No Runny Eggs

It’s a day late because I didn’t turn the computer back on after I got back from Madison yesterday, but it’s time to add The Liberty Tree Lantern by Capt. Karl.

The first of the people who attended Americans for Prosperity’s Blogger Schools, held in Oshkosh and Madison earlier this week, has started a blog. Jessi has started up Wake Up America. Welcome to the Cheddarsphere.

Mainly because I’m guest-blogging at E’s place, I finally remembered to add a couple of friends of E:

– American and Proud
– TexasFred’s

I really should have done this long before now, but better late than never.

There’s more thunder rumbling in the distance, but while I’m still dry and with power, I best add Gawfer.

If it’s summer, it’s road-trip season.

Monday, 6/9 – 5:30 pm, AFP Blogger training, Robbins Restaurant, 1810 Omro Rd, Oshkosh.

Tuesday 6/10 – 7 pm, Drinking Right, Papa’s Social Club, 7718 W Burleigh, Milwaukee.

Wednesday 6/11 – 5:30 pm, AFP Blogger training, Lucy Burns Institute, 301 South Bedford, Suite 6, Madison.

I thought I had Support Your Local Gunfighter on that bloated roll, but dumbshit me forgot to throw it on. It’s now fixed.

In any case, those of you who have his old Blogger address on your rolls and feed readers, please update it to http://supportyourlocalgunfighter.com/ and http://supportyourlocalgunfighter.com/feed respectively.

Sorry about the slow site access the last couple days. The main Houston data center of The Planet, which hosts StatCounter’s servers, suffered a catastrophic explosion in the electrical equipment room late Saturday. The good news is nobody was hurt, and none of The Planet’s customers’ servers was lost. The bad is the explosion and fire destroyed much of the electrical wiring. While the counter here was not on one of the very-affected partitions (i.e. I believe I only lost a few hours’ worth of stats, which is nothing since it was a Saturday night), the performance is still suffering because of the jury-rigged backup plan that StatCounter had to go to.

There’s more from The Planet here, and more from StatCounter here.

Revisions/extensions (1:29 pm 6/2/2008) – There’s also an unusual server load on the BlueHost box this site’s on. I don’t know if it’s this place or somebody else on the box.

R&E part 2 (3:41 pm 6/3/2008) – Thanks to Jen for pointing me to the wrap from StatCounter.

There’s one I should’ve had on that ever-growing roll long before now, and one I picked up through Twitter.

– Fairly Conservative
– Leslie Carbone

Just in case you didn’t notice that little item on the right sidebar, I’m probably one of the last bloggers on the planet to jump into the Twitter pool. Don’t expect a lot of stuff there, but why not give it a shot (I would’ve added “and a beer”, but it’s too early).

The Latinos, unions and Communists (I repeat myself) took the day off to pay homage to their hero Che, but I worked hard (or is it hardly worked; what’s the difference?). Guess it’s time to add once again to that overloaded roll:

– Moron Pundit
– Not So Friendly Fire
– ScarletPimpernel

I usually don’t navel-gaze, and there isn’t any special occasion, but a couple of numbers really popped out at me while I was looking over the stats. Please permit me this indulgence…

– In the year and almost a month since I’ve been tracking how many of you come in here, StatCounter says I’ve had 42,975 of you (at least when I started this). I know that’s high because of how “unique visitors” are counted, but it’s the best numbers I have (and better than what your average mass-transit authority claims for ridership). I do thank each and every one of you who’ve come in here (except for the two yokels I had to throw out).
– Related to that, somehow I’m up to somewhere around 190 of you subscribing to the feed. You guys and gals are the real hard-core.
– Shoebox, Leslie, Fred, Aaron, Patrick, the Emergency Blogging System, and I have combined to put up 2,025 rants high-quality posts (well, everybody else’s material qualifies as high-quality posts; mine go into the rant category) since I started the Blogspot version in October 2005.
– To go with that, I’ve had 1,955 comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks that haven’t been eaten by my anti-spam suite going into the start of this post.
– Akismet tells me that it ate almost 107,000 pieces of spam since I jumped to WordPress, and I know there’s been a few I’ve knocked out of here.
– I’ve often joked that the blogroll is quite bloated. When I throw in the Blogs4Bauer and the Moronosphere rolls, I’m somewhere over 300.
– I wish I knew how many vulgarities I threw up, but that counter broke a long time ago.

I do have to thank the Waukesha County bloggers for letting me stop in the blog n grog last night. It’s been so long since I was in downtown Waukesha, I was surprised at all the two-way streets there now.

‘Twas good to see Asian Badger, Dean, silent E (side note; I’m still a padawan), and Sancho again, and finally meet Mr. Ol’Broad, Jeff of FivePoints, Chris Lufter and Darryl Enriquez. Since I don’t seem to have all of their blogs on the roll (yet), seems I’ve got some more bloating to do…

– Darryl Enriquez
– Hobo Springs
– FivePoints

There is a rather big problem for those that use the direct link to the feed-generating files in WordPress (i.e. wp-rss2.php, wp-rss.php, wp-rdf.php, wp-atom.php and wp-commentsrss2.php) on blogs that upgraded to WP2.5/2.5.1, either in their own feed readers or (in my case) as the feed FeedBurner reads. They don’t send anything out in many cases.

I found that out the hard way when my last 2 posts did not get sent out to the feed, and some comments made after the upgrade also didn’t make it out. Fortunately for you guys, the fix needed was entirely on my end as I switched FeedBurner to read the more-nebulous …/feed and …/comments/feed URLs (since I have Pretty Permalinks set up), and I have the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin directing all of you to FeedBurner.

Unfortunately, those blogs I had my feed reader set to go to wp-rss2.php will have to be reset to read either the …/feed or …/?feed=rss2 URL, depending on whether they have Pretty Permalinks set up or not. That’s going to be a major pain in the ass.

Revisions/extensions (10:25 am 4/29/2008) – It is specific to WP 2.5.1. I haven’t seen any real mention of this in the WordPress forums, but as Peter has told me, the upgrade sure feels like going from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

R&E part 2 (10:34 am 5/3/2008) – Bringing up word of a patch from the comments. Thanks Nicolas.

Hi Steve,
There is a fix available at trac.wordpress.com ; that should avoid your users migrating from wp-rss2.php to /feed/

http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6460

Hope it helps,
Nicolas

I still don’t much like the posting interface, but the biggest bugs of 2.5 have been ironed out, and Shoebox says he’s ready to go. Hopefully I don’t crash the place.

Revisions/extensions (4:11 pm 4/28/2008) – It worked.

R&E part 2 (4:23 pm 4/28/2008) – The nicest thing about 2.5.x is I don’t have to mess around with downloading and uploading updates to my plugins. WordPress now can handle the uploading of those updated plugins automatically. Of course, I have to remember the customizations I do with them.

I’m all out of the descriptive words right now, but since it’s on the roll, I do want to make sure you know to check out Today’s Concerns by Greg Kowalski. I may not often agree with him, but it always is good to have another local view in the hopper.

I really should’ve done this long before now, but you know what they say about late and never…

– The Prozak Playground
– Wag the Dog

One can never have too many good blogs on the roll, I always say.

No, I don’t have WP 2.5 on here yet (a couple different reasons), but I decided to see if I could help out Stephen Green with some image usage issues he has with WP 2.5. His first issue, having a thumbnail going to a holding page instead of a full-sized pic, was pretty easy to solve. To avoid that, one should use the “File URL” as the link instead of “Page URL”.

The other item is a bit uglier; the cropping of a pic to the column width. I didn’t mention it here, but the “full-sized” option is anything but; while it does load the full-sized pic, it crops it to a maximum of 500 px by 500 px, and I don’t see a way to automatically change that (one could get rid of the height and width attributes in the HTML, but a lot of people use the visual editor).

Fortunately, there is a third option (besides the misnamed “full-sized” and thumbnail) to size a picture in WordPress, “medium”. With a bit of tweaking, one can change that from its default maximum 300 px by 300 px to fill the post column. With the caveat that this only works with pictures uploaded after you make the change, here’s how to make it happen:

– Find out how wide your post column is.
– Under Options > Miscellaneous, find the “Medium size” box in the “Image sizes” section.
– Put in that width for “Max width”, and at least 4/3rds that for “Max height”. Why 4/3rds? That allows vertical pictures to be the full width of the column. As an example, if the post column is 600 pixels wide, put “600” in for “Max width” and “800” for “Max height”.
– Hit “Save Changes”.
– Use “Medium” for the picture size. If the original picture is at least as wide as the column, it will be cropped to the width of the column.

Since I heard there was a shiny new back-end for WordPress in the new 2.5 version, I decided I would test it out before putting it up.

The good:
– It loads a bit faster than 2.3.3.
– The modified Journalized 2 beta 2 theme (yes, it does need to be modified some to work with 2.3, and I added widgetizing while I was at it) works as well in 2.5 as it does in 2.3.3. Before you ask, no, I won’t be releasing that; it still is Mike Little’s project, and he does have my mods someplace.
– MOST of the plugins I use work without any updates.
– Plugin updates no longer require FTP access; assuming a standard Apache install, you can now install updates directly from the plugin admin page. It should be the same thing for updating WordPress itself.

The bad:
– Those of you using Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam will need to upgrade to 3.0.2.
– The release version of WP-Polls (2.21) is broken. There is a beta version out there that does work with 2.5.
– The new media management feature does not work in IE.

The ugly:
– I hate the new post page; I miss having the options to the right of the post box.

In short, I won’t be migrating to 2.5 just yet.

I’m trying to troubleshoot why I can’t quite get silent E’s move right, so I need to change the template for a few minutes.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Revisions/extensions (12:36 pm 3/28/2008) – Back to normal here.

No, that’s not a typo on my end, that’s JihadGene channeling Krazy Kim over at Great Reader. If you’re not going to be reading that, I have but one bit of adivce for you – When somebody gets the Uncle Jimbo Stamp of Approval, you best recognize. He (and I) don’t care if your rolls and readers are so overloaded it takes 3 hours to go through.

That’s right, kids, I’m a regular at Ace of Spades HQ.

Conservative Belle ran with this graphic…

…from doubleplusundead (actually done by S. Weasel) and put together a Moronblogger blogroll. I’ve wedged it on the left side (no sense making you do an unbelievable amount of scrolling).

A lot of them should look familiar; after all, we are legion.

Revisions/extensions (6:18 pm 3/24/2008) – I should’ve recognized S. Weasel’s work. Mea culpa maxima.