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News & Updates

More regular updates can be found on Bluesky and the Message Board.

August-September Updates

I always say that when I’m stressed, I get really productive. This past month is definitely proof of that.

New on the site since mid-August:

Also, the site has been migrated to a new host and there have been a few tweaks you may not even notice as part of that process. I also unfortunately lost about 10 recent comments in the migration. If yours was one of them, I’m sorry. It was nothing personal.

Remember, you can see updates as they happen (and other stuff) on Bluesky.

Another reminder, you can always see what I do for a living here.

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Message board issues

The message board is currently offline again. I have a support ticket in place but I’m 90% certain this is another instance of bot traffic, to which phpBB (the software that runs the board) seems very attractive.

This is bringing me closer and closer to a moment of truth. And the truth is that the message board is on life support. There are, to put it bluntly, something shy of a handful of users who log on with any regularity. It’s rare that there’s a new post that’s not just me announcing new material on the main site. Part of this goes back several years to some mistakes I made running the board (and frankly not paying much attention to it) but this is not an uncommon fate for a lot of these old-school message boards. So many seem to be losing old users and not attracting new ones.

All this would be fine expect for the fact that it’s becoming more and more of a nightmare to keep the damned thing running. Between bogus registrations from spammers and server issues from (mostly) AI bots, the board is 80% of my headaches with the site. And despite the famed 80-20 rule, it’s not anywhere even near 20% of my legitimate traffic.

I want to keep the content available because there’s twenty years of great history threads on the board. I’m looking into ways to migrate it to a less bot-attractive platform as a read-only site. Frankly, though, it’s just not worth the effort to put in hours setting up Cloudflare or whatever trying to keep it alive for new posts when there aren’t any (even from me) and aren’t likely to be in the future. I think this is a lot of why Aaron gave up on RetailWatchers a few years ago. Fortunately, another user took it over and kept it going, and I’m happy to talk to anyone who may have an interest in doing that with the Groceteria board. But I’m not optimistic.

UPDATE: The issue in this case was not the bots but it was “bot-adjacent.” There was a DNS update on a bot-mitigation tool that was not made (or incorrectly made) by my webhost following a server migration this weekend. The board is running without it right now until they get it updated, so it may be a little bumpy for a bit.

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July-August updates

Newly added:

Newly updated:

As always, latest news, travels, links, etc. are on Bluesky.

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Onward to Richmond

Richmond turned out to be much more interesting (and to take much longer) than I expected. Most of the big chains turned up there at some point, including Safeway, A&P. Kroger, and Food Fair, and there was also a pretty robust collection of local chains.

This is one of my more heavily researched sections and I’m quite proud of it. It includes new pages on Richmond and Hopewell plus an existing one on Petersburg. There’s also a timeline and a photo page. Close to 700 locations altogether. Give it a look if you have a chance!

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Five options…

…for a monstrously large roadtrip this fall. Thoughts? Anyone?

Option 1 (5766 mi, 9225 km): Covers two of the remaining three US states (Montana and Idaho) I’ve never visited and gets me to Seattle and Portland (whch I have missed very much) for the first time since 2002.

Option 2 (5119 mi, 8190 km): Covers two of the remaining three US states I’ve never visited and allows longer stops, but skips Seattle and Portland (though it adds a proper stay in Denver for the first time since 1992).

Option 3 (5476 mi, 8725 km): Covers two of the remaining three US states I’ve never visited and also three Canadian provinces I’ve never visited, getting me to Winnipeg (which I’m obsessed with but will probably hate), Edmonton, Calgary, and Saskatoon.

Option 4 (5819 mi, 9310 km): Doesn’t really cover much new ground other than Dallas, but gives me more of my former home state California (it’s been eleven years since I visited) and maybe Denver.

Option 5 (5053 mi, 8283 km): Also doesn’t really cover much new ground other than Dallas, but gives me longer stays in SoCal, which is always a big plus, and skips my former home city of San Francisco, which may be just fine.

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Updates, testing, and other things

I haven’t really left the house much this weekend, not wanting to multiply the evil effect pollen has had on me this year. That said, I probably would have risked leaving the house for a 25th anniversary sale at Safeway in Vancouver. Plus it seemed like time to move the April Fool’s gag out of the top position.

So you get updates. You’re welcome.

Page layouts:

After almost a year, I have finally finished my project to re-format all the location lists on the site (which took longer than I planned). For the past ten-plus years, these pages were generated with a Google spreadsheet in an IFRAME. This simplified lots of things for me but also had some negatives. To start, it was absolutely horrible on mobile devices. Also, since the sheets were externally hosted by Google, none of the data showed up when you searched this site. Both of those problems are now solved. And for those of you who would rather see the lists in tabular format (which really is the best way unless you’re on a phone) you can still view them in Google Sheets, as a CSV, or as a PDF.

If you’re interested in geeking out and learning how I (sort of) automated this using OpenRefine, let me know!

Search options:

Another thing I started on quite a while back was adding a function to search both the main site and the message board simultaneously. This is harder than it sounds; these are two different platforms (WordPress and phpBB) using two different databases. There are plugins and paid options to cross-search, but I’m cheap (and don’t receive any compensation from the sites) so I opted for a Google-based option that I had used before. I finally have them reasonably well implemented on both sites. I have not (yet) replaced the traditional search functions on either; the Google option is an additional search box while I’m still testing and tweaking. Let me know how it works for you!

Latest updates:

Since March:

 

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