Lost Art Press

This is a Test of the LAP Broadcasting System

Posted on by Lost Art Press

As Megan and I mentioned yesterday, we are having serious problems with our WordPress site. We have a technical expert working on it. WordPress has mostly ignored our pleas.

In some ways, we are still trying to find out what is wrong with our Domain Name Servers (DNS). Some readers are not receiving email updates when we post new blog entries. Some are. Some are receiving an e-mail update, but it is only the digest form of the entry. Some people can see our posts in their RSS feed. Others are denied access to it.

So, if you are so inclined, could you leave a comment below telling us how you saw this entry.

  1. E-mail, full text
  2. E-mail, digest
  3. RSS

To ensure this post is long enough to kick the old WP into digest mode, I’ve elongated this entry with an old entry below.

Thank you. And apologies for the trouble.

— Christopher Schwarz

Be Fox Mulder, Not Cotton Mather

The best thing I can say about graduate school is that it taught me to think.

When someone presents an idea to you that is the opposite of everything you’ve read before and everything you believe is true, how do you react? Most people reject the new information like a kidney grafted to the place where the liver should be.

I used to be like that until I started reading Noam Chomsky’s criticisms of how mass media works.

Here’s the dime-store paperback version: Look for information that doesn’t match the conventional wisdom. This new information may not be correct either, but you should examine it closely because it will teach you something.

Here’s how this plays out in the workshop. 

In 2007, we re-published Joseph Moxon’s “The Art of Joinery” – the first English language book on woodworking – with some commentary from me. In the book, Moxon discusses “traversing” a board with a fore plane to clean it up and remove twist. I demonstrated this operation in the book and readers on the discussion forums howled.

Sadly, posts on the forums expire, so digging up the discussion is difficult. But here’s the gist:

  1. “Traversing” doesn’t really mean working across the grain.
  2. You never work across the grain with a plane. You work “with the grain,” that’s why we have this expression in our language.
  3. Moxon wasn’t a woodworker so he’s wrong.
  4. You interpreted Moxon wrong.
  5. You are wrong.
  6. Please die.

Ten years later, it seems funny that this conversation ever happened. That’s because enough people (the Fox Mulders of the world) tried Moxon’s techniques and were able to discredit the Cotton Mathers.

After 20 years in this business, I’ve seen this happen time and again.

  1. A.J. Roubo’s workbench from Plate 11 is for carpentry. Not furniture making.
  2. The bark side of a board cups and the heart side bows? Ridiculous.
  3. You have to finish both faces of a board or it will warp.
  4. You have to alternate growth rings in a panel glue-up or the panel will warp.
  5. Hide glue is outdated.
  6. Paint is for covering poor workmanship only.
  7. Nails are for carpentry, not fine furniture.
  8. Workbenches need a tail vise.

I could go on and on. And it would soon sound like I’m giving you a list of things to believe, or not to believe. All I really want to say is my favorite Russian paradox: “Disobey me.” And I’d like add one more bit of information to that: There is a way out of the paradox, but you have to find it for yourself.

— Christopher Schwarz

549 thoughts on “This is a Test of the LAP Broadcasting System”

    2. digest

      (nice post, though!)

      Oh, and I’m again listening to The Joiner and Cabinet Maker while dovetailing a bunch of kitchen drawers… I could just use a biscuit, but I like the process and find it satisfying.

  8. This is all that sows in your email from today:

    As Megan and I mentioned yesterday, we are having serious problems with our WordPress site. We have a technical expert working on it. WordPress has mostly ignored our pleas. In some ways, we are still trying to find out what is wrong with our Domain Name Servers (DNS). Some readers are not receiving email updates […]

    Read more of this post

    1. Same for me. I assume this is the digest version but am not familiar with wordpress so I couldn’t say

    2. This is also what I received, last few posts have come in a similar cashion

    6. Same for me.

      Usually I would get the full text email, I think this is the first time, I got the “klick here to read more” version

  14. I received email: full text.
    Good luck resolving the DNS – it can be a bear.

  29. Email, digest, for this one. But the AP about eating a meal had full post in my email.

  50. First thing I read in the morning. Bing lookup no email. Full text. Miss the old days before Sub stack took your daily ramblings away.
    Resist much
    Obey little
    -Walt Whitman-

  54. Came as a normal post, but had to use the link to access the full message.

  62. Email, digest
    I got a paragraph, with last line
    “Name Servers (DNS). Some readers are not receiving email updates […]”

  74. I just log on to the blog. I had no idea you could get it via email. LOL. Oh, now I see it…..just below. I like to log into the blog and have set as a favourite so no issues.

  87. E mail OK with one paragraph. Link worked fine as near as could tell. ELF

  92. I received the email. Would love to help, but I honestly don’t know what Digest or RSS mean, so I’m not sure how to tell what form is working or not. Sorry.

  111. Email, full text, bunch of comments, photos, LAP promo material. I’m disappointed that the LAP emergency alert doesn’t make a sound on my phone and warn me when Megan is contemplating another cat post.

  112. Email summary with a link to full text. No photos until I got on this site.

  130. Not one of your choices, but the LAP blog is always an open web tab (Chrome) on my phone, so always on. I hit the menu button, then the blog home button in the drop down, and Bob’s your uncle, there’s the newest entry, bright and shiny and completely normal looking. (Just wanted you to know that I follow it contrary to the crowd. Is that considered disobeying? Was responding to your survey with unsolicited information also considered disobeying?) All the best with the repairs.

  134. I’m not sure of the technical IT term to describe what I received… but it’s an email… looks quite normal… and the best part, it’s in English… well written… and provocative. I’d give you more description but I’m afraid I have to go try to plane something across the grain!

  135. I believe I got the lot. Email with link to read more which worked when selected. Able to leave comments. Hope you get it fixed soon.

    1. Can’t seem to comment, so +1 for RSS. Glad to seem I’m not the only dinosaur.

  149. E-mail, digest (I guess). I had to click on the “Read more of this post” link to see it all. I’d prefer full text.

  150. Email full text.

    “Believe nothing you hear and half what you see” Repeated to me by Tommy Twaddle, owner of the News Center.

  166. the email used to be full email but it changed, the april 23rd email was the last full one. I assume it is “email digest” now because it is an email of first few paragraphs with link to read the rest, and the link does work.
    i have never used rss, or i dont know what it is (or both)

  168. E-Mail digest with the last sentence as “Some readers are not receiving email updates […]

    Read more of this post” always without any photos/pictures except when the link is activated.

  169. Email digest…

    I don’t think it would be DNS server related but could be DNS records. Some email systems require certain DNS records known as SPF, DMarc, and DKIM

  172. Sending the team happy thoughts, great respect, and best wishes for happy days. When you write more books I will buy them.

  193. E-mail digest – gmail address.
    My regular address is signed up for the email notifications but the last one received on that address was October 25, 2023. LAP is not the only site I don’t receive notifications from. There seem to be some WordPress general problem with the address. That address is my WordPress login address.

  198. email digest – was getting full posts until recently when it switched to digests

  222. email, digest. The link at the bottom of the email opened the full article on the website. I usually get full text in the email

  228. I got it by email, but I don’t know the difference between digest and full text. The emailed version did not include the entire blog entry and ended with a link stating “Read more of this post”.

  244. Email, digest
    Also showed up in RSS feed, but delayed from email version (this may be normal).

    1. That is normal. If you think of email as a “push” technology, rss is a “pull” technology. Your rss reader has to ask for the latest update and typically does so on demand or on an hourly basis.

  260. Email digest. There have been times when your email came though as computer “ line code” unreadable. I mentioned this to Megan several months ago in an email and she had no explanation.

  266. Email digest.

    The digest version started after the screwdriver post.

    Technology is great when it works! Best of luck!

  272. Email, appears to be full text including hundreds of comments which kept loading as I scrolled down them.

  273. Got shortened email (couple of paragraphs if that is what you mean by digest).

    Also got full post on my NetNewsWire news feed.

  290. Email digest with link to full post. In the post there are no apparent problems with other links to the blog. This is from a Macbook Pro (2014) running Firefox 115.9.1esr (64-bit), with email @gmail.com.

    1. For me this switched between 4/23 (full – Classes near and far) and 4/26 (digest – flaking out Friday).

  320. Email, digest.
    Like others, emails were full text on 4/23 and then digest as of 4/26.

  321. email digest. posts over the past months have been full email. this is the first digest I’ve noticed and haven’t noticed any missed email posts.

  322. Email, full text. The issues with WordPress may not be your fault. WordPress has been all over the cyber security news lately. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/hackers-make-millions-of-attempts-to-exploit-wordpress-plugin-vulnerability/
    As for DNS or domain hosting, if you’re domain was hosted by Google, Google sold that part of their business off to Squarespace and I know of at least one domain that rolled over to Squarespace this past week. https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670?sjid=14375089934765221414-NA#zippy=%2Cfor-customers-who-purchased-a-domain-directly-from-google-domains

  330. Facebook. I did not get an email… but I did get an email from American Peasant this morning.

  334. And now that I’ve gone back to read the rest of the post… you remind me of the Terry Pratchett quote: “His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools — the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans — and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink.'”

  347. I at least saw it on my feed using WordPress’ Jetpack app. Does that mean RSS? (I don’t think I am subscribed via e-mail, I like using Jetpack or an RSS reader.)

  364. Email:

    Lost Art Press
    April 28
    As Megan and I mentioned yesterday, we are having serious problems with our WordPress site. We have a technical expert working on it. WordPress has mostly ignored our pleas. In some ways, we are still trying to find out what is wrong with our Domain Name Servers (DNS). Some readers are not receiving email updates […]

    Read more of this post

  372. I went to the website itself, since Feedly (RSS) hasn’t updated in a few days

  374. Email, digest but put this comment box at top of comments if you can.

  376. EMAIL, “the first couple lines followed by dot dot dot”. I wouldn’t call that a compilation or summary, but I guess that’s DIGEST.

  386. Email, digest. Until recently (roughly a week ago), I was receiving all of the LAP blogs posts Email, full text.

  390. Email. I’ve no idea whether this is a ‘digest’ or full post. I thought there was a fair amount to read. Don’t know what an ‘RSS’ is, so no comment.

  394. Got the digest form and was able to read entire post when I pressed “Read more ” button. Enjoyed it!

  396. Hi!
    I received the digest form and I was able to read the whole post. Hope this helps.

  401. Email with full text, I think. Ends with” There is a way out of the paradox, but you have to find it for yourself.”

  422. Email, full text. Hit my inbox at 8:16 am EDT Sunday Sunday April 2i, 2024.

  423. Saw this first on my email. But I have been getting notifications for posts that were older as well which I thought odd. Not sure if I was getting those instead of the new updates or not.

  426. Feedly says that your RSS feed is broken: “Feed not found — Wrong feed URL or dead feed”. Normally I follow the blog via RSS.

    Found this post by Facebook.

    1. Update — deleting the old entry and resubscribing seems to have fixed the RSS feed issue.

  437. Email, digest (I think – abbreviated email with link to here for the full post)

  446. This is what I got

    Lost Art Press

    April 28

    As Megan and I mentioned yesterday, we are having serious problems with our WordPress site. We have a technical expert working on it. WordPress has mostly ignored our pleas. In some ways, we are still trying to find out what is wrong with our Domain Name Servers (DNS). Some readers are not receiving email updates…

  450. Also got a come on from Word Press, after commenting, to subscribe; so it must not know I’m already subscribed?

  451. Full email, I think.

    Might be RSS since I got more posts after this point. Seems to go on well below this point.

  453. RSS I guess. Appears as a favorite in my browser as blog.lostartpress.com

  469. What change did you make to DNS? Everything looks good to me when I investigate the hostnames I’m aware of. Your time to live (TTLs) on those records are reasonable and relatively short. Someone else mentioned SPF records, and I see that you allow google and -all. The -all is not absolute, and receiving servers can still reject messages when others will accept them. When the blog sends emails, is it sending through Google or WordPress’s own mail server? If sending through WordPress servers, I’d recommend adding them to your SPF record.

    1. Sorry, you use ~all (damn my old eyes) which means receiving servers usually accept the message but can mark it as suspicious. It might be in people’s spam folders.

  476. RSS.

    I have noticed in the past that some posts seem to “break” the RSS feed (for my reader at least) for a period of time. These seem to usually be excerpts from books.

    It’s been a while since I checked this out, but I had looked at the raw feed and there was an unexpected white space character (it might have been a vertical tab, I can’t remember exactly) that broke the RSS parsing. I think this might have come from copying the text from layout software, but I’m not really sure. I don’t recall this happening recently.

  483. I see an email with a partial paragraph and a link to see the full text, which I clicked on and was provided what I think is the entire text.

  485. I am not sure what I got could be called a “digest” of the post. What I received in email was just a portion of the first paragraph of the full post. Essentially “As Megan and I mentioned yesterday…” through “email updates […]” with the text “Read more of this post” as a link to the blog.

    I used to receive the full article in email but for the past week or so all have been like the above.

  489. Noam Chomsky–righteous!! Saw and met him in Windsor, Ontario back in the early 2000s. His book, and documentary by Wintonick and Achbar are, IMHO, required viewing/reading if you care about the world you live in. I really dug the way the doc was framed in the context of Plato’s allegory of the cave!!

  492. RSS via Liferea running on Ubuntu 22.04. Delivering all blog posts in full text just fine near as I can tell.

  498. RSS feed. This morning I received a large batch, so I assume the queue flushed when you got it working. Happy to be back in the know….

  508. This is what I got

    Lost Art Press

    April 28

    As Megan and I mentioned yesterday, we are having serious problems with our WordPress site. We have a technical expert working on it. WordPress has mostly ignored our pleas. In some ways, we are still trying to find out what is wrong with our Domain Name Servers (DNS). Some readers are not receiving email updates…

  510. RSS but it’s loading 10 posts every week and they’re repeating

  513. RSS. it came through time-stamped by Feedly at May 3, 2024 at 2:13 AM (I’m in CDT)

  517. RSS feed on Feedly. Today a bunch of post came through, but nothing for at least two weeks before this.

    1. Same. RSS through Feedly with a bunch of posts today and nothing for a while before.

  521. All your posts since April 20 just appeared in my Feedly this morning at 12:13 am.

  522. RSS, but only just this morning, in a batch of delayed posts, starting with Apr 20th LAP Open Wire

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