Housekeeping

After about a year I thought it was time this website had a title. People have been linking to it as both Alun and Archaeoastronomy. Alun was in the title box as a placeholder and the archaeoastronomy URL was used because I had it spare and I couldn’t think of a title to register for my personal site. I haven’t been in any rush to choose a title as people have been able to link here anyway. I was a bit wary of using Archaeoastronomy as the title as it clashes with so many other sites, but I’m fairly happy that no-one will confuse this for the .com/net/org sites. There are also other sites which use the title. I like Archaeoastronomy and again no-one is likely to confuse this site with that.

Comment protection has been upgraded. I’m not having any luck with Akismet, so I’ve reinstalled Spam Karma and that’s working happily. It caught about 600 spam comments in a couple of hours. It may mean you need a JavaScript enabled browser to post a comment which isn’t totally friendly, but the alternative is requiring registration to post which is an even bigger barrier.

Google Ads have disappeared, apart from on the toys. I don’t necessarily see the adverts you see, so while I’ve removed all the antiquities dealers I can find, there are still adverts appearing to American readers which I won’t know about unless I’m told. I’m not saying all antiquities dealers deal with drug smugglers and terrorists – but if you trade in unprovenanced materials then how would you know you weren’t doing this? See Samarkeolog for the problems Google Ads places on site owners who don’t want to sell illegal materials. I was very happy with creationist adverts on the site though. I had no problem at all with people clicking on them. I don’t have any problem with people clicking on adverts for antiquities dealers if they’re not buying.

Coming soon are a few posts. There’s Mexican Footprints III. I’ve read the article and another write-up in New Scientist and there are still puzzles aplenty. David Buller’s Adapting Minds (out in paperback at the end of the month) was an interesting read from a Cognitive Archaeology point of view. I started reading that after I planned to write up a review of Steven Mithen’s Singing Neanderthals. These will all be posted Thursday. I’m not committing myself to this Thursday though.