here’s a screen shot of my WordPress dashboard for this blog from last week showing that, for this blog at least, 99% of the comments are spam. Thank you Akismet for making it manageable!

Sorry for the flurry of posts today (and I still have a few more draft posts that I’ll save for tomorrow). As usual, I feel behind during the week, and of course this was a BIG week in Tudor history with the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon’s coronation on Wednesday and Henry VIII’s birthday today.

I’ve created a Twitter account for Tudor stuff, as opposed to my personal Twitter account where I mostly post science and personal stuff. The address for the Tudor feed is http://twitter.com/tudorhistory. Right now I’ve mostly been posting links when I’ve updated the blog (although I’ll refrain from posting a link to this post, since I’m pretty sure the feedback loop from that will create a hole in the space-time continuum). I’m also going to do an occasional “Today in Tudor History” once I get organized.

And for those of you eagerly awaiting the next podcast episode (I *think* there are at least one or two of you!), it’s going to be a little late. There is an outside chance I’ll have it finished before the end of the month, but if not, look for it next weekend.

That’s the update from hot and steamy Texas! Hey, it’s expected to only reach 100F (37.7 C) for most of next week, as opposed to the 105F+ (40.5 C) temps we had all last week! And it’s only June…. it’s going to be a LONG summer…

Since I know some of you will appreciate my delight in this this – I finally managed to get a copy of Roger S. Thomas’ dissertation on Jasper Tudor! I had been trying to avoid having to order a copy, so I was very happy to finally see it turn up through the Center for Research Libraries (of which my university is a member) in digital form. Now I just need to find the time to read it. 🙂

I missed the exact day (March 14), but this is close enough. It was four years ago that I switched my old “News and Updates” page to what it obviously needed to be – a blog. It basically had been a “manual” blog (with no comments other than email feedback to me) since July 1997, and I was able to pull in some of the more interesting old posts to fill out the new blog.

Thanks to everyone who stops by!

I have a back log of stuff to post, so I’ll probably be bombarding you all with a bunch of posts today. I actually decided to use one of my comp days today to give myself a three day weekend to catch up and recover from being busy and sick!

But first… off to the grocery store to replenish the Kleenex supplies and pick up a few other things.

Just a quick update – I have a hellacious head cold, on top of just finishing our winter board meeting, so I’m really out of it at the moment. I’ll answer emails and catch up on posting soon, I promise. But for now, a hot shower!

Sorry I have been a little more scarce than usual with posts lately. I’ve been super busy at work and I was dealing with a dying laptop. Thankfully the second of those has been taken care of, but the first will continue for a while longer – but at least work that needs to be done on a computer will go a little faster now, courtesy of my new laptop via work (there is no way I could afford it myself right now!).

Two news posts coming shortly… I think I’m going to soak in a hot bath for a little while first. In addition to everything else, I might be coming down with a cold… no doubt courtesy of at least one of the many school children that I talked astronomy with last week!

Just a warning that I’ll be upgrading WP today around noon US Central time, so things might be unavailable or look a little weird for a time this afternoon.

Updated 1:15 p.m. – Seems like everything is working okay. And of course the blasted RSS bug is still there. I spent about three hours last night trying to fix the same problem on my science blog (since it was already at the latest version of WordPress) and I still haven’t been able to find the line in the code causing the problem. It’s very frustrating since I know what the problem is, I just can’t find the offending file with the bug!

Unfortunately this isn’t a big announcement that I have finally updated the FAQ pages that have languished untouched for far too long. But, it is my rough analysis of popular people and topics based on a year-and-half of submissions to the Tudor Q&A blog. I try to go through and erase the old emails about every six months (I just hold on to them for a little while in case I need to get back in touch with the original submitter), but I had gotten lazy and still had emails back to mid-2007. So, I decided it would be fun to glance through them and see what topics and people came up a lot. I also had saved the questions that I just answered directly (usually because the question had already been covered on the blog), so it did help give me a good idea of who and what piques people’s curiosity the most.

– By far the most-asked-about person was Anne Boleyn. And, specifically, her jewelry and her relationship with her daughter top the list. Her death, burial and remains were popular topics for discussion as well.

– The over-all most popular topic was Henry VIII and mistresses (and any resulting children). Someday I’m going to have to put together a timeline chart of all the known and rumored affairs (and any resulting children, real or rumored).

– I think “The Other Boleyn Girl” actually edged out “The Tudors” in number of inquiries prompted by Tudor fiction. But, I think that is good evidence that people are digging further into the real history after encountering the fictionalized versions.

– Jewelry is a pretty popular topic (as mentioned with Anne Boleyn), but in particular rings and ring-wearing customs have shown up a number of times.

– Jane Parker Boleyn, Lady Rochford (I never know which of her associated names to use so people will know who I’m talking about…) and Jane Seymour were asked about quite a bit, perhaps because of recent books and television since both Janes showed up in the second season of “The Tudors” and Lady Rochford was featured in a non-fiction book. With Jane Seymour starting out season three of “The Tudors” this year, I expect more questions on her in 2009.

But I couldn’t let another big spam milestone go by without a note:

So, I moved the blog to WordPress in April and hit 1000 spam comments in August. Now I’ve hit 5000 in November. This doesn’t bode well for the future.

Actually, one of the reasons that I posted this is to apologize in advance for any delays in the appearance of real comments. The spam-catcher is actually quite good at getting the spam, but unfortunately it also catches some non-spam from time to time. I try to check the spam queue at least twice a day, but sometimes I get a little behind and then I find that I have to wade through a couple hundred comments checking to see if there is a legitimate message buried in between the ads for drugs, pics of naked celebs and other things that I won’t mention but will leave to your imagination. (I personally I don’t care what people’s private fetishes are, but really, I don’t need some of those mental images.)

One quick additional note – I’m going to be working at a science conference for the rest of the week, so things might be a little spotty. I usually find that my days at meetings like this are quick bursts of activity sandwiched between lots of equations and plots (which is when I usually check my email since these conferences are rarely on the topics that I’m most interested in).

Regular commenter Foose has been “live blogging” her read of Starkey’s new work on Henry VIII over on the Q&A blog. If anyone is interested, here is the link to the thread. Feel free to join in!

Hopefully the final time for a while!

I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be moving into my new place this weekend and will check in to approve comments and post news when time allows. I’m not in as much of a rush in this move, since I don’t have to clear out so someone else can move in, like with the first one. I’m probably going to float between the two places for the next week since I haven’t set up the cable and internet at the new place yet. Boy will I be happy when this is finished!

No hurricanes this time, thank goodness. The house has sold and unfortunately my new place won’t be ready for another couple of weeks, so my stuff is going to be in a couple of friends’ garages and I will be staying with family. I’ll be tied up with getting the stuff out of the old house on Thursday and Friday of this week, but things should be back to something passing as normal after that. There will probably be another break in posting in the first part of October when I move into the new place. I’ll be sooooo glad when all of this is over and done with!

Courtesy of Hurricane Ike —

The odds are good that I won’t have much in the way of satellite internet access starting sometime this evening and lasting until sometime Saturday evening given the rain we’re expecting from Hurricane Ike. It might just end up being windy with only some light rain in my area, but we’ll just have to see. So, there probably won’t be any new posts or comments approved until Saturday evening or sometime on Sunday.