No Runny Eggs

If it’s a new month, it’s time to add some more to that bloated roll on the right. Please welcome The (Somewhat) Daily RAG out of Pleasant Prairie.

Dunno if I’ll have anything up before I leave just after dawn tomorrow, so I hope my trio of guest-bloggers have some stuff. If you don’t hear from me before then, see you around the 18th.

And yes, I’ll be eating plenty of walleye and drinking directly out of various Minnesota/Ontario lakes (don’t try that in Wisconsin).

Whether you’re on the 2.1/2.2 development track (like me) or the 2.0 one (like Hot Air), there’s a new version of WordPress out there. Head here for the newest 2.2.2 version or here for the 2.0.11 legacy version. There’s a couple of security fixes (more for the old version).

I wanted to print out a post for somebody, so I went to print. Imagine my shock when the printer started to churn out 15 pages. OUCH!

So, I went and did some digging around WordPress’s site, and I came up with a very handy page to alter a theme so it would print rather neatly. After a bit of trial and error, I do believe I got it. Now, you won’t get my sidebars, and you’ll get something that looks at least a bit like my main page (a bit more so if you use Firefox; Internet Explorer does not honor background colors when printing).

Even though I think “Team Trousermouse” was a weak quote for MRQ compared to a few others I unleashed last week, Phel and Uncle Fred didn’t think so. Seems it’s up for MRQ of the week (the poll’s on the right side of every RDW page, including the one I linked to).

Go, vote before Monday, August 6. Prove my prognostication wrong. I will deny it if you attempt to stuff the ballot box, so please don’t.

This is humbling:

– 60 people rolled in here off of WisOpinion’s mention of my initial missive on the latest Milwaukee County pension scam.
– StatCounter recorded 220-some page loads from 174 “unique” visitors, with 47 of them coming back after 6 hours.

Needless to say, yesterday was by far the busiest day of the blog, and I didn’t even have a live thread. Now I’ve got some pressure.

Dan and Nicole, late of “The Early Spin” on WISN, are staying active in the Cheddarsphere, and are Still Spinnin’.

Seeing I’m headed up to Canoe Country for a week and a half on Wednesday, your merry band of guest-bloggers are on deck. Aaron’s already promised video mayhem. Wonder what Fred and Patrick are bringing in.

I really have to thank Mike Schramm, the editor for WisOpinion, for finding Feed43. They’re able to turn just about any page into an RSS 2.0 feed, including the CNI blogs. Now I can read Kevin Fischer, Matt Thomas, Brian Fraley’s Tosa-specific stuff, and everybody else through my feed reader.

Time to catch up on roll processing –

– I’ve been a bit late in adding some sunshine to the roll, but please forgive me, Little Miss Sunshine. I do tip my hat often; I try to be a gentleman.
– James T. Harris has his 620WTMJ “corporate” blog up – The Hip Musings of James T. Harris. Don’t fret; he still has The National Conversation active.
– Even though Coop has gone bonkers on the rail issue, According to Coop is more-or-less right most of the time. As I sometimes say, “If someone is agreeing with you all the time, stop talking to yourself.”
– I REALLY wish that CNI would implement RSS feeds for their blogs (I recommend the new JSOnline blogging software); it would make stuff like finding and regularily reading Kevin Fischer’s This Just In, Brian Fraley’s Tosa Takes (Wauwatosa’s Official Non Partisan, Good Government, Rainbows and Unicorns for Everyone, Watchdog!), and the previously-rolled The Right Side of New Berlin so much easier to read.

Move #1 – Dean has fled Blogger and moved Musings of a Thoughtful Conservative to WordPress

Move #2 – P-Mac has made the switch to JSOnline’s new blogging software. Comments are ON!

Please adjust your blogrolls and feed readers accordingly.

I’ve widgetized the Journalized version of the search box, the internal links and the other category, so now I’m running widgetized sidebars on both ends. I personally still have the links widget to fix because I prefer randomized order :-)

Revisions/extensions (3:00 pm 7/5/2007) – Did a down-and-dirty trick fix to get the random blogroll back.

The Silent One has moved silent E speaks off of Blogger and onto a server running the full-blown version of WordPress. Please update your blogrolls and feed readers accordingly (and don’t be like me and send everybody to a single post :-)

Sorry about the lack of posts, but I’ve been trying to widgetize my theme, Journalized. Since Mike Little, the author, has made this theme so powerful through some pre-WP 2.1 tricks (a big example is I can select having 0, 1 or 2 columns through a dialogue box), it’s not exactly easy.

Time to take a break from that and highlight Senate stupidity.

I’ve been trying to get the trackbacks and feedbacks separated from the main comments. Unfortunately, every trick I’ve been able to dredge up on the web has been a dead end, and some of them temporarily broke the comments. I finally decided to make trackbacks and pingbacks just a little more noticeable.

I’ve also upgraded to 2.2.1, which necessitated a re-hack of my feed-generating files. Those went off-line for a bit, but they’re back.

Sorry about that.

One more feed hack; you now know if I decide to make a multi-page post just by reading the feed (assuming, of course, your feed reader of choice does display everything I send down the line). How I did it is over on page 2.

I’ve done some behind-the-scenes stuff to my feeds that aren’t in the WordPress defaults. The first is something that you won’t notice (because I do not publicize comments feeds all that much); to make my comments feed validate properly, I replaced the <author> tag in the file that generates the comments feed with <dc:creator> (I also needed to add a namespace reference to the site that hosts the specs for that tag to enable that; it’s in the main RSS 2.0 feed). It seems that the <author> tag that the default WP comment feed generator forces is supposed to have an e-mail address attached to it.

The second is something some of you may notice, at least if you can read comments directly from the main feed. Using Nick Schweitzer‘s feed as a template, I’ve figured out how to add the number of comments to the feed so some feed readers (like SharpReader, and unlike Google Reader) will tell me how many comments are on a particular post. That involved adding a namespace reference and putting the <slash:comments> tag in.

More geekspeak below the fold…
(more…)

The new design is live and in living color. There are now RSS feeds for your favorite WTMJ bloggers, and soon Charlie will have comments.

The bad news is you do need to fix your blogrolls. I’ll get you started:

Sykes Writes – http://www.620wtmj.com/shows/charliesykes
Wagner on the Web – http://www.620wtmj.com/shows/jeffwagner

Revisions/extensions (11:53 am 6/19/2007) – Almost forgot to mention; I’ve survived another round of Charlie’s blogroll updates. I must’ve picked up a lifetime exemption from the Sykes Cement Overshoes because I successfully tested them many moons ago.

Last revision/extensino (1:02 pm 6/20/2007) – Google Reader now recognizes the feeds. They still don’t send out so much as a summary, which isn’t a problem with SharpReader (I just have it open up the entire page, just like I do with sites that send out only excerpts).

Time to add a few that I didn’t have before:

– Pundit Nation
– Fox Politics

It’s not that I don’t have anything; it’s that I feel craptastic (with the emphasis on the first 4 letters).

Hopefully the Immodium kicks in.

While making sure I didn’t have any mentions of a certain hotel heiress here (I still don’t; if you want that sort of news, everybody else has it), I rediscovered a link to Eminent Domain. Unlike so many blogs that I linked to back in the early days (specifically, my BlogSpot days), he’s still around, and still making sense.

I’ve been promising myself I would throw HamNation producer/camerawoman Katie Favazza’s blog, Elocutio, on the roll since just before I went on vacation. Time to pay up and do so.

I could’ve swore I had Fuzz Martin on the roll; after all, I did have him on my feed reader for quite a while, and I usually do both at the same time.

Don’t be like me and forget; put him on both.