Menstrual Poetry

Minor Technical Difficulties & Why I Love BlueHost

Anyone who visited this site from 12-12:30am was greeted with an Internal Server Error. I have no idea why this occurred or what made it happen, as I hadn’t touched this site since early yesterday afternoon. After a minor freak out, poking around in my error log trying to figure out what exactly happened and realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to figure it out, I called BlueHost, the hosting company I use for this site.

This is the second time in almost a year that I have called them for technical support and this is the second time that they came through and fixed the problem within 10 minutes. Because they didn’t want to keep me, the crazy chick freaking out thinking that her entire site would be gone by the time they said “Sorry, we can’t help you.” on the phone, they said that they would email me as soon as they knew what was going on. Within maybe 10 minutes I received an email saying that the problem had been fixed. Like I said, I have no idea what happened but I’m very glad BlueHost did and returned my site to normalcy. Good customer service is hard to come by and when it comes to anything technology-based, it’s even more difficult to find so when a company actually does what they say they will, I am a bit surprised and of course have to make a big deal about it.

The site is back, sorry to anyone who was greeted with nothing but an Internal Server Error and thank you BlueHost.

Big Changes in the Comment System

If you’ve been a long time reader or commentator of Menstrual Poetry, you may have noticed that a while ago, we had a big change when it came to the comment system. While debates tend to break out between commentators due to the nature of most of the topics I write about, I wanted to implement a comment system that would allow people to debate with one another without having to go searching for their comment and the replies to the comment they left, so I installed Intense Debate, a comment system that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for at the time as far as threaded comments went and allowing people to debate within the comment system–I mean hello, the name of the system was Intense Debate! I ended up using Intense Debate for a month or so and then realized when another hot debate broke out between people in the comments, threaded comments wouldn’t go beyond one reply to a comment, which if you’ve debated or conversed with other commentators in a post, you know that there is never an instance where you leave one reply to a comment and that’s the end of it; you need to be able to have an ongoing conversation with people about a topic, it’s just the way it is. I had a myriad of other problems with Intense Debate that honestly, I forget now but remember that my friend Ally from Take Me Nowhere had the same problems with the system. Ally, upon requesting help from their customer support when she tried to uninstall Intense Debate but repeatedly received error messages upon exporting her comments, received nothing back for quite some time and then after she received emails back from them, realized that they were simply giving her the run around and blaming her for their obvious flaw in the system. The customer support debacle between the two of them got rather nasty throughout the month it took them to get back to her and ultimately left her with no other option than to manually go through hundreds of comments and put them back into the system with absolutely no help from Intense Debate’s disgusting attempt at customer support. I ended up having the exact same problems with the system as she did and while I emailed their customer support upon receiving their infamous error messages, I just never received anything back from them, leaving me no options but to manually go through all of my comments and manually put them back in and resort back to the standard Wordpress comment system.

From that point forward I have been using the standard Wordpress comment system and while it has worked fine, I still had that hole in my comment system where commentators couldn’t debate or reply to comments left by other people. While surfing around the web yesterday I came across a lovely little comment system called Disqus. Having never heard of it before, I read the testimonials on their site and also did some other research on the program and couldn’t find one horrible review, so I installed it here and that is the comment system you can now see on Menstrual Poetry.

I am really excited about Disqus because it has threaded comments like Intense Debate did, but unlike Intense Debate, there is no limit to the amount of times you can reply to a comment, it will just thread along forever if need be. Disqus also makes it easier for you to moderate your comments by putting a tab right in the comments section of Wordpress that lets you easily manage comments and opens the Disqus tabs immediately, eliminating that extra click it would take in order to open the Disqus comment manager.

In case you haven’t had the opportunity to check out the new comment system, I suggest you take a gander and also leave a comment. An icon will show up if you have either a Gravatar or profile on Disqus that will also track all comments you make on sites that have their comment system on their sites. It also has another cool feature that I like a whole bunch. If you’ve noticed little up and down arrows next to someone’s icon in the comments you can click up to give their comment a point if you really love what they have to say or you can click down if you think their comment serves no purpose, you don’t agree with it and so on. Not only that, but if a comment has -4 points (on this site, anyway, it can be changed and varies on other sites using Disqus) the comment will not even be shown; it’s very digg-like.

I have missed a lot of awesome features in this pseudo review, so here is a screenshot of what my Disqus manager looks like:

When it comes to your site’s comments, everything can be moderated and tweaked through Disqus and it’s a pretty rad system, I like it.

I have had one problem with Disqus, however. After importing my old comments from Wordpress into Disqus so I wouldn’t lose any comments I had prior to the installation, the system decided which comments it was going to import leaving a lot of old posts without any comments and quite a few posts with just some of the comments imported. While all comments are still in my Wordpress comment log, they don’t seem to want to show up on the site now for the public, so if you’ve noticed this problem and wondering what’s going on, please be relieved to know that I am aware of the problem and have wrote to their support about it. This brings up another huge plus about Disqus.

Within an hour (if that) of writing to their support about the issue I’m having with the comments, Daniel Ha, the cofounder of Disqus emailed me back to say that he was looking into the matter. I Twittered the problem that I was having after I had sent the email and just in case I checked Twitter before my email, like I did, Daniel Ha also sent me a tweet saying that he responded and that all was well. Obviously Disqus knows a thing or two about support and actually helping out and looking into the problems its users have during the process of setting up their commenting system. I am fully confident that my problem will be fixed and if not, I’ll find another way around it. I am thoroughly impressed by their support and by their program, obviously.

So thank you, Disqus, not only for the totally rad commenting system, but also for the excellent support and dedication you show for your creation. You’re pretty rad in my book.

I hope everyone likes and haves fun with the comments now, I’ll also be replying to comments made on this site a lot more, so count on seeing me communicate a bit more with everyone, which is always nice.

We Interrupt Your Previously Scheduled Feminism

To wish my boyfriend, who is looking very much like a villain in this picture, a very happy birthday!

He is 31 today, or as he put it earlier ‘almost 50.’ So happy ‘almost 50th’ birthday to the man who thinks nothing of wearing a bright pink shirt with ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ printed in rather large letters across the front to play a show with his band, regardless of what his band mates may think or say to him about it.

And with that, I’ll share with you my favorite quote of all time which also says a lot about why me and the boyfriend get along so well–Well, besides the enormous amount of hours we can spend playing video games together and feasting on junk food.

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

– Anais Nin

Super Cool New Look!

I had started a very small project a few days ago that was supposed to take about an hour or two, tops. However, because this always seems to happen at the most opportune moments, simply changing the theme here up a little bit proved to be a little more difficult than I had first anticipated.

Instead of Menstrual Poetry being the feminist/political/what-have-you blog of me, Holly, the chick who writes this stuff, I really wanted this website to be mine, as well as yours. Yes, yours!!! Menstrual Poetry could not, would not, ever ever ever survive without the support of the people who visit this site and comment. We are sadly living in a world that frowns upon our basic rights and freedoms and because of that, now is the time to truly start a revolution and get as many people as possible who have minds of their own and want to voice their opinions and concerns in a platform that will respect what you have to say. Your freedom of speech is important and must be celebrated and because of that, I really want Menstrual Poetry to come across as a platform for me to not only speak my mind, but for respectful visitors to do the same. Following this thought, I have added a great deal of links in the right hand side of the sidebar to be used as resources for all things women, violence awareness and prevention, as well as a ton of great, super awesome blogs that I read and think you should too.

So here it is, the new look with a ton of great resources and blogs and happy, happy stuff. From this point forward, I promise to update more. Promise!

Apologies for Lack of Posts

Things have been a wee bit busy over here in Menstrual Poetry-land and I wish I had more time to update as much as I would love to, but sadly, with only 24 hours in a day and needing to sleep for at least some of those hours, it just isn’t possible.

In the middle of working, working and more working and being yolked to Twitter, I began hearing more and more about a new social site, Plurk. Upon a closer inspection, I saw it as a site that desperately wanted to be Twitter, but with two days in and a new addiction formed, it is far better than Twitter–In my opinion, of course.

Here’s my widget:

I think everyone out there should sign up and be my friend! It’s fun, I promise.

Feminism at its Finest: May 2008

The Feminism at its Finest blog carnival is a day late, so we’re just going to pretend that it’s still May; just for today! Of course, thanks to everyone who submitted their posts and to submit your posts for the June edition, which will be up on June 30, just go here.

I would also like to clarify that in order to submit your blog posts, you do not need your own domain, a Blogspot, Wordpress or whatever else is out there; even if you just wrote something on your MySpace blog and it is feminism-related, please feel free to submit it as well; not enough people give the MySpace bloggers a chance to really take part in the blogosphere happenings, so here it is. And now, on with the carnival…

A. Lee presents American Conceptual Artist & Feminist Barbara Kruger Probes Your Views posted at eArtFair, saying:

“Barbara Kruger juxtaposes mass media photographs with biting slogans. Her art both questions and condemns mass media’s ways of control self-identity, desire, and public opinion. A key aspect of her work centers around the question of what it means to be feminine.”

Amanda Moore presents 106 Organizations That Are Changing the World - Are you helping? posted at VagabondetteVA.

Garry presents Whirled News - President, Candidates Address Gasoline, Climate Crisis posted at Chicks With Guns.

Ian Welsh presents Ok, Enough With the Stupidity About Clinton’s “Kennedy Statement” posted at The Agonist, saying:

“The level of near hysteria, of complete unwillingness to read Hillary Clinton’s words in any context with any good will that is sweeping large portions of the political blogosphere, reflects a deeper pathology.”

Lauren Martin presents Liberty Lowdown: Magic 8-ball, primaries, and you posted at Blog for Choice, the newly improved pro-choice blog from NARAL Pro-Choice America!

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Next, They’ll Claim Obama Inherited Clinton’s Reverend posted at Mad Kane’s Political Madness.

nandita presents Domestic Violence in the Press a Century Ago posted at law Matters.

Nine Deuce presents The First Amendment is only sort of cool. posted at Rage Against the Man-chine.

O. Daille Nation-Ashley presents David vs Female Lawyer (Goliath?) posted at Power Of Attorney: Not Happy Hour At The Bar.

Renee presents I Wish I Was In Dixie posted at Womanist Musings, saying:

“This post is about internalized racism and how it cause some to act in ways that are detrimental to POC. It stands as a legacy of slavery.”

Renee also presents MacFarlanes Babes posted at Womanist Musings, saying:

“I posted on the Family Guy spin off because I believe that people mindless consume pop culture without realizing how damaging the images are that they are consuming. When we internalize without thought we are accepting negative portrayals of others as normal.”

Shaheen Lakhan presents Domestic Violence and Executive Dysfunction posted at GNIF Brain Blogger, saying:

“Executive function has big implications for the design of domestic violence programs. It is important to know the subtypes of batterers because different subtypes have different needs for treatment, and different levels of intervention that are necessary to ensure safety.”

Shaheen Lakhan also presents Democracy vs. Domestic Violence posted at Brain Blogger, saying:

” People are looking at how we are affected by the groups we belong to that are treated unequally and subjected to various kinds of stress and discrimination — a field called intersectionality.

Tali presents 10 Strangest Pinup Artist Quirks | Artists, Cartoons, posted at The Pinup Blog, saying:

“Visual artists can’t hide behind their work, at some point, some one will notice, a fetish, a habit a quirk. Missing belly buttons, fake breasts, detached heads- This is a list of the 10 most fucked up pinups in classic cheesecake history.”

Tracee Sioux presents Empowering Girls - Hillary Clinton posted at Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me, saying:

“Don’t Quit. It’s a good message for all women and girls.”

Tracee Sioux also presents Hillary’s “Feminine Ideal” Sin posted at Blog Fabulous, saying:

“What was Hillary’s big crime in the face of women? She didn’t self-deprecate.”

Tracee Sioux also presents Real Breasts Gallery posted at Blog Fabulous, saying:

“We’re so inundated with images of “perfect” breasts in the media and marketing that most people’s idea of what real women look like has been distorted. Women stand in front of a mirror and compare themselves to the unreal and declare “I just wish mine were normal.” For a better perspective enter the Real Breasts Gallery.”

And that’s all for this month. Remember to submit your posts for next month’s carnival by going here

Guest Blogging at The BoBo Files

I’m hanging out over at The BoBo Files today and bringing some happy feminism sunshine over to the dreary conservative-geared politiblog. Come join me!