Here's an update on all the things happening here:

First of all, the blog/comment issue. I may have found the culprit - it seems it has something to do with the blog template. How that could have changed from working without trouble to refusing to show comments, well, I have no inkling of the hint of a clue of an idea... but it means I can start to look into it with something like a bit more of a direction. The quick fix for this might be to install a different template for the time being, but that would look completely different to the rest of the site, and the one I tried this morning for a few minutes was... um... let's just say I found it not aesthetically pleasing or easy to use at all.

Secondly, the online spinning workshop - my plan is to include a spinning kit consisting of a dressed distaff and a spindle with whorl in the price for the workshop, and send these out beforehand. That way, everyone will have the same tools and materials, and we can all start on the same spot. This might not be the best option for courses abroad, but it's certainly something for Germany... and the international shipping option might be the DIY distaff kit, plus fibre, and then my spinners will have to dress the distaff themselves. I'll look into that some more - first course will be in German, and I'll fix a date and put it into the shop in the next few days.

Before that, though, I have to finalise and send off the two pieces I've been writing for two museums - both are materials for internal use, to help with setting up an exhibition or with museum projects. Usually the museum assistance things I write are directly connected to a reconstruction that I'm making for them, so it actually feels a bit weird to hand in "just" a written thing, and no actual goods in connection with them. If all goes well, I'll be finished with one of them before the weekend comes - at least that's my plan. Let's see how well it fares when it has to face reality.

Finally, for you to see you off into the weekend, some garden pictures - because there's also nice things going on there. There's still tulips blooming, among them this fuzzy-edged one:



To my delight, the first of my new tomato plants has started flowering. If the fruits will be ripe as quickly, and taste nicely as well, I might have a new favourite breed...



To my similarly great delight, the little lemon tree has not only grown a good bit this early spring, and bloomed nicely, it is also hard at work making lemons. This is the first one, and the largest to date.



All the care instructions in the 'net, by the way, say that lemon trees like it rather dry and must not be watered too much. I found that at least this one specimen hates getting too dry; it will roll up its leaves, never to unroll them again. So now it lives in a pot with a water reservoir, I make sure the reservoir is never completely empty - and that seems agreeable to the little tree. Which will, hopefully, provide us with lemons now I've found out what it wants.

I'm having a little bit of a technical issue (thanks for the heads-up, Beatrix) - the comments are currently not showing on the blog.

I have no clue why this happened, and I'm looking into it. The quick-fix attempts have not worked, unfortunately. (These were, just in case you're interested: Checking if the cache plugin is to blame, checking if there is a wordpress plugin that prevents the comments from showing by disabling them all, checking if it's due to the theme by changing to another one.)

This means there might be some deeper issue... which I'll go and hunt for. Unfortunately  If you have been or are commenting (and thank you if you did, it's always great to get feedback): I still get what you are writing, both in the back-end of the site, and as an email, so it's not lost. It is just not showing up currently.

The really weird thing about this is that I can't remember changing or updating anything in the last few days, or in between the comments still showing and them disappearing quietly (and I don't know when, exactly, they did this). So there I will have go, delving deeper into the innards of my site. Wish me luck!

So... there's some site maintenance coming up. Fortunately, it seems like I've fretted way more about how difficult that might be than it was worth. Fingers crossed it will run smoothly, when I run it one of the next few days. Just in case this interests you, here's the background:

This website runs on Joomla!, which is a free and open-source CMS (or content management system). Basically, this means something you install to give you a basic structure, and a lot of templates that you can use to get a certain look. It's a good bit easier and quicker to handle than writing html from scratch, and uses the new-fangled things like css and javascript and shenanigans like that. It also keeps you updated on any new developments coming in, as there's a bunch of people working on the system, keeping it up-to-date regarding security, database versions, and whatnot.

There's several CMS to choose from, if you are setting out. I decided to go for Joomla! (yes, with an exclamation mark, even though that makes for awkward typing) because when I was first looking into making an online shop, I found a shop software that looked sensible and useful to me, and that was based on Joomla!. So when I set up the current site, pulling everything together into the same base made sense.

The blog, however, was running on blogspot back then. I wanted to migrate the whole thing, and found that J! doesn't have a good blog setup suitable to get the thing over. That may have changed by now, but back then I found there was a plugin that could be bought, integrating  Wordpress (which is primarily a blogging system, unlike J!, which is more a general-content-in-articles system) for blogging into a J! site. Ah, the things that are possible these days.

That's why my blog is running on Wordpress inside a J! installation.  From time to time, there's updates for some extra functions coming in, such as the spam protection used in this blog. The most recent one then made said anti-spam break because it doesn't support the current WP version that I have... since the special circumstances mean I don't get the regular updates for Wordpress, and those for the inside-J!-version usually came quite a bit after the regular ones. (If you caught a glimpse of spammy comments, these happened during the c 24 hours that I needed to find a replacement for the plugin.)

So... I went to check for an update for the plugin I have, and found out that there is sort of one. The company who made Wordpress4Joomla is not offering it anymore as a subscription service - the files are now available on GitHub, for free. Even better, and slightly unexpected: an update was included in this list just 2 months ago, to the almost-newest version of Wordpress, 5.6. Which is very, very nice, basically - but since there's just the files in the repository, and no support or explanation, it means some figuring out had to be done on what to do. Hence the fretting. Accompanied by some looking into options in case I don't manage to update the thing, and/or updates stop completely and I need to change to some other blog plugin.

In the end, after looking at previous installation packages and the files in there, I started up the (already rather old) copy of my site running locally on my computer, and tried to just copy the new files with changes in them over the old ones, bringing my WP first from 5.1 to 5.2, and then from 5.2 to 5.6. And lo and behold! it did work, as far as I can tell from this test.

Which means that I can go and try to do it on the actual live and running thing, here. As soon as I have a bit of time and the necessary inner calm to do so, because it's always a little nerve-wracking to do things like that... even if there's backups to roll back to the previous version in case things go pear-shaped.

I'm really happy, though, that I was an adventurous student with enough free time on my hands back when the Internet started to become what it is. My first site, done just for fun, was written by hand in html in a plain text editor. That gave me a good, solid basic understanding of things internetty - and over the years, by having to keep at least partly up to date with how things developed, I gained enough understanding of the scripts and things that came into being to not be completely daunted. I can more or less understand some things happening when I read scripts - not well enough to do my own programming, but it suffices for a lot of small tweaks that are necessary in some cases. And that, when it works, is also deeply satisfying!

The shop is back online, after a short break overnight to implement the change in VAT rate that is in effect here in Germany starting today.

I think the change was one of these ideas that are well-meant and sound really good at first, but are not as brilliant on a second, closer look. For me, it was rather easy to implement, with a smallish shop and a decision on how to handle it that makes things much easier for me. Changing the tax rate was, in my case, quick and easy to do. The prices, though, will remain the same, as the shop fixes the brutto price (including the tax). As I have both things with reduced tax rate in the shop as well as normal rate things, and the printed matter is partly bound to the price (there's a German book price law, which means a new book will cost the same no matter where you buy it, and the price is fixed by the publishing house), I can't just slap a general discount on.

My solution is to offer a discount code - you can enter this in the appropriate field shown on the shopping basket page - and you'll get the price reduction on all the eligible items. (Or you can just pay the full price, if you want me to have a bit more revenue from your purchases, which will also be welcome.)

Other vendors have not had it this easy, though. Especially if you have an automatic cashier desk or similar things, I've heard that things could be very complicated, and nerve-wracking. In quite a few branches of trade, there's a lot of confusion on how to handle this, and whether it's better to pass on the reduction to the customer, or to keep the little extra revenue. It should be clear in gastronomics (which was, I think, the primary reason for the VAT rate reduction), but in other businesses, I wonder if the extra amount of work and hassle will really be worth it. It's extra-complicated in the book trade, due to the fixed-price law!

Just like in so many other circumstances, only time will tell whether this stunt will actually do something for German economy. In the meantime, you can enjoy the discount and with it the accompanying "krumme Preise", as we say in German - non-round, slightly weird numbers for the prices.

And that's it for the current behind-the-scenes report...

There's a stack of things happening here, though almost all of them are boring-type background things. There are some minor issues with the website, including some updates and some other small nuisances that I'd like to fix, but still haven't. In some cases, I'm not good enough at programming or understanding how the website innards work, and I just can't find where to tweak stuff so it works as intended. Most of these things are also not crucial, so I tend to have a go at them when they catch my eye, which they do once in a while, and after an hour or two of fuddling around, I put them to rest again. Sometimes I change a small thing only to find out (days or weeks later, if things go badly) that my things-look-better-now tweak actually was a things-look-better-here-now-but-shittier-everywhere-else thing. Sigh.

The most current problem was a deluge of spam coming via my contact form. It seems to have been solved now, at least mostly - I'll see if what I did was enough in the next few days. There's a plugin installed now that should keep bots from posting while doing nothing (and adding no extra steps) for regular, living and breathing human beings. If that will not stop the spamming, I'll have to add one of those wonderful "please answer this simple maths question" thingies - something I did want very much to avoid. But if the alternative is to get about 200 spam emails each day, plus the same amount in "Undelivered Mail Returned To  Sender" messages, that decision does get a lot easier.

There's also some more maintenance and ordering of things going on with the computer. Most of the transferred programmes seem to work fine on the newly setup machine, but there's a new backup procedure to be implemented, and it's a good opportunity to do some additional housekeeping, so that's also going on, and - as usual - it takes a long time and is a little annoying.

In other, more happy news: There's been some progress on the Ink cardigan, as can be proved by this very bad, very blurry photo:



I've progressed past the raglan increases and into the main body. Next step will be knitting the sleeves. I've found out with my first knit-it-all-in-one-piece piece that I absolutely hate knitting the sleeves as the last bit. There's just too much finished object to turn around with each round of the sleeve to make it comfortable... which means I'll do the sleeve-knitting right now, at the earliest possible part. That way I can also see if things fit, or if I have to go back a bit and adjust stuff.

 

There's nothing much happening here - I'm still rootling around, enjoying that it's quieter now, trying to catch up on my backlogs (there are several, email being one of them) and trying to fix those small but pesky issues that had cropped up here and there.

The pallia newsletter subscription was one of those. Since starting the English newsletter in addition to the regular German one, I needed some way for new subscribers to choose which one to get (or if they want to get both).

That seemed not to be possible, at least not for somebody like me with no php skills whatsoever. So, as a workaround, I made a new list to subscribe to, which was supposed to automatically send a "Welcome"-Mail with the choice in it (thus also serving as the double-opt-in thing). Unfortunately, this did not work as intended either. To top everything off, the "subscribe to newsletter"-Checkbox appeared twice, once in the registration form for the shop and once in the checkout, and it only worked if checked in the checkout process. (You do not want to know how many test users I have subscribed to the newsletter trying to find out what goes wrong. And how many fake orders I put in...)

Since support was not willing to help, I've now solved the problem in a roundabout way. There is no more "subscribe to newsletter" checkbox in the registration or checkout anymore; instead, there are opt-in links in the email you will get after ordering.

I've also decided to finally switch to a different bank account, since my old bank has changed their terms and conditions in a way that totally does not suit me. So that is coming up in the next few days as well - hopefully transferring everything to the new bank will go smoothly.

It definitely feels very nice to get all those niggly things sorted out!

As usual, somehow there's an astounding lot of stuff going on once the summer comes to an end. Not only is the European Textile Forum coming up (November will, according to experience, arrive quicker than expected... as always), there's also the MEDATS Study Day (for which I've finally managed to compress everything I want to say to the time allotted for my paper - hopefully I can keep to it at the conference), there's a medieval fair which I'll be going to, and the Nadelkunst fair as well.

So I will do what I always do when things come thick and fast: I take a little break off the blog. Expect me back here on October 8 - at least for a while, before I'll take another timeout for the utterly delightful craziness that is the European Textile Forum!