I finally found the time, and the correct bit of code "magic" to get the new Blogroll tool setup and running properly. Now I can get around to finally making updates to the lists!!
I went through tonight and removed a number of blogs that had either gone away, or not been updated in quite some time, and added a couple of new links that I remembered off the top of my head. I still need to go back through my emails and comments from people I've talked to about adding, or just wanted to add as a thank you for commenting here. I'm sure I'll still manage to miss a couple, so if you don't see your blog, let me know.
Also, if you have any suggestions for bloggers who are survivors f cancer, depression, or some disability, leave a comment so I can add them in the appropriate list as well!
Thanks!
I've completed the upgrade to the newest version of Movable Type. I've still got a couple of things to work out, but I believe they're just on the backend, nothing that you guys will see, however, if you do see something, holler!
Rick Belden, the author of Iron Man Family Outing contacted me a little while ago, offering me a free copy of his book. Unfortunately, my to be read list is getting a bit long, so in the interest of getting his generosity pointed in a direction that would be beneficial sometime this year, I declined.
However, my backlog is your good fortune. Rick has offered to give away a free copy to one of my readers. I'm going to make this simple. In exchange for the free book, you agree to write up a short review of it. You can post that review on your own blog, and let me know about it, or you can write the review and send it to me, and I'll be more than happy to post it here.
So, if you're interested, and want to know more about the book, check the link below. The first one to comment here, gets it. Be sure to enter an email address in your comment. It doesn't get posted to the site, but I'll need it to put you in contact with Rick and you can arrange for him to ship you the book.
Matter of fact, if you want to review a book about child abuse, and don't have a blog of your own, feel free to drop me a line. I'd love to add some more book reviews without having to read them all myself! :)
As you can imagine, this blog gets a lot of spam comments. Movable Type does a pretty good job of catching those so that you guys never see them. In fact, I have the settings set pretty tightly to avoid you having to deal with them, but sometimes that means things get caught incorrectly.Most of the time, things simply get marked "pending" until I approve them. I get an email every time a comment gets marked pending, so they tend to get approved the next time I'm on-line. Occasionally, however, good comments get marked as spam, and dumped into the spam folder. I used to take a peek in there every once in awhile to make sure nothing was in there that shouldn't be, but had gotten out of the habit of doing that, mostly because it was very rare.
Apparently, over the last week or more, a handful of comments had gotten dumped in there that weren't spam. I hadn't noticed them in there until tonight, so some comments took a number of days before finally showing up on the site. I'm sorry, hopefully they're all posted now, and I'll try and do a better job of peeking in there so you don't have to wait quite as long to see your comments show up!
Thanks to a great plugin, I've enabled you all to have the ability to subscribe by email to comments on any entry on the blog. So, when you leave a comment and want to know if anyone responds to your comment, just be sure to check the box for that, and leave your email address with your comment!
As with anything else, let me know if it's not working so I can look into it!
I got an email yesterday asking for advice on finding people to talk to about being a survivor, and within the email the person expressed a desire to share their own writings and poetry. Naturally, I couldn't help but suggest starting a blog.
Not only does starting your own give you a place to share those writings and ideas, but as your participate in writing your blog, linking to other survivors blogs, commenting on other sites, and just generally being part of the survivor's blog community, informal as it is, you'll find lots of people to connect with, and lots of thoughts and ideas that can be very helpful in your own healing.
By the way, that person did start a BlogSpot blog, which is a really easy place to start a simple blog for those of you who know little about all this HTML stuff. Go check it out and say hello!
I just upgraded the site to the newest version of Movable Type. I think everything is working correctly, aside from the blogroll. I've got that "sort of fixed", in that it displays, but I won't be able to add any new blogs to it until the plugin develop updates it to work with MT 4, or I find some other way to maintain the blogroll myself.
Let me know if there's something not working the way it should!
Given that, there's some room for new links. I'll be adding some in over the next few days, mostly abuse survivors who've taken part in the Carnival Against Child Abuse, but I could use some help for the other groups; depression, cancer and disability survivors. If you know of a blogger who is writing about these things, leave a comment or drop me a line. Thanks!
The July Edition of the blog Carnival Against Child Abuse is up, hopefully I'll be able to get some time to read through some of the other entries!
I've been a little busy working on a redesign of my other site this week, but there is one thing I wanted to bring to your attention. I've added a few features over there to the RSS feeds, including one for this site's feed as well. I know most of you don't use RSS readers, but if you do, subscribe to this site's feed, and not only will you get every post delivered to your feed reader, you'll also get anything related to Child Abuse that I bookmark using Del.icio.us each day as part of the feed.
Literally, the best reward I get from keeping up this site are emails like this one:
It's been a week since I made the call to Survivors UK, the London-based child abuse organisation. Then I found your site, no.2 when I googled. I get a date for my therapy to start in a few weeks. I'm not brave enough to maintain a blog or site like you though I'm sure I'll comment on anything I find interesting when I catch up with all of it.....
Right now I am happy that I'm not alone even though you are in a different country.
That makes all the writing, thinking about writing and site maintenance worth it right there.
In a further email, this same reader posed an interesting question that I wanted to share with all of you, and solicit your feed back on.
How did you select which friends to tell first?
That's a tough question for me, because I think the first few people I told were people I already knew were survivors themselves. Then, when I had a very public breakdown, well, everyone already knew!
Now, as to who I tell now, it tends to fall into two groups. One is people who are going to be deeply involved in my life, on more than an acquaintance level, because the abuse is an important part of understanding who I am, so they need to know, and the second are people who I feel would benefit from know that they aren't alone.
I am interested in hearing what other survivors did in terms of telling people when they were first starting on the path to healing. What advice would you give to someone in this regard, what pitfalls would you steer them away from? What was your experience like?
The deadline for this months Carnival Against Child Abuse is rapidly approaching. I've gotten a handful of submissions so far, and a few that Marj was kind enough to pass on that didn't quite make last month's deadline, but we can always use more, so get your submissions in, and pass along the word on your own blogs! Thanks!
The November edition of the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse is coming up. I'll be taking a turn at hosting it this month, and I'm looking forward to seeing all the ideas and writings that you all have been doing, so be sure to get your submissions in before Nov. 22!
Hopefully everything is working with the new Movable Type upgrade now. Let me know if something's broken!
I hadn't been on-line much this weekend, so when I saw there were 9 comments, 7 new, on that last post I thought for sure I had gotten hit by a comment spammer. Much to my surprise, though, that was not the case, there was a whole little conversation taking place in the comments and some really good ideas and thoughts were flowing, all without my even being around. I am truly awed by the community that has started to pop up around this, and others, blogs. Thank you for contributing to it!
BTW, last month was the first month in the history of this site that the traffic levels were higher than my tech site. Now, to be fair, there are far more people reading that site in RSS readers than this one, and they don't show up in the page views or anything, so it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but it does show me how much this site is growing, and it also shows me that folks are coming here, reading through the back posts and leaving comments at a much higher rate than ever before. That makes me very happy!
Now if I could just find time to make more of my own contributions in order to justify the increaed attention! ;)
I tried to upgrade to the newest version of Movable Type last night, and even though I thought everything went ok, I discovered today that wasn't exactly the case. So, if you tried to leave a comment and couldn't or were one of the unfortunate ones who stopped by the site as I was trying to fix the problem and wound up screwing up the layout. I'm sorry. I've rolled everything back to pre-upgrade status, and it all should be operational again.
I'll have to do some research into the problem and try the upgrade at another time.
I noticed a pretty major problem with the database today actually, and had to recreate the last 8 entries. I think I've got everything in, the only thing you may notice is that all the comments for those entries are dated today, when I had to re-input them manually. Sorry, hopefully I've got everything taken care of and working the way it should be now. :-)
I'm still in the process of cleaning up little things that I noticed are broken with the new hosting for both sites, so I haven't had anything really insightful to say here, but I'm getting pretty close to having everything the way I want it to be. After that, I really want to dig into thinking about ways to spruse this place up a bit. With my new hosting plan I have a lot more flexibility in terms of being able to really do some different things with all of my sites that I hadn't really been able to do before. I've got some ideas, but I'd like to hear what you think. Given that this site's name is childabusesurvivor.net, I want it to be a place for all survivors, not necessarily just for me and my thoughts. What would you like to see added to give it more of a community site feel? Would you like to see other survivors blogging on this site? A new forum-type system, a news articles RSS feed? A little chat room? Something I haven't even thought of yet? Let me know.
If you're seeing this, then you have gotten the updated DNS pointing you to the new server(s). I've moved all of my sites to a new place, and am looking forward to the increased abilitites with this set-up. Of course, finding the time to implement some of my ideas may be another thing entirely..:)
I had to take the forums off-line temporarily. There's been a security problem with the BB software. I haven't decided if I'll bring them back or not once the problem is fixed. I'm just not sure it's worth the work any more to keep something up to date that gets so little use for folks. It's something I was re-thinking anyway. Perhaps this will just give me the impetus I needed to make that move.
Saw a couple of new sites, one from a comment, the other in my referrer logs:
Fugly Fog, a brand new blog by another male survivor, was the one I saw in my referrer logs, and JustAMom, written by the mother of a child who has recently revealed that he had been sexually abused. I hope they both keep writing and find their own voices in the midst of all of this sorrow.
Don't know if anyone's noticed that I added a couple of survivor blogs to the blogroll, End of Abuse and The last one. As always, if you know of any blogs by abuse depression or disability survivors, please pass them on!
As you might notice over on the site, I finally found some time to switch over the blogroll to using the MT-Blogroll plugin. this should help me keep it more up to date. Obviously, given the size of the blogrolls now, I found that a large number of the blogs I had been linking to had stopped posting for a long time or were gone completely. Now, more than ever, I'll be taking suggestions for survivor blogs to add. Feel free to send them my way.
Speaking of finding time, I'm having to give some serious thought to determining what my priorities are going to be over the next few months. I'm working a full time job, consulting part-time for my former employer, trying to lead the way on a website development and launch for the Friends of the Library, maintain two websites, do free-lance writing for another, and still manage to be a good husband to my wife and friend to my friends. I'm finding that I'm not spending enough time on the things I really want to do, this site included.
Given that, it's high time for me to start managing my time better, and then once I've gotten a much better handle on how and where I can improve my time-management skills, start to wean away some of those things that are not a priority to me. Hopefully then I can get around to improvements on both sites that have been on the back burner far too long.
Time-management, yet another skill that I should have learned at a much younger age, but dealing with depression and everything else somehow got in the way of that for too many years. Yet another, albeit small, example of what is stolen from victims of abuse. The years of maturity that are lost by being perpetually stuck in the victim mentality. On the other hand, it's never too late to start learning!
Because of some issues with spammers creating accounts just to post links to sites, I made a change in the forums that create a visual check before you can sign up for an account, and then require me to approve your account before you can post. I don't think it'll be too much of a problem, I'll keep an eye out for new sign ups on an almost daily basis so no one has to wait too long.
Of course, the day I institute this two people sign up for accounts. After no activity other than spam on the forums for weeks, these two new folks had to wait for my approval to post. Luckily, they both did come back and post messages shortly after I approved their accounts. Hopefully they'll stick around and use the forums to find a voice, and hopefully requiring approval doesn't dissuade anyone from signing up and posting.
I just upgraded this site to the latest version of Movable Type, if you see anything a little odd, please let me know. Thanks!
Also, I'm working with a new blogroll plugin for Movable Type to see if I could maybe make use of that instead of doing everything by hand as I do now. The first step is cleaning out all the old blogs that either don't exist any longer or haven't been updated in a LONG time. Once I get the lists whittled down, I'll spend some time looking for new blogs and then eventually I'll get the new lists added to the templates. In the mean time if you want to suggest any blogs for the categories that are listed, let me know!
I meant to blog about this a couple of days ago, but work events have conspired to draw my attention away from many things. Typical. :)
Anyway, this particular person found their way over to the forums and shared their site with us, http://onceabused.blogspot.com/.
By the way, there have been a couple of folks who found their way into the forums and have begun talking about some issues, which is nice. I'm glad to see someone getting something out of them being there!
Turns out my hosting company upgraded the Perl version on the server, and didn't include all the modules that are required to run Movable Type, so that's why things were basically wacky the last few days. I just finished installing the Perl modules into the MT installation itself, so I won't have to rely on the host having them globally available, and hopefully, everything is back to working. For today anyway.
If that was all gibberish to you, just know that I think everything's working again and feel free to ignore this until I post something else. :)
Sorry for the couple of spam comments yesterday. The server this site is on had a Perl problem that made my installation of both Movable Type and MT-Blacklist stop working correctly even though the comments functions kept working. So my anti-spam tool wasn't working and I couldn't get into MT to delete the spam comments, but I could run a script that closed all comments, so that's what I did. I'm going to go ahead and leave them closed, rather than trying to open them back up and close them after 30 days like I normally do. Hopefully, the few comments weren't a bother to anyone besides me. :)
I was glad this evening to see that Leah came back from blog-hiatus, as promised. Glad to have her back!
Unlike Leah, I went on hiatus without telling anyone. It was really sort of an unplanned hiatus. I've just been very, very busy. Work has been crazy with staff turnover, getting people trained and functions covered all while trying to get the equipment, and staff to handle it, ready for our big Annual Meeting this Tuesday, on top of writing an RFP for website development for the Friends of the Columbus Library, and trying to get some initial ideas and articles written for a tech ezine that hasn't launched yet. I've even managed to spend some time with my wife, so something else had to give for a bit. I'm really hoping that things will settle into more of a routine within the next week or two, but you just never know! 'Til then, know that I am well, and hoping you all are too!
Thanks to an email from the author, I learned about a new survivor blog today called Welcome to my Nightmare. Another addition to the community!
I told you a while back that I was going to be looking for a new place to give all the money I've raised, what little there is, plus some of my own. It wasn't that I didn't like the Prevent Child Abuse America organization, it was more that I felt like I gave to a large, nationwide organization and that was that. I did, however find that the local Prevent Child Abuse Ohio chapter is a partner with the Children's Hospital Child and Family Advocacy Center here in Columbus, so this year, I think the donation will go directly there. Thanks to everyone who has either used my CafePress store as a referrer for their store, or made an Amazon purchase through my affiliate links, I'll be making a $35 donation there later this week. (Unless there's a sudden burst of income over there, in which case it will go up accordingly. *grin*)
Thanks to the owner stopping by and leaving a comment, I've found another survivor blog, Long Lonely Walk, to add to the list of brave survivors willing to share their stories and journey.
I've implemented the new MT-NoFollow plugin to try and do my part to help in the fight against comment spam. If somethings broken, drop me a line and let me know.
Just don't expect a quick response, there's been a death in my wife's family (I'll leave it to her to decide whether to discuss the details or not), and we'll be traveling in the morning to attend the funeral. Be back Monday! In the mean time, the forums are available for discussion amongst yourselves, and there are plenty of other blogs to keep up with until I get back on the blog-wagon around here!
I know I said things were getting back to normal and I'd have more to say, and then I let 5 days go by without saying anything. Shame on me.
One of the things I have been thinking about, relative to this site is the donation I made to Prevent Child Abuse America last year. I didn't get quite as much out of my affiliate links this year but that's not going to change the amount I donate, I'll make up the difference myself. On the other hand I was a little disappointed in that particular organization's ability to communicate with their members. I'm not saying they don't do good work, I'm simply going to take some time to look around at some other organizations and consider my options. I'd like a place who's communications provide some content for this site, something for me to talk about in the area of helping abused children. Perhaps something local would allow the opportunity to see and report on the results of their work? That would work well, I just need to spend some time investigating and making an informed choice. I'll keep you posted as we go along, and as always suggestions are welcome!
Just finished doing upgrades of both the Movable Type installation that this blog runs on, and of the software the forums run on. The new version of Movable Type is aimed at helping with comment spam and server issues surrounding the countless comment attempts, while the PHPBB upgrade is because of a security issue.
I'm fairly certain that both went off without a hitch, but if you run into something that's not working, please let me know!
Thanks to her stopping by and leaving some posts in the forums, I found a new survivor blog, Angel Eyes. Hopefully she'll keep blogging and showing up here every once in awhile. :)
OK, so I changed my mind on the comments. Mostly, spammers changed my mind for me. Making the comments on all entries over 30 days old moderated kept the junk from hitting the live site, which I'm happy about, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But 350 moderated comments later, I'm tired of weeding through them and deleting/approving them, (I think I actually approved 1 of those 350) so now comments on those older entries are just simply closed. If you have something to say about an older entry, drop me an email, webmaster at this domain.
Comments on newer entries are, as always, welcome and appreciated!
Sorry, for those of you who have a TypeKey account, I didn't add the code to actually allow you to sign in using your Typekey registration and leave comments. Ooops. Hopefully it's working now!
OK, so it isn't working. The Typekey site tells me that this site hasn't turned the feature on, when, obviously, I have. Ugh!
Now it works. A case of really bad documentation on the TypeKey site, explained here.
I upgraded the Movable Type installation to 3.11 this evening. Assuming that this posts, everything seems to be working properly. The impetus for moving was comment spam, unfortunately. I came back from our last vacation with a dozen or so comments that had been posted to the site. Normally, spam comments are gone just about as quick as they appear, but since I was unconnected from the Net these stayed much longer than I would like.
In regards to comments, I'm really kind of caught between a rock and a hard place with this site. I want anyone dealing with child abuse to be able to leave comments, and be heard on this site in whatever fashion they like. If they want anonymity, I want to be able to provide that. On the other hand, I want to protect the people reading and contributing to this site from having to look at offensive comments. Upgrading to 3.11 and the latest version of MT-Blacklist gives me quite a bit more flexibility than I've had previously. As with anything though, this will be a trial and error, but I think I've got a pretty good start on finding a nice middle ground.
Basically, if you're registered with Typekey, you can leave comments here without any problems. If you're not there are a few limitations, but you are still able to post comments and take part. Depending on how things work out, those limitations will change, but basically they'll only come into play if you're leaving a comment on an older post, or trying to link to a URL that's been blacklisted.
Let me know if you have any difficulties with the site!
Sandy, in the forums, asked if anyone knew of any support groups for wives of male survivors. While that seems like it's probably a good idea for a group, I'm not familiar with any groups with that specific agenda. I offered some suggestions for where she might begin to look for that, but if anyone else has any ideas, or knows of a group like this, feel free to drop by the forum topic and leave her a reply!
Discovered a handful of new blogs this week that I've added to the side of the page. First a pair of abuse survivors DanDare, and Jennefer, and also a blog by someone dealing with MS called Thoughts from my broken brain.
Thank you for sharing your stories with us!
Dan was kind enough to leave me a comment with both a pointer to his blog about being a male survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and also a pointer to malesurvivor.org. His blog is intensely personal and quite moving, while the other site is a very useful resource for male survivors.
I got an email this morning from Neil Ahern, author of a book titled AN INCH FROM MURDER My Life As A Male Victim Of Sexual Child Abuse. That link will take you to an explanation of the book and of Neil himself, but he has also started up a weblog which, in his words:
I have put this Blog together because in 1987 and for years afterward - I never attained the goal of creating a self-help group for the male victim of sexual child abuse. Yet this forum need not be – just for the male victim – nor – for just survivors of sexual abuse. All abuse is wrong. I hope today – as I hoped in 1987 – that I can be of help.
Please feel free to join and contribute to this Weblog and/or comment on the entries that you read here.
That sounds very close to the reason I started doing this website, and have hoped that people would be able to get something out of reading, contributing, posting in the forums, whatever they can get. Given the similar goals, how could I not link to him?
I've been watching some of the blogs that I link to in the blogroll on the front page of this site slowly go away, just stop updating, or morph into something else. So I'm officially going to start looking for more "Inspirational Blogs" in my surfing. As always, I'm looking for examples of regular people overcoming abuse, depression, a disability, etc, who are just living their lives and talking about their lives online. If you know of any, or are one, please leave a link in the comments!
YoMonkey posted a survey in the forums, hoping that some folks will take the time to help her with a study she is conducting to help high school kids understand the effects of child abuse. You can send her an email from that post with your answers, or, I suppose, you could just answer them there in your own post, whichever you're more comfortable with. I haven't answered them myself yet, but I'll try to soon!
I haven't been posting here much, I know. But I have been linking to some news stories and such over in the forums, so feel free to check that out and add your two cents!
One thing I will say, boundaries are good things. Everyone should learn to have them and enforce them. It's your life, you make of it what you will, no one else can do that for you, expecting them to only shows how much you don't understand the idea of personal boundaries. I can't discuss in much detail, but I've been witness to the results of someone who does not have a clear understanding of personal boundaries, expecting other people to pay attention to them whenever they feel the need for some attention, expecting other people to open up to them about their personal lives, etc. and feeling hurt when they don't. It's not pretty, and it's not a healthy way to interact with people.
I had mde a post at the end of last week about our trip to Richmond and all the work that was left when I got back, and a pointer to this idea in the forums for keeping track of Child Abuse Awareness month activities, but apparently, my host must have restored the backup from a day before that post or something. Sorry about that. I'll have to see what's going on.
As I discussed over on the tech side of things, I'm keeping a close eye on the new version of Movable Type and the TypeKey plan to combat comment spam. Given the content of this site, I'm very concerned about anonymity and the ability of folks to comment, but at the same time I'm concerned about people being safe. It's a difficult balancing act. In the forums, which are small now, and aren't seeing many people other then me post, but which I hope more people will take advantage of, I've tried to create that balance by requiring everyone to register, but not making any personal information a required part of that. All you need is an email address that you can verify once. No one other than myself ever sees that address unless you want them to. That allows for some anonymity but also makes it at least a little bit of work for someone who wants to spam the forums or is being harassing to other users. I'd like to make comments work a similar way, where you can be anonymous, but spammers and trolls will have to work a little to get to us. Currently I use Mt-Blacklist to keep spammers at bay, and it's working remarkably well, and is still allowing everyone to comment anonymously. I may have to change that to some degree in the future, but I will still be looking for a way to let everyone who comments here or posts in the forum choose what level of anonymity they need and feel comfortable with. I won't know what that will mean exactly until MT is done with their beta testing and everything's out in the open, but rest assured I'm keeping an eye on it!
I finally got an acknowledgement of that donation I sent Prevent Child Abuse America. The letter I got from them last night thanks me for the donation they received on Feb. 17. I think maybe they should have a talk with the company who processes the online donations for them. I made that donation way back on Jan 1!
Still, it's good to know they did get it!
My apologies. I inadvertantly forgot to turn on the "require regsitration" feature of the forums when I moved everything and a couple of folks left comments without registering. Oops! The comments were perfectly legit so I left them there and will keep them as part of the board, but in the future everyone will have to regsiter to leave a message. Hopefully they'll come back and register and continue to be a part of things!
This site's host is moving servers again, so we may be going away for a bit while all the DNS gets updated and I get things installed and running properly at the new home. I got everything saved this time though, but I'm leaving this note as a temporary head's up until things are back to normal!
Keep your fingers crossed!
Allison talks about a survey making the rounds about blogging and privacy. I've never been one to take surveys, and I don't especially want to try and complete the whole thing, but I had a few thoughts...
Obviously, I do identify myself on both of my sites. I think in both cases it's for good reason. I want my readers to trust me, and trust in what I'm talking about. On the tech site it's all about the information I'm sharing with folks. I think there's a certain amount of credibility that comes from having my name out there. The same goes, maybe even more so, for this site. I want people to see me not as a story, or just a victim, but as a whole person. I want people to see that the guy who has bad days, and who struggles with self-esteem and depression, is the same guy down the hall working in IT, and the same guy who's married, takes trips, loves photography, etc.
That being said, the use of my name also means there are some things I can't discuss. I don't generally talk about people I know in my day to day life. I don't use the names of people I work with, or name where I work. I don't talk about them except in the generic sense of working with their PC's. There's no reason to. I also don't get very specific about the abuse I suffered. Same thing applies. There's no reason to name names, it doesn't change the truth. Believe it nor not, there's a whole lot of stuff that I don't talk about on my blog. So I can certainly see why anyone would want to use a pseudonymn.
The reality is, as much as I write about my life, I control what you see and what you don't, just as any other blogger does. I try to do that responsibly, understanding that it is open to anyone to read, friends, family, future employers, coworkers, etc. While I don't ever want to lie and ruin my credibility, I also don't want to hurt people for no good reason either. Sometimes it's a delicate balance. That's why my best advice to bloggers is to always, always think before you write! :)
I'm closing up last year's business today. I just went to Prevent Child Abuse America and donated the $35 that had been raised this year through Amazon links and CafePress referrals Thank you to everyone for making that possible. I've also renewed this domain for another year, so here's to hoping this site can be helpful and useful to survivors and others this year!
I'll keep you all informed as information from Pevent Child Abuse coes in to me, as a new member. :)
You might have noticed some funkiness going on here since last weekend. The site actually was taken offline as a precaution with the host having their netblock hit by a DDoS attack. Then when it came back there was a problem with CPanel that wouldn't let me login or FTP or anything. Then everything was back except the MySQL databases that run the backend of both the blog and the forums were gone. Both have been restored from backups, almost. The forum backup was from Dec. 2. Everything from that point on has been lost. So if you registered since then, I'm sorry but you'll have to register again. I'll try and get some of the articles linked back that I had put up in there since, but no promises. I'll have to see if I can find them again!
The blog database backup and the current archives gave me all the entries to the site, but some of the more recent comments had not been backed up. Again, I'm very sorry for that, and I'll try and keep more current backups now that the holidays are over and I might actually have time to do that! :)
Now, where were we? Oh yeah, hope you all had a happy and safe New Year's celebration. I rang the new year in restoring database backups while my wife, who hasn't been sleeping well due to coughing and cold-like symptoms was fast asleep when the new year came in. One exciting couple, aren't we?
I'll be leaving work early today and hitting the road to visit the in-laws to do our Christmas celebration. I'll be limited to dialup access all weekend so I don't expect I'll be getting much content added around here. I just wanted to take this opportunity to point out that, even when I'm not posting here, the forums are open to one and all to post their own thoughts, or share links, news items, whatever. Feel free to use them! Or at least let me know that someone is looking at things over there and getting something out of it. :)
Have a good, and safe, weekend!
Found a new link to a fellow survivor of child abuse and have added her to the blogroll over there under that category. It seems that the blog was just started this month, but the frank, honest nature of the writing has made an immediate impact on me. I expect I'll be back many times.
In other site news, I've been adding many interesting links and news articles to the forums over the last few weeks. I'm hoping that others will follow that lead and use the space to post their own links to good information or just to discuss their own thoughts. The more people we have contributing the more information we can cover and archive in one place as a resource for survivors. At least, that's what I'm hoping!
Marilyn from Prevent Child Abuse was kind enough to return my call this afternoon. Turns out that the $35 level of giving is enough to make you a "member", so that's the minimum amount I'll be donating over there thanks to the kind contributions of folks from my sites. That'll also mean I'll be subscribed to their members newsletter and invited to local events. I'm sure that I'll be sharing whatever information they have with my readers!
Thanks again for making this possible, and remember you can always contribute to the next donation by using any of the methods laid out in this post.
I got the first check from the CafePress store in the mail yesterday. It was for $26.30, which, when combined with the $14-15 I've got coming from the Amazon links at the end of the year will make a nice little donation to Prevent Child Abuse.
Of note, yes I have decided to go ahead and donate it all, rather than half this year, since the money won't have covered the hosting fees anyway, and the site had at one time a $35 level which made you a "member". (That's not on the site now though, I'll have to call and confirm that.) Also, most of the CafePress money came from referrals, stores that listed me as the person who turned them on the CafePress, but they don't list who those stores were! So I really have no idea who the 5 stores are that have me listed as a referrer, and don't know who to thank for that, so I just have to throw it out as a blanket thank you!
Lastly, I'm thinking about adding some childabusesurvivor.net stuff to the store but the process of coming up with a logo for the site is proving to be a difficult one for me. Hopefully I'll have something soon!
So, thank you to everyone who made this possible and remember to follow those links to Amazon for your holiday purchases and we can make this year's donation even bigger than I'm already planning, or if you have some purchases coming up early in 2004, we can get a head start on next year's funds!
One unrelated note, I've started throwing some links and things over in the forums, so remember to check those out. You'll have to register in order to post anything there, which makes it a bit more of a safe area than the blog is. The public will be able to read them, but if someone wants to say anything they'll have to provide a valid email address to me and can be therefore be held somewhat accountable. I purposely don't require that on the blog, where it's just me and my writings, but for the safety of other folks who might be posting there, I have.
Things got a bit screwed up here late last week, and I couldn't post anything to the blog. Apparently it was an upgrade gone terribly wrong on the server. Anyway, things should be back to normal now. I did get the shell of a forum system setup last week. There's a lot more I can, and would like to do with it, but first I thought I'd throw something together and see what sort of interest there is in even having one. I'd hate to go to the trouble of all that extra work only to find that no one ever uses it. So we'll start here and see what happens!
If you've been following along in the comments below, you know that the big thing I want for this site, more than anything else, is to have it become almost a community of survivors. That's absolutely the goal I have in mind, but it's the details that are the stumbling block. I mean really, what do we mean when we talk about a site being a community? And how do you encourage a group of people who have been victimized, traumatized and have generally grown to be untrusting to be part of that community? Yes, I could very easily throw up some message boards and see what happens, but I don't think just the simple presence of a message board is going to create a community anymore than having a comments system creates a community. They both create a technical way for readers to contribute to the conversations, but they don't make it feel like this is your site as a group, does it? That's something else, entirely. Ultimately, I'd like for this to become that sort of a site, where the "community" keeps the conversations and the support for each other going, regardless of how much time I have to contribute. That, in my experience, happens much more in a spontaneous way. It's not something you can plan for, it's something that either happens or doesn't happen. When I view it that way, I think maybe all I can do is throw together the technical stuff and hope that folks start to develop a community, but I'm not sure that there aren't steps I can take, small things I can do, to help prepare folks to move to that sort of format. I just don't know what those steps are yet.
In the meantime, keep reading the other folks who are blogging about these sort of things, contribute to the conversations here, and send me any ideas you might have, either by commenting here or dropping an email to the webmaster address at this domain. This site is for all survivors, not just me...
As I wrote yesterday on my tech blog, I'm seriously feeling the need to work on some techie projects. I think I just need the outlet and the challenge to balance the non-challenges I have with work right now. Also, like I did on that site, I wanted to give you all the opportunity to have some input:
"I've got a number of things in mind for this site and the Child Abuse site, but no firm decisions on what I really want to accomplish. I'll keep you informed as we go along, but in the mean time, what do you want to see here, or there? More interactivity? More community? Do you want less of my thoughts and more links? Do you think the abuse site needs some community around it? Do you want to forget you ever saw this site? :) I'm willing to listen to most ideas. I'm not promising I'll actually follow through on any of it, but I'll listen. "
So what do you say?
OK I think I've gotten all the entries back. My lack of backups though has caused me some problems. All of the comments are basically gone, or at least would require way too much for me to get back. Also, permalinks might be confusing, at least until Google catches up to the fact that entries were not entered in the same order, again too much work, so Google results for a specific post may be pointing to the wrong one now. Sorry about that, but frankly, I don't get paid enough to spend that much time trying to make sure they're the same number entry as they were before. (I get paid exactly nothing, so go figure..*L*)
Other than that, we should be back in business! Thanks to my anonymous hosting donor for getting us moved and back online! And yes, I've learned my lesson, I'll try and keep current backups all the time!
Found another blog being written by an abuse survivor over the weekend, Shattered Dollhouse. Seems like I've been finding a few more lately, or maybe they're finding me, eh? Obviously I'm glad to see more people openly talking about abuse and surviving, but at the same time, I'm sad that there are so many of us out here. As always, if you have any suggestions on sites to fit into any of the categories, I'm always looking for more!
Have I mentioned lately that I am truly honored by you people? Seriously, all of the people who take the time to write meaningful comments, or send me email privately (webmaster at this domain....) absolutely make my day! I'm truly honored most by the people who share their own stories with me, whether it be in comments, on their own blogs or, again, in private email. Thank you for being a part of this site, and have a great weekend!
Thanks to a pointer from Leah, I've discovered a brand new blogger who is trying to write about her experiences with surviving incest. I hope she continues and I wish her much sucess!
A new entry to the blogroll, under the abuse survivor wing you'll find Leah's Survivor/Thriver weblog. As always, I'm open to other suggestions of blogs for the "Inpirational Blogs" wings!
It's only a small site with only a handful of readers, but I still thought "heck, why not?" when it came to installing the Amber Alert Ticker that you see at the top of the main page. It took all of 2 minutes and if someone sees something on this site and has some information it might just prove to be invaluable!
I can see from my server logs an increasing amount of traffic coming in from specific searches. For the record, this is a site wrtten by someone who was a victim of child abuse, and it contains links to photos that I have taken, mostly from my travels over the last few years. There are no "pictures of child abuse" here! The pictures are purely G rated fare, the sort of thing your grandparents might have made slides out of. :)
So, if you came here looking for pictures of abused children, for whatever reason, please move along. Nothing to see here...
I've added a handful of books to the Suggested Reading list. As always, half of my proceeds from anything you buy through my Amazon affiliate links will be donated to Prevent Child Abuse.
Yes rev your comment was right on, Joel definitely deserves a link from here. Anyone who is willing to start up a webring for bloggers dealing with mood disorders is of similar mind to what I'm trying to do here, that's for sure!
I'll be updating the links throughout the site soon. It easier to do a bunch at one time, but in the meantime, take a look!
Yeah it's an interesting name, no doubt. :)
I was looking at Brian's weblog, and saw a link to this series of articles from the BBC about a man and his battle with brain cancer. Pretty interesting stuff and it definitely fits the overall idea of linking to sites by and about people overcoming their setbacks, whether it be child abuse, mental illness, cancer or other disabilities.
Speaking of which, in going through the blogroll today I've noticed some of these have either stopped blogging, or are lost to the ether for some unknown reason. I need to find some more blogs to link to. Any suggestions?
I managed to get all the content from the old site that I wanted to move, moved over the weekend. The "shell" of the site is in place so now I begin working on additions to the content. The layout is going to remain as is, for now. I'm happy with the simple look and slight tweaks to the default colors and stuff. As far as adding new features, those will come, in time. Until the site starts to grow a little I don't see that there's much of a point to adding discussion forums, for example. But I have the ability to, if it becomes something folks would like. For now, I'm more focused on the books list and writing blog/journal posts.
In the mean time, I hope you enjoy what's here and please, if you have any comments or suggestions, you know where to leave those!
Things are coming along, I've obviously imported all of the old Blogger entries, I've moved all of the Essays over, I've created a page for "recommended reading" that I will start to build a list of good books dealing with abuse and depression, and I'll start building a list of online resources as well.
Those of you who have followed me over from the other site already know that on that reading page, if you use those links to make some amazon purchases, I'll donate half of my proceeds to Prevent Child Abuse. (The other half will go toward paying hosting and registration fees for both of my sites.)
Anyway, if you have any book suggestions, or online resource suggestions, or even suggestions for the blogroll over on the side, let me know! I'm open to any and all suggestions!
This is my first post using Movable Type. This is not how the site will continue to look, I can guarantee that, but it'll probably take me some time to figure out how to change it to what I want it to look like. I'm looking forward to having lots of new stuff on board fairly soon, so stay tuned!
I have officially registered childabusesurvivor.net as the new home of this blog and the rest of my child abuse site that's currently sitting over at Geocities. I got an offer for a free small hosting account for this site and really couldn't refuse. I'd love to tell you who gave me the offer, but he prefers to remain "in the background", so I will respect his wishes. :)
Look for big changes in the near future!!
I've decided to annouce now, despite the fact that the child abuse stuff has not been redesigned and moved over just yet, that 50% of all of my affiliate link $$ will be going to prevent child abuse.
You can read more about it over there, and see the actual links. Affiliate links on this blog will be forthcoming!
Just finshed installing a new comments system, moving everything over to my server instead of having to rely on YACCS any longer. Please let me know if there are any problems with it!
I did, in order to get the old comments transferred over, have to go and take out a lot of punctuation, and the date/time stamps, so older comments may look a little strange, but I think you get the general idea. :)
Although she doesn't discuss her health issues very often, I think if you read Robyn's blog knowing about them you can see how obviously she is a fine example of someone overcoming adversity to live a full life. So welcome BlogBlogBaby to the Inspirational Blogs listing!
Thanks to a pointer from Dave Winer, I've discovered a new blog by someone about their fight with cancer. My best wishes go out to Brian, as well as a thank you for blogging about his fight.
I spent quite a bit of time finding new links last night. I needed to update the Male Survivor Resources page because a whole bunch of pages that I had linked to were just plain gone. I hope you all find the new links as useful and informative as I did in the late night hours. I'm hoping to get the other pages links all checked and added to soon, but it takes time! If you find a bad link, or have any suggestions for links, please let me know! I can use all the help I can get!
Here's a question for you. I want this site to become popular so that people who are dealing with childhood abuse can feel less alone, find some help, etc. At the same time the site is mostly about me. How do I promote it without coming off as self-serving and egocentric?
I've been doing some writing today about my trip last night to Cincinnati to see Midnight Oil. It's sort of a review not only of the show, but of my personal feelings about being back at Bogart's to see them 13 years after the first time I saw them there. You can read it here.
The search for more inspiring blogs is not going so well. It doesn't seem like there are too many people blogging about their experiences overcoming such obstacles. That's rather disappointing to me, as I really believe this medium would be a great way to document, once and for all, that survivors are not alone. I'll keep looking, but I could use some suggestions as well!
You may notice that I've created a little bit of a blogroll over to the right. I found this handful sites in one night of searching the internet and following link after link, looking for blogs of people who have overcome either abuse, depression, cancer or some other type of disability. If you know someone who's blog fits the bill on that front let me know, please! It doesn't have to be the main theme of their blog, but I want to create a list of folks who are blogging and are proof positive that we all can overcome our difficulties!
From Paradise Ali, one of the few that I've found so far: (Scroll down, trouble with permalinks over there!)
Fortunately, I was able to escape that cycle with the help and encouragement of other survivors who turned their pain into positive work. For all those times that I wondered and raged, "Why me!?"
So do you like the new design? I thought it gave a more cozy and comfortable atmosphere to this page, and that was more appropriate for this blog than tech blog. I want to do more with this blog now, starting with finding some good links. Anyone know any blogs that deal with depression and/or abuse?
I've been debating whether to blog about this since it happened, but here it goes. I had dinner with a friend I hadn't seen in about 7 years last week. This was someone who was involved with the HS ministry when I first started going to that church my junior year of HS. For those of you who don't know, I spent about 10 years at this church, it's where I met my first wife, where I eventually became a Bible teacher to the HS kids, and where I knew most of my friends at the time. I quit going after I had my breakdowns, realizing that the church itself, while certainly not to blame for the depression and identity disorder, was not helping me. Let's face it, any environment in which I could easily allow others to tell me what I should be, instead of trying to be who I am, was not healthy. A church setting was almost perfect for that. On top of that, many people within the church itself had no concept of what it's like to suffer with mental illness. They shied away from me, given off the impression that they really thought that I just needed to be more "spiritual", and that would magically make my illness go away, and they didn't want any part of me until I was able to do that. Lastly, after I quit attending, after the divorce, and after I took some steps to put some sort of life back together, many of these same people who professed to be my friends, were obviously uncomfortable in my presence. There were many reasons for it, some were still close to my ex-wife and couldn't really accept me, or my current wife. Some were so involved in church-work that they had no time, or common interests with someone who does not attend their church, and some just were never going to deal well with someone who has a history of mental illness. There were a few exceptions, people who have been able to treat me as a human being and be my friend regardless, and I cherish those people more than they will ever know.
So going into dinner last week, I simply wasn't sure what to expect. Luckily, Jeff was able to treat me well, and we had a good time. He did bring up my faith and decision to not attend any church, which I guess I expected him to do. My response? "Look, I still believe in God, and I know he loves me, I just don't trust people or myself enough to really get involved in any church again." It occurred to me afterward that I've never really expressed that before. That my problem with religion has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with people. I half-expected an argument out of it, but to my surprise he accepted my answer with a quick "Well, being involved in a church is good, but not really the main point, is it?"
All in all, it was a nice time and I'm glad we got back in touch again.
It seems there is more Geocities stuff going on, they are now telling me that due to "maintenance" the site will be unavailable for the weekend of May 17-19. Sorry, but there's really nothing I can do about it.
Had to go testify at an administrative hearing yesterday. I can't get into details, but naturally I was testifying for one side and the other side's attorney was trying to, I think, make some inferences in his questions that made me look bad. Needless to say, it was not at all a pleasant experience. I really retreated into a social shell right before and after the hearing, but I got through it. I spent most of last night watching hockey and just being alone and doing my thing, as did Angela by watching a movie in a different room. (She had to testify too) I think that was exactly what we both needed. I'm proud of us for getting it over with and taking care of ourselves!
So here it goes, switching the weblog over to the other host so I can continue using FTP to get to it.
I realize now that I haven't been writing here much, I guess I'm just not really having any big abuse issues that are worth discussing. In some ways that's an excellent thing, but part of me wonders if all this activity is going to catch up with me and prevent me from keeping track of what's going on. So far, I don't think it's a problem, but it's something I always need to watch out for.
OK, I had to switch hosts over at my domain so things here got a bit slack while I was dealing with all of that over there. Now that I've got that settled into it's new home, I'm going to try and republish this blog over in a directory on that domain and just link it to here since I won't be able to directly publish to geocities anymore. Keep your fingers crossed that this works out ok!
Sheesh all this stress and conflict with the old hosting company has me on edge but being able to deal with it and overcome it is a very powerful feeling!
Well here's the official word from Evan about the Geocities ftp thing. I'm leaning toward relocating just this page to my domain, leaving the rest of the content over here as it is, because I want it to be seperate from that site! Hopefully that will allow me to keep a journal going linked from this site, and you won't notice too much difference as you switch to a different domain, and I'll link that page back here and not to the other site at all. (Well you might notice that there won't be any freakin' ads on this page anymore when I move it..*L*)
Geocites to end FTP service for free users. -So I don't know if this blog will continue in this format after this month. I kinda need ftp to do a weblog, and I'm not about to start paying for this site. We'll see what I can come up with in the meantime!
Someone linked to this blog and had a comment about it. Unfortunately the site that links to it is in Danish and none of the online translators do a very adequate job of telling me what this person is saying! I can take a guess, and I'm fairly sure it's complimentary, but if anyone wants to give me an accurate translation, of this I'd appreciate it!
Her er et par eksempler på, hvordan personlighed kan gøre en blog værd at læse: Survivor of Child Abuse, Scoble, Tinka.
The comments are up and working now. I use aspcomments over on my Technical Blog because it's a paid hosting service and I have access to scripts and a cgi-bin. With geocities, I don't have that, so I had to find something else. I found it the other day in the form of YACCS -Yet another collabrative comment system. They host the scripts and stuff, all I do is put the java coding here to call them. Not bad at all. Go visit this guy and take a look at his other site Rate your music . He'll appreciate the look!
I know, I know, changing the weblog here again! I wasn't very happy with Radio, and although some of the features I want for this were to be included in the next version, it wasnt going to be free anymore! So I went back to the drawing board, and came up with a blog using bloger that I will also be able to use a comment system on. Keep your eye's open for it!
So we start over again..*L* Hop on the bus, plenty of room. We'll be discussing issues surrounding my day-to-day life as an adult survivor of childhood abuse, so if you have anything to share, please do!