Tag: Hot Topic

New comment system for Hot Topic

It’s Saturday afternoon, and between finishing the chilli jam to go with tonight’s six-hour roast lamb and a quick pre-dinner bike ride, I’m moving Hot Topic over to use the Intense Debate comment system. This is an externally-hosted comment service, operated by Automattic, the WordPress people. During the import process, existing comments may not appear on the site, but all should be well within a few hours. This is only a trial, and I can revert to the basic WordPress comment system at any time (it runs in parallel, in fact), but Intense Debate offers a wide range of features that should make commenting (and managing comments, from my point of view) easier. Existing log-ins should synchronise with Intense Debate, but if you create an Intense Debate account you can have personal profiles and other things. The experiment has begun…

[Update Sunday evening] It appears that existing Hot Topic log-ins are not automatically recognised by Intense Debate. I recommend that regular commenters sign up for an ID account. That gives you access to “reply by email”, which is a neat feature of the system. You can also comment as a guest, but without that (and other) features.]

A blast from the past

Two years ago I took part in the World Peace Summit: Climate Change – What To Do? in Wellington, at the Westpac St James Theatre. I blogged about it at the time (before and after), and promised to link to the video of my talk when it was available. Of course, I then completely forgot to check, and so when I stumbled upon myself on Youtube earlier today, I thought I’d finally keep my promise. Given that I was talking in 2008, I think my comments stand up quite well (I’m rather pleased with my remarks about warmer winters being snowier winters), though my technological optimism is now tempered by pessimism both about the state of the climate system and our ability to come up with policies to reduce emissions. If you follow the “more from” links on the Youtube page, you can also watch David Wratt, Pene Lefale, Rod Oram, Andrew West, and Rachel Brown’s presentations.

Back at the ranch

Petrel(small).jpg

Back at my desk, after four days on a boat in the Abel Tasman/Golden Bay area. I’m tempted to post a selection of my photographs, but I’ll settle for this one (for fellow Sciblogger Chthoniid) of a petrel, taken in Golden Bay a few kilometres off Farewell Spit on Monday morning. Oily seas, hot, lots of birds and kingfish. Click on the picture for a bigger version. Anyone know the exact species? I’d say it was a black petrel, but I’m no ornithologist. I’ll be back on the climate beat over the next few days, but meanwhile my thanks to Bryan for a series of very good posts over the last week.

Time for a break…

Time to reconnect with New Zealand. I’m taking my summer break from blogging. Over the next few days, I’ll be on a boat (the one in the picture) tootling around the Abel Tasman, and therefore out of touch with the world. Bryan will be your host until I get back to my desk at the end of next week. Be gentle with him, please…

Hacked again

Hackers broke into Hot Topic‘s servers again this afternoon (though not, apparently, the same bunch as last time), and although I was able to restore the site within a couple of hours, some problems may remain. Not quite the New Year present I’d been looking for… As before, I would ask registered users to change your log-in passwords. Tomorrow, I may need to restore the database to an earlier version (from this morning) which could mean loss of some recent comments, but I’ll try to avoid that if at all possible. I’ll be working with my hosting provider to try to prevent further incursions.