Category: Site Updates and News

I’m feeling better, although still not 100%, but things are stacking up so I’ll be posting some news items as time permits today. Thanks for the good wishes everyone!

I posted something on the Q&A blog, but I thought I should post it here too — I woke up last Thursday with a scratchy throat which has now developed into a full-blown cold. I thought I was improving, but I seem to have taken a step backwards today. So anyway, updates will be a little slow until I’m feeling better. I think I’m just going to curl up in bed with the Olympics tonight and leave the computer in another room…

And that is just since I moved to WordPress in mid-April of this year. Sheesh!

I’ve finally started posting the new versions of photos of the places I’ve visited in the Architecture section. So far I’ve updated Hever, Sudeley and Kenilworth Castles. I added a couple of photos that I left off the first time around, even though some aren’t great or a little redundant. Also, the thumbnails and full views are bigger now, since I have more storage and bandwidth to play with. I’ve also done a few tweaks with the layout and added an image to the history pages. I’m going to work on this some more over the weekend but I might not get the new pages uploaded until I get back to work on Monday.

Hello all! Yes, I know there is some news that needs to be posted, but I’m going to do my WordPress upgrade today (probably before noon US Central time) so things might either be unavailable or look a little wonky for a while.

Update: All done! I don’t see anything broken, but if there is something that doesn’t work right now, please leave a comment.

Wendy J. Dunn is going to do the Tudor Ghost Story Contest again this year! Full details are available here. You can read past winners there as well.

Things might look a little weird here on the blog on and off today while I’m trying to add a few things. My apologies if the blog becomes awkward to read for a while!

Hello all! Due to the upcoming sale of our house and move (back in to Austin proper – we’re out in a rural area near Elgin right now) my weekends are going to be completely eaten up soon. So, I’ve decided to put the podcast on hiatus for the summer. We’re hoping to take a vacation to Maine again this year too, so I’ll probably just aim to start back up in September or October. This will also give me a little time to think some more about a few format changes that I’ve been considering. And this will allow me to finally get on a schedule to put the podcast out at the beginning of a month instead of the end! 🙂

I apologize to all the folks who have emailed me telling me how much they look forward to the podcast every month since they’re going to have a bit of a wait for the next one now! But I’ll still be updating the website and news blog as time allows, so you can still get your “Tudor fix”.

Until the fall, fare thee well!

Just a little warning that I’ll be upgrading WordPress, so the blog might be unavailable for a short time (at roughly 3 p.m. CDT). Maybe this will fix that RSS issue!

Update: 3:05 p.m. – Upgrade complete! Seems to be working okay, but it didn’t fix the Firefox RSS issue… bummer.

If any of you were reading on the RSS feed and stumble back here wondering why nothing has shown up lately, it’s because WordPress doesn’t publish its feeds the same way Blogger did, so you will have to resubscribe to the site with the link at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Sorry about that!

And if Blogger ever does start to publish correctly again, I’ll try to get a post out on the old feed to tell people to come over to the new one. I have no idea if or when that will ever happen though, the way things are going!

Just in case anyone wanders over here from the Q&A blog, I thought I would post something about the problems that are continuing with publishing from Blogger.

Sometime on Friday, things just stopped working and nothing would publish from Blogger to my site. So, I popped over to the Blogger discussion forums and discovered that lots of other people were reporting the same issues. A similar thing happened last September, but it only lasted for about 3 days that time. We’re now up to 6, and I’m very, very frustrated – and quite disappointed with the lack of response from the Blogger folks (on their own forums!). I’m still not sure why two posts have been able to squeak through since the problems started, but since the issues are continuing, it certainly hasn’t been fixed.

So, I’m going to give it another few days and if it isn’t fixed, I’ll migrate that blog over to WordPress too. Things will be down for a few hours, but considering that they haven’t been working properly for 6 days, a few hours shouldn’t be a problem!

Since Blogger still hasn’t managed to fix the publishing problem that I (and many others) have been having for almost a week now, I’ve decided to start migrating all the blogs over to WordPress, which comes with my web hosting package. I’ve managed to get over the posts and comments from the old blog, but I’m going to have to re-link all the pictures. There will probably be some kinks for the next week while I tweak things here and there. For those of you reading on the RSS feed, hopefully there won’t be any interruption.

I think the switch is going to be a good thing since it will allow me more flexibility in what I can add to the blogs in the future.

If anyone comes across any problems, please email me: lara@tudorhistory.org

I was looking through some folders on my laptop to see if I could weed some stuff out, and I found the folder that had the last version of my personal website before I moved it and the Tudor section over to their own respective sites at Simplenet. Above is the graphic that was the “gateway” from my main page to the first Tudor webpages I ever made, somewhere in late 1994, I’m pretty sure… I know I definitely had it going by the time I moved to my current job in 1995.

I still can’t believe how far the internet and my website have come since those early days!

(Thanks for indulging me in a little reminiscing!)

At this point some old-time site visitors are recovering from a fainting spell. Yes, it’s true, I’m really working on the actual site, not just updating the blogs and podcast!

Whenever I starting working on the site proper after a long spell, I always think of when Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory started up again after he closed down because the workers were stealing his secrets. Well, I don’t have yummy chocolate and candy to share (or any creepy Oompa Loompas to help me out), but I will be updating some entries, adding some new pictures (including quite a few from my 2003 trip to the UK that I finally scanned from the negatives) and various other things. I need to re-organize and cross-link some things too, but that might take some more tweaking. I’m also going to start doing individual “updates” pages for each person, etc., so you can keep track of what I have added, updated or corrected. There will be a link at the bottom of each individual page to its “updates” page. I sort of borrowed the idea from Wikipedia, although I won’t be keeping copies of the old versions of the pages (some of them that I wrote over 10 years ago are almost painful to read since I think my historical writing has improved since I originally started the site!). I’ll try to do a blog post summarizing recent updates periodically for folks who are interested.

PS: And for those of you whose calendar already reads April 1, no, this isn’t an April Fool’s Day joke. I really am working on the site!

I just wanted to put something out there that spammers and scammers are once again trying to spoof my domain or use the site address in emails to try to scam folks. The only two email addresses that I use are tudorhistory@tudorhistory.org and lara@tudorhistory.org. Anything else that appears to be coming from my domain has been faked. Generally the only email you will get from me is in response to an email you sent to begin with or to a question submitted through the Q&A form.

Also, I’ve seen at least one email of a Nigerian-type scam saying that they saw a person’s profile on tudorhistory.org. The only “profiles” that are on my site are from people who have commented on the blogs or have submitted listings on the penpal pages, so if you’ve done either of those, you might want to be on the lookout for that type of scammer email.

Yeah, I know, we’re nearly a week into the new year, but the December podcast is finally posted. Hopefully my voice doesn’t sound too bad on the recording… I’m mostly better now but I still have a cough and some nasal drainage, which is still messing with my voice a little. But I don’t think most people would be able to tell. 🙂

I would like to wish everyone a happy 2008 (still 11 hours to go here in Texas, but I know some of you have already changed calendars on the other side of the planet!)!

I have some updates and blog posts to make that were *supposed* to be done over the break, but my laptop died right after arriving in Alabama and then my boyfriend and I got really sick (I got the better end of the deal… he ended up with pneumonia, I just had a really bad cold). We made it back to Texas a couple of days ago but we’re both still recovering. And the laptop is a couple of days away from getting fixed, so I probably won’t be making any more posts until that is back up and running. I have back-ups of everything, but I like to keep my most up-to-date copies of everything in one place so I don’t get things mixed up. I usually have everything on my thumbdrive, but of course, I copied it all to the laptop shortly before it died so I wouldn’t have to worry about losing the thumddrive on the trip. Oh well! I’m guessing everything will be back up and running and as close to normal as they ever get the first full week in January.

So, once again, Happy New Year!