Category: Website Changes

As is pretty typical of most websites I have ever been on comments on articles tend to drift ‘off topic’. No giant surprise on that happening–at least not to me.

At this time I need to reinforce the need to comment in the correct areas. If the comment isn’t relative to the topic (for instance a new issue) it should be made in the correct area. Some areas for miscellaneous chatter are listed below.

Sandbox page.

This area is for most anything you want to post.

REIT chat.

This should be obvious–talk about REITs.

Reader Initiated Alerts

A popular page–obviously to have quick announcements on new issues–redemptions etc. Since I can’t monitor all the data 24/7 this page is the most timely. While I get to the new issues etc–it is usually an hour or two after some folks have the news.

Canadian discussion

Again–obvious–for Canadian related issues. Many folks buy the Canadian preferreds and discuss them here.

All of the available pages are in the RIGHT HAND COLUMN.

Because of the ‘off topic’ commenting the thread is ‘hijacked’ to another topic, which makes it difficult for those wanting to find older comments to find them as they have to wade through 100’s of ‘off topic’ comments to find what they need.

If folks could try to adhere to some level of on topic commenting things will be a bit more organized in the comments.

Thanks all for you help.

Everyday for the last week I have found comments in the spam filter which I have had to manually approve. Most of these I find no reason for why the ‘system’ rejected them.

The spam filter is set up to flag the most serious 4 letter words–not all, but the worst of them.

Additionally it is set to ‘kick out’ anything from one particular commenter who I banned at least 18 months ago (the only person ever banned).

So if a comment section is not taking your comment, don’t take it as a ‘ban’ or anything like that–likely the spam filter didn’t like something. When you end up in the spam filer it temporary stops you from posting until I get it manually approved and then you can post.

I will try to figure out what setting I have control over that will stop this seeming random kickouts.

Just a short note that we are in the process–a slow process–of adding fundamental data to the website for the ‘parent’ company of the issuers of preferreds and baby bonds.

You may have noticed a box that looks like this on each page of the income issue (only 100 issues are done so far).

The above is for Federal Agricultural Mortgage (AGM) and they have 3 preferred issues outstanding. So by looking at any of the 3 preferred issues you will see data on the ‘parent‘.

We have to do around 800 issues–so this will take until the end of March to complete.

After that is complete we will add another piece on the parent company–the latest income statement and balance sheet. This will go lower on the security page. Again we will have to go through all 800 pages to enter the widget.

After this we may add a news stream for each parent on the page–but this is not determined yet.

The intent is to bring all the company data together on to 1 page so one can do a little due diligence instantly.

For the 2nd time in 2 days the website was down for 4-6 hours. This time I was working on the site at 6:46 am this morning when it went down–no word from the hosting company for hours after that, until a note came 3 hours later.

I understand that they may have maintenance needs, BUT the Sunday outage was ‘planned’ and no notice was given–if they would have let me know I would have posted a warning on the outage. The Monday outage was not planned–stuff happens.

Chad (who handles the tech end of things) has other hosts available, but for now I will stick with our smaller, local host–but if this happens again I will have to strongly consider a move.

I need to apologize for the website being down for 4-5 hours Sunday morning.

Unfortunately the hosting company was doing a server upgrade this morning, but gave no notice that this would be occurring. Fortunately for them this was only the 2nd outage in 27 months so I can’t be too hard on them–if this was a regular occurrence I would find a new host.