Just a quick post to say that Cipher Mysteries’ email subscription button now no longer works, because the Feedburner service behind it is no longer (since a little earlier this year, in fact) accepting new subscriptions. Which is annoying (of course), but it is what it is. Google had a reputation for buying companies more for their people than for their product, and Feedburner is only one of many such acquisitions that were left to wither on the vine for years, so this should be no surprise.
It’s a shame: as a blogger, I really don’t want to have to manage a list of subscribers, so Feedburner was always going to be a good fit for me. So now I’ll have to find a Feedburner replacement and integrate that back in.
More generally, the Cipher Mysteries website needs attention: the theme it’s using is outdated and fairly second-rate on mobile, and mobile views now typically account for more than 50% of page views here. Here are the stats for the last 14-ish hours:
Incidentally, Diane mentioned a mysterious “Singapore spike” in her site statistics a few days ago, so here’s a graph showing the same spike on Cipher Mysteries a few weeks ago (the three colours are page views, visits, returning visits):
Anyway, it looks as though I’m going to have to give Cipher Mysteries a bit of infrastructure TLC, bah.
Could the Singapore spike be attributed to Hickey Taylor, wearing one of Gladys Moncrieff’s dresses, singing “L’amour, toujours l’amour?” He does sound like a lot of fun in his young days… I imagine he could draw quite a crowd!
Jo
I wonder if Hickey Taylor did drag renditions of ‘Day after Day after day we will always be Swearhearts’ or ‘Vilia’, both made her own by the immortal ‘Our Glad’ (Maid of the Mountains) Gladys Moncrief.
https://www.artscentremelbourne.com.au/community/content-hub/together-with-you/stories/2021/lgbtiq-heritage-in-the-apac
It seems that “Our Glad” was a sapphic icon! All those Gallery Girls!
On Ciphermysteries and TLC – I think it’s impressive that the format has had such good ling run!
Oh dear! You can tell I type in a mobile! “Long run”!
I used to be a longtime subscriber until July last hear, when suddenly Feedburner stopped sending updates. I miss this blog’s regular heads up greatly. Is there a solution?
Andy Lawendel: unfortunately, I need to replace Feedburner, and also fix the mobile-unfriendly WordPress theme. But I keep finding new things to blog about! I’ll try to fix subscriptions soon.
Dear Nick, do you have the IP of the Singapore-based person or bot that has been downloading Voynich posts from you and Diane?
Bob Edwards: I checked the Cipher Mysteries logs, and the last 11 accesses from Singapore (out of 500 total) all had different IP addresses (and several different ISPs). But I’m pretty sure IP addresses are easy to spoof, so that’s not a huge help. 🙁