February 18, 2003

Well, long time no updates! As will probably shock no one, after five years I'm not quite as prolific a soapmaker I once was. I had such a stash of soap that I haven't actually needed to make any in months. The good news is that I have two-plus year-old soaps that are doing just fine -- no dreaded orange spots or any of that nonsense. :) Bad news though -- I went to make soap this past weekend (the bug bit me and I couldn't take it anymore!) and I'm out of lye! Can you believe it? What a pain. Now I have to figure out where to buy it, because I went to several stores and no one had any Red Devil. Doesn't it figure?

Interestingly, my little site here has started to draw some unwanted traffic -- SPAMMERS! Oh, man. I cannot write down how much I hate those guys. Seriously, I just went and deleted some idiot's post from the discussion board where he had figured out a way to make a porn site automatically pop up by inserting HTML code into the subject line of a post to the discussion forum. Yeah, that's what I want people visiting my site to see! Arrrrggggh. So I had to go hack the discussion forum program to make it edit any subject lines which include HTML tags. I almost made it re-program any subject line which matched to read "Only an idiot spammer would attempt to insert HTML in the subject line," but then I figured I was just being snarky and it was possible -- however unlikely -- that an actual soapmaker visiting the site might accidentally use the less-than or greater-than characters, and being deliberately insulting was probably not the best way to make friends. But man, I just want to take those spammers and smack them upside the head...with an anvil. But for now, until they develop technology that will allow me to reach through my computer and start delivering the smackdown to spamming freaks, I had to settle for fixing the program. This after just a few days ago I modified the program to add a "Report this message as spam!" link to each message posted, in addition to the other links on the discussion forum. How lame is that? If it gets any worse, I might have to look at using a BBS package where you have to sign up for a username and password in order to post... it would cut down on the drive-by spammings, but at the expense of making it more annoying for newbies to try and post. Sigh.

Anyways, the observant visitor will notice the really blatant ad on the front page now saying "as featured in Crafts Magazine!" Yeah, I'm totally psyched about that. They wrote me some emails back around October wanting to know if they could reprint some of the recipes on the site, and I gave them permission, but didn't know if it was actually going to happen or not. Well, it did! They sent me an advance copy of the magazine and I got it last week. Very exciting. The only gotcha is they misspelled my name! I don't know what it is about my name, but no one can spell it. Ah well. Hopefully the recipes will be useful for someone, anyways. ;)