Two Unpleasant Items

First, as to the lack of posting: My New Year got off to an auspicious start with an attack of flu, whose attendant aches and shakes served to distract me from a lurking tooth infection. This duly burst into full abscessive glory a couple of days later, the upshot being that I now have a lump in my lower jaw about the size of a golf ball but not nearly such desirable company. I struggled to the dentist last Thursday and have thus been enabled to vary my festive diet of painkillers with a seasoning of antibiotics; and I have to go back on Wednesday to see the NHS dentist who wasn't available last week, whereupon hopefully this nonsense will cease.

Second, as to the comments facility: Haloscan has been taken over by a firm called JS-Kit, whose facilities are unable to cope with the quantity of comments which are posted via Haloscan. Rather than do anything silly like add to the capacity of their machinery, JS-Kit have opted to create an entire new comments system called Echo, with a great many new bits and pieces and new dials and buttons and new bells and whistles and new studs and chains and jewels and cogwheels and tweakers and bloopers and all sorts of other new delicious things whose usefulness is doubtless transcendental. Since Echo is so much simpler and easier and more economical than Haloscan, JS-Kit also charge a small fee for its administration. The alternative is to download all your Haloscan comments for free and, presumably, copy and paste them one by one beneath the appropriate entries. A few weeks ago, I received an email from JS-Kit advising me that they would be switching me to Echo soon and that I should choose between the new system and the download. I chose the new system, on the assumption that I would be able to switch off the 99% of it that I didn't need, and was promised a smooth transition. The result was that, a day or two ago, the Haloscan comments disappeared and not an echo was left in their place.

I have asked about it on JS-Kit's support message board (their support staff don't stoop to individual emails, apparently). I was told that according to their records I had not started the upgrade process but had "paid for the Echo subscription separately". I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, and requests for clarification have been ignored. Accordingly, I have switched to Blogger comments, asked JS-Kit for a refund and downloaded the Haloscan comments instead. I don't know if I'll ever be able to get them back up here again; but rest assured, they are not lost.