Thanks, Jack!

With Jack about to return to Seabrook this evening, and this blog likely back to normal, I thought I’d like to publicly thank Jack for allowing us to play in his sandbox while he was away. I had fun, I got great exposure, and I hope you had fun reading what I wrote.

A meme I think we guest bloggers should follow before Jack gets back is to talk a little bit about the People’s Republic of Seabrook and what brought us here as readers (which led to us being invited aboard as TPRS writers).

Jack’s always intrigued me by being pretty much the antithesis of the Texan stereotype. Buddhist. Very liberal. Most definitely not a cowboy. Mind you, he shares certain aspects of that same Texan stereotype: exuberance and passion. And it all mixed together in his writing in such a way that made me want to come back again and again.

I became Jack’s de facto tech guru when I noticed that his Movable Type installation was very out-of-date and that, worse still, he was being hammered by lots of comment spam. And I do mean LOTS of comment spam. Holy moly, I could not believe the amount of comment spam I encountered. It was a cry for help that I answered, and Jack gave me permission to go inside his blog, purge the 50,000 comment spam messages that were infecting his posts, upgrade his Movable Type and install MTBlacklist. At the same time, I upgraded his template to what you see today.

Well, MT Blacklist seems to have worked. His total number of comments dropped from 55,000 to 5,000 when I was through the purge. Several months later they’re back up to 9,000, so I have to think that most of those 4,000 are legitimate. Still, that’s more comments than I’ve seen during the history of my blog. So whatever it is that Jack says or does certainly attracts attention and comment. I’m clearly not the only one who’s impressed around here.

So, thank you again, Jack, for letting me come to play. I hope some of you readers will hop on over to my blog, read and comment. Also, when my young adult fantasy novel Rosemary and Time comes out, I hope you will go to the bookstores in your area and demand they get you a copy. Remember: it makes a good gift, and you can tell them that you knew the author, having met him here.