No Runny Eggs

I guess that procrastination is a good thing sometimes. Warner Todd Huston moved Publius’ Forum from a Conservablogs host to his own host, so the time is definitely right to add him or correct your links if you haven’t.

Google is finishing its absorbtion of FeedBurner at the end of the month, and as part of that, they are requiring those of us who use FeedBurner to tie it to a Google account. There is a poison-pill incentive at the end of the FAQ:

If you don’t tie FeedBurner to a Google account by the end of the month, you will lose your FeedBurner feed.

Besides the Google account tie-in, they’re stripping away Site Stats (because it competes with Google Analytics, which quite frankly sucks) and FeedBurner Network (because it’s too tied to FeedBurner Ad Network, which was dropped for AdSense).

Beyond that, there’s no changes that should be noticable. There are new addresses for feeds so that they’re on Google servers rather than FeedBurner ones, but the current addresses will redirect to the new ones.

Mike Little released another update to the Journalized theme, so I rolled the changes in. Also, in preparation for a possible “headlines” section, which would involve moving both sidebars to one side, I’ve slightly changed how the Day by Day cartoon appears so it would be centered in the “main” column rather than the page as a whole.

I think things work.

Revisions/extensions (3:27 pm 1/28/2009) – At the suggestion of Shoebox, I resized the iframe that Day by Day sits in so that, except for the Sunday cartoons, the scroll bars are gone.

R&E part 2 (3:29 pm 1/28/2009) – Needs some more fine-tuning at the 1024×768 resolution. Also need to crank out a 800×600-compliant version (and install a theme-switcher).

R&E part 3 (4:07 pm 1/28/2009) – There’s no pleasing Firefox; it brings out the scrollbars with a larger iframe set than IE. I am not going to have a lot of whitespace so that Firefox can have no scrollbars 6 days a week.

A good friend from my days of playing (and beta-testing) Harpoon suggested that I start reading Neptunus Lex. Lex is an ex-Navy pilot, a bit younger than the other ex-Navy pilot on my roll as he got to fly the F/A-18 (among other aircraft).

I wholeheartedly recommend adding Lex to your readers.

…this activation of the Emergency Blogging System is for you. Huckleberry Dumbell reports that the URL for Dan Deibert’s old place has been taken over by a pR0n site.

This concludes this message from the Emergency Blogging System.

That’s right; the best blogger to come from East Central Wisconsin found his pencil and something to write on. Please give a warm welcome back to Kevin Binversie and Lakeshore Laments.

Since I won’t have time to do a Scramble this morning, I may as well burn the theme song of the day.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_lio51Z1qc[/youtube]

Or at least adding Moxie to the oversized roll. I still have to collate the feed of bloat, the roll of bloat, and the blogs of those I follow on Twitter and Facebook into a unified mess, so I’ll get there eventually.

With the new year just around the corner, it’s time to do some forward-looking navel gazing. No, I’m not going to shoot for the impossible, like hitting 200,000 readers (I haven’t had 100,000 since I put StatCounter up in April 2007), or getting celebrity guest-bloggers (I already have a very good cast that regularily bails me out, starting with Shoebox and going through Patrick, Fred, Aaron, Leslie, silent E and Big G, though if there are any celebrities that want to put up a post of two, I won’t turn you down). There are a couple of technical things that I really want to get done, though:

– Finally combine my feed reader, the blogs of those I follow on Twitter, the blogs of those I’m friends with on Facebook, and the Roll of Bloat into a synchronized mass of semi-organized chaos.
– Get the mobile version of this place WP2.7-compliant (i.e. allow one to reply to a particular comment)
– Figure out a way to allow people using the mobile version to vote on all the current polls without having to switch to the full-sized version.
– Get SOMETHING of my own up every day that I’m not on vacation. I’ve slacked way too much this year.

I’d also like to not have to rip both parties equally; of course, that depends mostly on whether the Pubbie half of the bipartisan Party-In-Government continues to control the GOP.

With that, I’ll throw it open to the rest of the crew and the 6 loyal readers of this place who actually pipe up. What do you want to see here in 2009?

I haven’t been a big fan of the revision system that has been in WordPress since 2.6. Yes, it has saved me a couple times, but it takes up a lot of database space, and there is no way to eliminate all the revisions.

Fortunately, a guy named goshy came up with Delete-Revision. It will go through your wp-posts database and let you easily and quickly take out all the revisions except the actual post. While it is not officially tested with WP 2.7, it does work seamlessly. The only operationally-bad part; it’s an all-or-nothing operation.

Overnight, I reported that Filosofo Comments Preview 1.0.5, which I’ve used here for something north of a year, was broken in WP 2.7 RC1 with regard to threaded comments. Austin Matzko, the author, invited me to try out a version that works with threaded comments. The good news – for the most part, it works. The not-so-good; previewed comments have the “click here to cancel reply” replaced with “reply”, and clicking that unthreads the comment without warning.

I’ve temporarily enabled it here to see if it still is compatible with earlier versions of WordPress (2.6.3 in this case).

Revisions/extensions (6:32 pm 12/2/2008) – It works. Back to the release version here.

I know, I’ve been a bad blogger lately because I haven’t put up a lot of posts. That hasn’t stopped me from doing some behind-the-scenes stuff to this place.

First, and foremost, please welcome Big G to the party. Shoebox recruited him in, and those of you who have seen his comments know why.

Along the lines of guest-bloggers, I’ve changed the template slightly. Instead of taking you to whatever link the author set up, it will take you to that author’s archives here. That link is still over on the co-blogger/guest blogger widget on the sidebar (which has been updated, along with the Authors page for both Big G and silent E).

Next, I’ve re-upped with BlueHost for another 3 years. That’s right; this place is not going off into the ether just because the Dems swept things or because the hosting package was up for renewal.

Last, but not least, with the official end of the Soldiers’ Angels Project Valour-IT fundraising competition, I’ve put Day by Day back front and center. I thank those of you who donated to Project Valour-IT during the competition, and especially Team Army, which I do believe won. If you missed it, don’t fret; FbL and company will still take your donation for any and all of the various projects they do.

I still have to collate the newest blogs out of my feed reader and Twitter friends, but I do have to take some time to add Red S.E. Cupp. If you haven’t hear of S.E. Cupp, she is the co-author of Why You’re Wrong About the Right.

One of the things I discovered while in DC is that this place wasn’t exactly mobile web friendly. However, I discovered (quite by accident) a nice little plugin that does make it mobile-friendly – Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition. I don’t quite have it optimized yet for this place, but I do have the captcha integrated so you can comment remotely through it.

If you do have a mobile web interface and still get the full 3-column site, please let me know.

I remember promising Aakash Raut I’d put University Blog on the roll a couple months ago, but until I ran into him at the Capitol rally at the Defending the American Dream Summit, I forgot. Even though he’s on the Blogs 4 Bauer blogroll, I do need to add him to the main roll.

On a related note, I’ll eventually get everybody in my feed reader, Facebook and Twitter taken care of. Sounds like a winter project. (Un)fortunately, winter starts in a few short weeks in the land of cheese and beer.

Forgot to mention before I went to DC that I would be pretty much incommunicato. Worse, Shoebox is headed on vacation starting tomorrow.

We’ll be providing you with the usual guest-bloggers, as the word went out to them that the always-open door is a wee bit more open.

The technical third of the Drinking Right trifecta, Nick Schweitzer, has set up an actual home for Drinking Right. It helps that we’re franchising out to the DC area with Sean Hackbarth and Kevin Binversie starting things up right on October 7 at 6 pm over at Mr. Days Sports Rock Cafe (3100 Clarendon Blvd. in Arlington, VA).

I will be there, as I weaseled my way into having a couple extra days in DC before AFP’s Defending the American Dream summit. As usual, I’ll also be at the Wisconsin version at Papa’s Social Club (7718 W. Burleigh in Milwaukee) at 7 pm on October 14.

I just realized that I didn’t put in the place that the Noonan boys and ESK started up a bit before the Bar burned down to the ground – Brewed Sports. I blame my neck.