No Runny Eggs

Good afternoon. I know, I’m a bit early, but I’m playing cribbage tonight and I won’t be here or anywhere else on-line for the real thing. The state of the blog is pretty good. I’m holding rather steady at about 80 people subscribing to the feed, and, spikes notwithstanding, about 125 of you showing up here on a daily basis. True, some of them show up for the polar bear/Gorebal Warming pic and don’t stick around, but that counts as traffic according to advertisers. Of course, I don’t run ads here, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is I’ve somehow managed to create a nice, not-too-small cadre of readers, some of whom actually comment. For that, I’m grateful.

I’m also grateful for my guest-bloggers, Fred, Aaron, Leslie and Patrick. They all bring fresh perspectives to this place, especially when I’m not around. They know the door is always open here.

I’m blessed by all of the people I’ve met because I blog. There are simply too many to name, and that would be true even if I am horrible about remembering names. First of all, there is the Drinking Right crew; Fred, Aaron, Nick, Dave before he retired from drinking, Asian Badger, Sean Hackbarth before he went to DC, the Unreal one, Dean, James, Dickie, and more that don’t show up on a regular basis. There’s also the gang at the Center-Right Coalition meetings; Mark Block, Brenda Baas, Brian Schimming, the guys in Rich Zipperer’s office, Chris Schneider, everybody in Madison. There are also those I ran into on various road trips; silent E, Chris from OTB, Uncle Jimbo, Owen, Patrick, Dad29, Chris the head barkeep at WSB, Mary Katharine Ham, Katie Favazza, John from Argghhh, Jo Egelhoff, Dean Barnett, Fausta Wertz, Eric from Tygrrrr Express, Jim Geraghty, Swint, Bruce, Scott Feldstein, Tom McMahon and I’m sure I’ve forgotten more than a few. If somehow I did, hit me with a frying pan so I remember.

On a semi-related note, the blogroll has bloated quite nicely. Yes, there are some dead links I’ll have to eventually whack, but that will be for another day.

Over the last year, I’ve implemented a captcha system and a trackback-checking system that has greatly reduced the spam I have had to deal with. Shortly after the creater of that captcha system, Peter Keung, implemented a method for the sight-impared to leave comments, I enabled that with less-than-spectacular results. Fortunately, he’s gone back to the drawing board and implemented a more-robust version, one that will once again allow me to open up registration once I install it right after I finish with the SOTB.

I’ve also cobbled together a widget-friendly form of the template I’ve been using. Except for the tags, which I don’t use anyway, it sure seems to work with the latest versions of WordPress, including WordPress MU, what the WordPress.com blogs run on. I have made it available to a couple of people I know, though I do not particularily want to release it publicly as mine. After all, most of the work was done by Mike Little.

I’ve also implemented “pretty” permalinks. They work rather well, allowing links to the old “?p=xxx” as well as the new “pretty” ones to go through. However, I discovered a problem when I changed the date of one of my posts to a different month. It seems that breaks the incoming links to it that pointed to the “older” version. Fortunately, a bit of messing around with htaccess allowed me to redirect that incoming to the right post.

Late last year, I was invited to start using Cover It Live for my liveblogs. That is a nice little piece of software, one that a lot of others have picked up on. So many people picked up on it that we’ve crashed its servers twice in a weekend. Oh well; that happens. One of my early suggestions, that the creators of said liveblogs get to edit the liveblog, has now been implemented. Graci, Keith.

I’ve been mostly happy with my webhost, BlueHost. The price is right ($6.95/month if you lock in for 2 years in advance), they offer Apache hosts which allows the redirection noted above, and for the most part they’ve managed to stay up. The biggest problem, which still vexes me, is a CPU Load Exceeded error I occassionally get. I can’t quite get that squashed, though I hope the new version of the captcha that is set to be installed will help in squashing it.

Another bit I’ve managed to finally implement is the splitting of a post with the use of WordPress’ “more” tag in the feed. That means the feed is a bit safer for work now that most of the expletives are contained below the fold. It also means I probably will drop more expletives into posts.

The inveterate gambler in me had an almost-successful NFL season, even though I completely missed on the Packer prediction. Unfortunately, that degenerated into a complete collapse in the playoffs. Oh well; easy come, easy go, and I’m not stupid enough to put actual money or other things of value on this.

So, what’s incoming for 2008? Pretty much what you have seen is what you’re going to get. I’m not going to bullshit you into thinking I’m going to do some massive change. I’m going to keep pressing for shifts toward federalist, small-government conservatism even though it is an uphill battle; I see that as the only way for this country to continue to survive. I’ll probably keep on swearing. I’ll probably do a NCAA pool or two, and the inveterate gambler will be back in September for the NFL season. Beyond the Drinking Rights, the Center-Right Coalition meetings and Defending the American Dream – Wisconsin summit, I don’t know my blog-related travel plans yet, though I do hope to meet more of my fellow bloggers. As for the navel-gazing, don’t expect another one this year, suckers.