Wordorigins.org

I’ve disabled the comments feature here on the main wordorigins.org site. The comments had simply become a way for spammers to get their message through. The signal to noise ratio was somewhere around 1:100 and I simply don’t have time to hunt down the individual spam posts and kill them.

If you wish to comment on one of the posts here in the main site, please use the discussion forum.

You may notice a new category on the right-hand navigation bar, astronomy and astrophotography.

In addition to word origins and language, I am also an amateur astronomer and budding astrophotographer. Some friends have asked me to put some of my images on the web, so I am obliging.

When I post to this new category, the new photos and entries won’t appear on the main wordorigins.org page, but they will appear in the RSS feed if you subscribe to that.

I’ve created a Facebook page for Wordorigins.org. If you’re a Facebook member, do a search on “wordorigins” and it will pop right up. Take a look, become a “fan” of the page if you are so inclined. I’m a novice when it comes to Facebook, so if you have any suggestions on things to do with the page to promote the Wordorigins.org community on Facebook, I’ve started a thread in the discussion forum on the subject. 

I’ve made some improvements to the navigation within the site. I’ve added alphabetical navigation to the Big List, so it should be easier to surf and find the terms you want. I also changed the format for how the archives of old articles are displayed on the pages; instead of a long list of links that necessitates a lot of vertical scrolling, it’s now a drop-down menu.

Enjoy.

One of the features that is changing with the new site is our weekly mailing list. We’re using a new back-end system to generate and send out the emails. Those of you that were subscribed to the email list on the old site have already been added and you should have already received your first email from the new system.

The mailing list is weekly, a digest of all that has been added to the site (other than the discussion forums) in the last week. If you subscribe to the RSS feed for the site, the email list will be duplicative.

For those that would like to subscribe, just enter your email address in the “Join our Mailing List” section of the right-hand column on any page and click the submit button. You will be sent a confirmation email with a web link to verify that you really want to subscribe. As before, the mail list is completely private. We do not sell or give out our list to anyone.

Note that the email list is separate from site “membership.” As not all members want the email, you must sign up for this separately.

And management of your email preferences is easier under the new system—there are none. To unsubscribe, simply click on the link at the bottom of any of the weekly messages.