Dixon's Forum

Well, it’s been a busy week here at Dixon’s Forum.   Remember last week, the Tip Jar got canned, and attention turned to Privacy Policy.

Privacy Policy is complex.   I’m using a free open-source Content Management System called WordPress, a basic, limited website system that enhances its capabilities through software Plugins.

There are hundreds of Plugins.   Most offer a free version and a paid-for Premium upgrade.   Dixonsforum.com is entirely made of the WordPress core plus free limited Plugins.

Each Plugin is developed and maintained by groups outside of WordPress.   Some Plugins boast many thousands of installations, some have just a few.   Some Plugin developers are just one person doing it for fun, others are sizable for-profit companies.   They encourage Premium upgrades by frequently offering more bells and whistles, and better support options.   The Plugins I’ve chosen have their own subcategories in the WordPress Support Forums, which are staffed by volunteers and often consulted by Dixon’s Forum.

WordPress is continuously improving and updates often, so the Plugins have to update, too, and stay compatible with the latest version of WordPress.   

We choose our Plugins carefully.   Some conflict with one another.   Some make our site too bulky.   We may find one that fits our situation perfectly but hasn’t been updated in years, so choose a newer one that’s not quite right.

Dixonsforum.com uses a very popular Plugin called Elementor to stick my logo image behind the text and the Image Carousel at About Me.   Click    to see it.  Google Fonts Typography provides fancy fonts for the poems.

All In One WP Security handles the firewalls, anti-spam, hacker blocking and the like, to keep your data safe.

LiteSpeed Cache speeds up the website.  UpDraft Plus handles the backups.

SEOPress will be handling the Googlebots and analytics, when I get around to that.   The interface between WordPress and my hosting service is Hostinger.

GiveWP provides way more fundraising capability than I need for a simple tip jar, and connects to a payment gateway called Stripe.   But I’m likely not having them for long; they’ve shut it down before it even got hooked up.

Each Plugin has its own Privacy Policy; they all inform mine.   Trying to incorporate them has high error potential and would be a daunting task even if perusing Privacy Policies wasn’t such great fun.

So, I sidetracked to making the Weekly Activities Navigation.  It’s at ends of each Activity, for hopping among the Segments or Installments or Chapters, whatever, of the weekly Activities.   (Installments of “Unentitled”, segments of “That’s my Way”, chapters or whatever, are actually just special names for standard, regular blog posts; “Unentitled” and “That’s my Way” are post categories.)

Sadly, to hop from “Unentitled 01” to “Unentitled 02” using “Next Post”, you’ll have to hop through “That’s my Way 01”.   Boo!   Ick.   So I made the Weekly Activities Navigation pattern.  

You can still navigate the WordPress way by clicking the category name to list only those posts from that category, but you have to hop back and forth from the list to the installments or segments or whatevers, distracting, cumbersome, spoils the fun.

So each week’s Activity has a pattern of navigation buttons at the end, and I fill in the links by hand, so you hop along the posts of a single Activity.   It’s very worth the extra effort, you see, because, while this is indeed a showcase for artpieces, dixonsforum.com is also itself an artpiece.

As I reluctantly turned back to Privacy Policy I realized I don’t have to hog all the fun combing through privacy policies, extracting the nuggets for mine.   I can make link buttons to each Plugin’s Privacy Policy Page, and share the fun by letting you comb through them all yourselves!   Then you get it first-hand and there is no chance of me Fouling it Up, a likely event.

Click here to see the new multilink Privacy Policy.

Now to the weekly Activity.   Remember, you’re pretending the script for my oral story, “That’s my Way” is a live storytell, left hanging from a cliff.     (A 👍🏻 gesture means “Please cheer”, a  👎🏻  means “Boo!”,  🤜🏻  asks that you groan.  🦶🏻  means I’ve tripped over my own feet.)   Click here to see the second Segment    .

Click here     for the fuller explanation (the home page of the first segment), and here    for the first segment itself. 

Next Week:   the third Installment of my rememberly story entitled, “Unentitled”.