As part of my recent work on the website, I have also overhauled the email functionality of the site. WordPress is deployed with a default php based email, which is functional, but (from my digging) unreliable. In my case, I suspect it has failed entirely, since I rarely receive emails from the website any longer. And I suspect this may impact either visitors commenting and/or registering on the site (again, I am being optimistic about the level of interest in my content).
As of Wednesday, I believe I have the new plugins operational, and linking to a GMail API, which allows the site to reliably email, and more importantly, source the email as coming from Halfing13.com, instead of my gmail account. Which may make it more reliable in the long run, and hopefully allow for the day when I have a user or more actively interacting with the site.
