For the past few years, my primary source of bona fide referrals here at thomasseidman.com has been via DCBlogs.com. But late in April 2015, the hourly-updated live feed went down and by early June the humanly-curated DC Blogs Noted feature also stopped issuing its highlights and short reviews of recent notable content. And since then there has been eerie silence. The links remain, but frozen in time.

The Webmasters have provided no notices regarding why the site went moribund or given any clue of its return, if ever, to functionality. Hundreds of local bloggers were affiliated with the site, and even those posters have let the apparent demise of DCBlogs pass without comment. It is something of a pity since the blogger community that once flourished here in the District catalyzed in part through the commonality of having thumbnails of one another’s posts appear on DCBlogs. Just a decade ago, blogger meet-ups, advertised via DCBlogs word-of-mouth and an earlier Yahoo! Group set up by intrepid local blogging pioneers, were a common periodic occurrence. Now, I suppose, the number of blogs has become unwieldy and the impetus to socialize with other bloggers has waned as the form has become ubiquitous. As blogging has become mainstream it has inevitably lost some of its cachet. I also imagine people have been put off by the danger of making public parts of their lives and beliefs that later come back to haunt them, especially in an era that has forgotten netiquette.

There still remains the matter of driving traffic to thomasseidman.com. I have been signing my site up for some blog directories–not necessarily the best and most selective ones and certainly not ones I would need to pay for. So, I have signed up with the WordPress Blog Directory and at Globe of Blogs, Blog Flux, Blogging Fusion and Ontoplist.com. I’ll see how it goes.

After a period of time during which WordPress was updating itself automatically, it snuck back into manual mode and thus I have pushed the buttons and just gotten a fresh build. The time seemed appropriate to do a bit of work on the site, and I have added some new plugins, updated others and even deactivated a few.

One of the issues I have been facing lately has been a problem with broken hyperlinks. The accepted wisdom is that certain updates to WordPress and/or certain plugins can cause hyperlinks to break, but there is a dearth of information on what exact version or add-on can be looked at as likely culprits. Debugging was a nightmare and I frankly gave up.

It was curious to note that the old hyperlinks continued to function perfectly. New ones were impossible to create (even if I coded the HTML by hand). Since the latest update, this problem had disappeared, I am happy to report.

I have overhauled the content on my Home page and moved the content formerly there to a sub-page in the drop down menu. I’ve included an RSS feed on the landing page on astronomy-related news. As an existential proposition, it is good to bear in mind our insignificance in the greater scheme of things. I am also feeling love for the gif image and have included some on my pages. I have also included a synopsis of The Book.