Day: September 30, 2021

Private vs. Public and our Euro friends

Murder by Death

Murder by Death

 

So far, the limited conversations about this site that have centered around privacy and visibility is that everybody is for making the site private.  Since this current test site is my personal domain, I’ve already taken all steps to make it as inaccessible to the public as possible and I’m comfortable with its current status.

But once our Euro friends who fall under the GDPR laws join us, it’s a different ball game, as, if I understand this correctly, the law states that all users must list their real names/addresses, unless the site is private.  My current settings would count as private, in my opinion.

Currently, it’s possible to make posts and pages private using the Visibility function, but the glitch with that is setting that to Private makes the post or page visible only to administrators (handy on the future perm. site for administrators to basically PM each other).  The other option is Password Protected and that just seems a bit too much, asking everybody to enter a password to read the posts.

The only way to make the entire site private is through a plug-in, which is free.  It will enable whole site privacy, and as they say on the site: “Now, whenever anyone who isn’t registered and logged into your site comes to see it, this is all they’ll get: the login screen.”  (source: https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/how-to-make-wordpress-private/)

Do we want to do this?  We can still ask new members to join us, but they won’t be able to approach us blindly; they’ll have to come to us through another member.

Thoughts?  Personally I want our Euro members, TA, Lillelara et. al to be able to join us without stressing about GDPR.  If that means I publish my personal details along with everybody else’s on my privacy page, or make the entire site visible to members only, so be it.  But this is definitely a discussion for the committee.

TEST TO SEE HOW MY HB POST LOOKS IN THIS TEMPLATE

Mike Finn

My fourth week of Halloween Bingo felt very relaxed. I finished three books and enjoyed all of them.

.’World Of Trouble’ was the last book in a trilogy about the end of the world that I’ve been putting off reading, partly because I thought it might be too sad. It was sad but not in a maudlin way. The ending was beautiful and perfect. I’m very glad I finally read this one.

‘Burn Bright’ was my fifth visit with Anna and Charles and was the best book in the series so far. I picked it for my Raven square partly because it gave me a potential bingo and partly because I was in the mood for more Patricia Briggs.

I enjoyed learning about the Wildings, werewolves too broken to live with the pack and too dangerous to live with humans. The central mystery was good and the action was compelling. As usual though, what I enjoyed most was getting to know the characters better. 

‘Shadowlands’ was a last minute decision. I wanted something light and quick to fill my Sunday and the Trick Or Treat square offered me another potential bingo.

I’d never read Meg Cabot before. She delivered a light, entertaining Young Adult tale about a teenager who can talk to the dead. Most of the mileage came from our heroine’s move to Carmel from NYC but there was also a baddy worthy of a Buffy Season 1 episode. It was a pleasant way to spend five hours.

So this is my current Halloween Bingo Library:

The game is 44% through at this point and I’ve read half of my books. I’m hoping to get a bingo this week. So far I have:

  • eight squares read and called
  • three squares called but not read
  • six squares read but not called.

New Plug-in: Default categories

Murder by Death

Murder by Death

 

When Christine set up the details of the site layout, she created a category for everybody who is here (so far).  Once that user creates a post and assigns it to their category, it automatically creates a link in the left menu that will show all that users’ posts aggregated onto one page.

The hitch(es) are that Administrators have to remember to create the category when the user is created (at the moment it’s just me, but eventually will be Christine and whomever she assigns an Admin role), AND the user has to remember to assign their category to their posts.

I found a plug-in that eliminates half that need to remember.  It’s called Restricted Author, and it allows you to set a default category on a per user basis.  (You can also restrict authors to certain categories, hence the name, but I’m not using that feature.)

Admins still have to create the category when they create the user and make sure it’s assigned to them as the default, but now whenever any of us create a post, it will automatically assign that post to our category.

NOTE:  The category is only set upon saving the post (either Publish or Draft), so when you first open “new post” the category won’t be checked.