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Sunny Kingston, Mexico: home to the 20th anniversary Natural Building Colloquium

April and I have been in Kingston, New Mexico for the past two weeks for the 20th anniversary Natural Building Colloquium. Last week we were surrounded by 150 incredible natural builders from all over the globe. This week we’re helping finish projects that got started and cleaning up after the craziness that was the gathering. It’s been a dizzying time… it’s been a real privilege to be surrounded by so much building knowledge and experience. What a joy to meet so many people whose work I’ve been following for a while! (What is this “colloquium” business, anyway? There’s a good history of the gathering in the newest editon of The Art of Natural Building.)

I don’t have much time (or bandwidth) to really get into details here… it will have to wait until I get back home in another week or so. Until then, here are just a couple photos! It was a great time and I wish I had even more opportunity to soak it all in and meet more of the people in attendance.

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Changing the newsletter service for The Year of Mud has been on my agenda for months. The past two weeks, I finally took the time to hunker down and make the switch from Feedblitz to Sendy. What that means for you is… no more ads embedded in emails, the signup process is much easier, and if I’ve got everything figured properly, the new email template should be easily viewable on your tablet, phone, or whatever crazy technology you do your newsletter reading on. I’m happy with how the first couple of newsletters have turned out. It’s actually a little more work for me, but this latest edition of the newsletter is so much more improved that it’s worth the extra effort.

To celebrate, I’d like to make a special offer to readers. In next week’s newsletter, I’ll include this special w0rkshop offer for subscribers to the list. If you want to be privy to that, please consider signing up!

See that signup form in the right column? All you need to do is fill it out and hit send. Super simple. I also have a dedicated page where you can sign up for the newsletter. You will be automatically added to the list. Why don’t you join in? Thanks for reading, as always.

EDIT: I’ve just learned from a reader that Disqus may not be the best choice, because the system keeps track of your comments and they cannot be deleted. That doesn’t sound all that great to me. I’m currently re-evaluating my choice and considering going back to the default WordPress comment system, and hoping that an oddball plugin is causing my quirk with the comments periodically disabling themselves. Any other input would be great!

Maintaining this blog extends beyond just writing and posting new articles. There’s a fair amount of fussing and managing WordPress and other web stuff, too.

Anyway, without boring you too much here… I’ve had a nagging problem with the WordPress comments settings changing themselves for a couple of years now without any good advice about how to resolve the problem. More specifically, the comments basically disable themselves periodically, so people cannot post comments unless I somehow catch the problem after it happens.

Today, I’ve updated the comments feature on the blog to a third party system. To that effect, I would love your feedback on the new system — please let me know how it works for you.

You can leave comments as a guest without registering, and if you already use Disqus elsewhere, you can log in with your information here. I would dearly appreciate any comments and feedback about this change. And if you find that you suddenly cannot comment on a new post, please contact me and let me know! Thanks for reading!

Update: Thanks for all the many offers of assistance! Things are now under control.

The Year of Mud website is needing somewhat advanced technical work, more than I can currently provide. After years of using the software, I know some of my way around fairly well, but an issue is at stake that could use a code-savvy individual to get in and clean up some stuff. Are you that person? Do you have WordPress technical experience? Spam links have been embedded in the background of some of the pages, and the result is that this website’s ranking on Google is suffering. Yikes.

I would appreciate any help that can be provided. Perhaps we can work something out. The results will be for the better of the site and its readers. Please contact me if you think you can possibly be of assistance! Thanks!

Yesterday, we drew the lucky winner’s name out of a bowl for the Ricefield Collective mittens giveaway. The winner is Diana Sheppard. Congrats, Diana! I wish we had enough mittens for all the folks who entered, but alas…

Keep warm and have a great New Year, folks.