Special Blog Post:
Blog Maintenance Coming Soon
As an early warning to you who frequent this quiet tavern on the outskirts of the Blogosphere, this week is moving week for The Dark Wraith Forums. Specifically, your host will be moving this Weblog from Blogger to Movable Type. The journey will be perilous.I anticipate two major hurdles. First is the architecture of this Website. It is highly customized, the product of many months of deliberate work that took it from very simple to stupidly complex. The index file is literally a mass of creative coding that renders all kinds of interesting, useful, or just visually unusual effects: here you can find graphical tricks like a layered header, a scripted object to deliver the main feed for a news wire service, and a nice implementation of AJAX so sidebar content can be updated on the fly without ever having to recode the template, itself. The problem is that blog services try their best to make everything easy so a blogger's focus can be on content instead of code. In fact, the word "powerful" when applied to a blog service almost invariably means "We do all the hard stuff for you, and we do lots and lots of neat tricks you'll really like."
Whatever. I'll write my own neat tricks, thank you, and I'll need the publishing service to stand aside and serve only as a means of updating content in the main column. The danger is that a new publishing service is going to have no use whatsoever for all of my customized code: it's going to expect to see one of its stock templates, complete with all of its code for calling all of its features.
In other words, no small part of the transfer is going to be an exercise in saying to the new publishing service, "Here's my index file. You're going to eat it, and you're going to like it." The risk is that the new publishing service, upon hearing the culinary butch talk, is going to respond in kind by saying, "Bite me."
The second problem, somewhat related to the first, is the comments here at The Dark Wraith Forums. In my theory of blogging, the comments are an integral part of the overall content. That's why you see the comments right in the blog's main page, itself, rather than as a pop-up window or as content that appears only when you're off the main page. My greatest concern is that the transfer is going to move the articles but leave their attendant comments behind because of the widespread coding theory that only the articles are "true" content. Even though I've integrated the comments into the primary architecture of the index page, I am deeply concerned that another publishing service just won't have a place for the articles' comments to land in the transfer, especially considering how I've customized this blog to put the comments where they are. I'm almost to the point of creating a completely new, mirror image of this blog as a test site to see what happens during a transfer. That would be a whole lot like work, but it might be the only way to put my mind at ease, or it might be the only way I can learn how to trick the system into moving everything just the way I want everything moved.
One way or the other, I will be moving; and as I promised, I'll look back long enough to rip Google and its Blogger service a new one... provided I haven't gone to my grave having a heart attack when the move doesn't happen as planned.
In a somewhat related vein, I am developing an architecture theory for my new Website, Truth2008.com/Truth2008.org, although I am genuinely unsure about what publishing platform is going to most effectively render what I want, which is a newspaper-style format with multiple articles visible (in newspaper-like, multiple-column arrangement), but with the blog feature of commenting available on any article. Even if I were to like Drupal—which I don't because it tends to get brutally slow as an implementation becomes content-heavy—I don't think I can get it to render the visual layout I want, at least not without some seriously fancy coding that would take months to perfect. If any of you have seen an example of a content management system that fits the description of what I desire, please point me in a direction; otherwise, I'm going to end up writing the code equivalent of a new invention of the wheel that I probably wouldn't have to.
So there you are: the plans for the coming week are on the table, although these plans might take more than a week to implement. If things get ugly, you'll know it. Don't worry: even if the blog turns into a total mess, I'll figure out how to fix what my incompetence has wrought. It might require human sacrifices, but there's an oversupply of neo-cons waiting to serve some useful purpose anyway.
Barring that avenue, I can always find some Right-wing economists. They're pretty easy to capture: all I have to do is put out some stale doughnuts under the picture of President Bush in the faculty lounge area, and they'll come running, figuring that they'll be safe from reality as long as they're grazing under the watchful eye of their hero.
They won't know what hit 'em.
The Dark Wraith moves forward with his plans.
Published 7/03/2006 12:32:00 AM
<< 36 Comments Total
Good morning, Mr Wraith.
Regarding issues 1 & 2 as laid out above:
Or, perhaps, you might try being less anal (only on occasion, and at your convenience, of course).
I have no recommendations other than Maxwell House 1892 roast (YUM!!).
Good luck and godspeed.
Again, good morning, Mr Wraith.
Please pardon the consecutive commenting, as in this case, I felt it to be a necessity, due to an unfortunate oversight on my part.
Knowing your penchant for formulae both arcane and useful, I felt you should be privy to this information:
c/2 + 1 = S
where c is the number of cups of coffee desired, and
S is the number of (heaping) scoops to add to brew.
Example: Were 7 cups of coffee desired, the correct amount of scoops would be
7/2 + 1
or 4.5 heaping scoops of coffee grounds.
I submit this formula for your approval.
Dark Wraith...Simply and sincerely...Good Luck!
Hi,
I Found Absolutely FREE PlayBoy & PentHouse:
http://www.playmates-girls.com
http://www.oxpe.net
If I find something else I'll inform you.
Best Regards, Yuriy
Good morning, Yuriy.
I'm going to leave your post up for a few hours just to let you know that I am installing an advertisement rate card after I've moved this blog.
That little ad you put on my private Website would, under that posted rate structure, have cost you $280.50 for each day or part thereof that I left it posted. Two things are fortunate for you: first, I haven't posted the rate card yet; and second, even if I had, I would have deleted the ad as soon as I had seen it, meaning you probably wouldn't have gotten hit for more than one day of advertisement.
By the way, Yuriy (if I may be so forward as to call you by your phony Russian first name), the daily rate structure for unauthorized ads is fifty cents per character and $100 per URL. Your comment had 161 characters. (I counted them manually just to get myself even more irritated than I already was when I saw your lame-ass porn ad.) Had you been better with simple HTML coding and embedded the URLs in hyperlinks, the URLs would have cost you $200 each.
Also, I tagged your IP address. I haven't run the WHOIS, so I don't know whether or not you have the common sense to be doing your trespassing under proxy servers, but that's not terribly important one way or the other: if I can't bill you, I'll bill the sites, themselves; and when they ignore me, they'll get surprised with the filings in the small claims court of competent jurisdiction.
Here's the bottom line, Yuriy: you piss me off; and I mean that sincerely.
Once again, you piss me off.
And your mother is ugly, too. So's your sister (the big one—the smaller ones are just plain scary).
The Dark Wraith was coding way too much last night to be patient with trifling smut spammers.
Good Morning Dark Wraith,
Please please, could you sacrifice Coulter first, pretty please?
I might even get into watching that one..
Good morning, SB Gypsy.
My sacrificial preferences tend toward immolation; as such, the Environmental Protection Agency regulations on open-air burning of garbage come to bear.
Specifically in the case of Ann Coulter, I cannot claim in a permit application that the resulting gas and particulate emissions would be environmentally safe. In fact, the air-borne emissions would be toxic to biological systems ranging from humans on down to single-celled organisms. The only creatures that would benefit are certain species of carrion eaters whose auto-immune systems are adapted to otherwise highly dangerous toxins.
This does not, however, preclude sacrificing Ann Coulter. It's a matter of having appropriate safeguards in place at the altar. My thinking is along the lines of a medium-sized George Forman grill. With the cover closed and the temperature control set on "fricassee," we should be able to bake the bitch swiftly enough to ensure that harmful chemicals are safely broken down to inert substances.
The cremated remains can then be cast joyfully beneath the feet of parading bands at the inauguration of the Democratic President in 2008.
That's my thinking on your suggestion, anyway.
The Dark Wraith is, of course, open to alternatives.
DW @ 08:42:11 AM EDT
;-)
McMa’am sailing by to wish you a boat load of good fortune (super-sized, of course) on this voyage and safe harbor when you finish.
Happy sails to you.
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
Hey, Yurly... Wraith is right. I have seen your sisters and your mother...not socially, but I've seen their porn films. Nasty wenches!
Dark Wraith and all non-spammers have a good 4th of July.
Peace.
Hey dude, I'm seein' spades over at shakes' place. Make it stop please or I shall go insane.
I look forward to enjoying your wisdom in whatever form the Akashic Record maintains! Happy Interdepence Day.
Good evening, kablooie.
My goal is to make it look like nothing happened. That's sort of like having a tornado come through and hoping everything lands in the next county and looks exactly the same as it did before the twister came through.
It could happen that way, y'know.
The Dark Wraith figures he's due for a lucky streak.
Good evening, konagod.
What's this thing with the spades?
Now, mind you, I use spades in my HaloScan signature, but that's just a trick to get brand recognition. If you're talking about real spades, that's another matter entirely.
I use to have a spade. I used it in the garden. It didn't work as well as those old-fashioned M-80 firecrackers, though: let me tell you, one of those suckers could make a hole you could plant a maple sapling in.
They've outlawed those M-80 firecrackers just about everywhere, or so I've heard. They're too dangerous for modern standards. Although I'm opposed to over-regulation, I think it was a good idea to outlaw them. My nephew put one under my brother's lawn chair once. Darned near blew my brother's ass off. The man didn't have proper bowel control for days.
We used to make our own fireworks. I was into model rocketry. I started with rocket kits from a company called Estes. They kept upping the ante on engine power until they were selling rockets that had engines that were unbelievable powerful. I figured out that putting three of those engines in tripod formation in a light-weight tube could hoist the missile way high in the air. Then I figured out that I could put payload in and still get a darned decent boost.
That's where the cylindrical container of gasoline came into play. Light plastic that would burn through when the solid motors were burning out and spraying their hot gasses upward to blow the nose cone off and deploy the parachute. Take out the parachute and there was plenty of room for a nice plastic cylinder full of gasoline. Gluing the nose cone on after loading the payload would ensure that the detonation was contained until the pressure was pretty darned impressive.
Launch went smoothly: the rocket snarled off the launch pad like a something from one of those military documentaries. The rocket got about three hundred feet in the air when the smoke stopped pouring out from the three engines. That meant the explosion would happen any second.
It didn't.
In fact the rocket slowed down way faster than I'd ever seen one slow down before, and it arced right over and headed back down.
No explosion—just a flying bomb coming back down to be with the people watching my experiment.
Did you see the movie October Sky? That was the movie about the boys who launched rockets and they got all kinds of applause from the townsfolk when the biggest one launched beautifully and went way, way up in the air.
Well, konagod, no one was applauding my rocket. The thing was just plunging back to the good Earth like an aerodynamic rock.
What I'd failed to take into account was the fact that the cylindrical fuselage of my rocket, even though it was nothing but a lightly varnished cardboard tube, was what in structural physics is called an isometric shape. It's like an egg: if equal pressure is applied on all sides, it won't break. That's what was going on with the tube: the explosion couldn't come out the nose cone because it was glued on with epoxy; the explosion couldn't come out the back end because the motors were anchored into their firing chambers. That meant the only way the explosion could come out was by compromising the fuselage, but the fuselage was an isometric body, so it could hold the pressure up to an enormous level.
Maybe twenty feet off the deck, the rocket did finally explode.
Konagod, that explosion was one of those "BOOM" things that literally makes visual reality do a ripple-wave. I'd never heard anything like it before in my life. Heck, I'd never seen anything like it. I guess everyone thought I'd meant to do it since no one said, "You idiot" or anything like that.
Of course, no one said much of anything right away, although as I recall everyone was talking very loudly for the next half-hour or so. I think the explosion made people kind of deaf for a while.
It hadn't gone as planned, and I suppose, if the rocket had gotten closer to the ground before going off, the whole incident would have been a genuine tragedy. As it was, people were generally pleased with the experiment.
All in all, though, I think it's better that we don't let kids play with fireworks anymore; and I think it's a good idea to keep the youngsters away from model rocketry, too: gasoline and aerodynamic surfaces make for too much risk of ripping the hide right off onlookers.
As it was, when my nephew tossed that M-80 under my brother's lawn chair, my brother's ass wasn't the only butt that got smoked that day.
The Dark Wraith in retrospect sees reciprocational karma in that episode.
good evening dark waith, i am glad you brought up spades.... or did I? Oh, I lost mine in the garden, and it became a rusted relic of what might have been.
Some say I'm too dangerous for modern standards,
and some say I'm not lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes.
my visual reality is doing a wham bam thank ya man, or whatever you chose to call it in the parlance of your time, but I do understand the point....
you have given me MUCH to read, and for free I might add,
I'm beginning to hear voices, and there's no one around......
give me a visitor's pass tomorrow.... 8)
Good evening, thepoetryman.
I'm glad you and others offered some comments this evening. It got so quiet around here after I posted that rant at Yuriy this morning that I was afraid I'd driven everyone away.
I really shouldn't have been so harsh. Everyone needs a job, and I suppose peddling Internet smutsites is as reputable as a number of other vocations. Take politics, for example: sure, there are those who ask, "What if the kids see it?" but we can't simply stop living just because kids might find out what we're doing and be marred for life. I remember the first time I saw a politician. Obviously, it disturbed me. But did it make me want to go into politics? Of course not. If anything, it made me resolve that I would spend my life not running for elected office.
It all has to do with your home life. If you've been raised right, you can see porno and politics and still come out okay.
Not that I came out okay, mind you; but that was more to do with watching too much of the Twilight Zone and Bugs Bunny.
I always sided with Daffy Duck. I was sure that duck would eventually figure out that Bugs was deliberately messing him up when they'd argue about whether it was "duck season" or "rabbit season." I got so frustrated when Daffy would scream, "Duck season, FIRE!"
Then it occurred to me that maybe it really was duck season.
That and my identification with Daffy made for a toxic pre-adolescent psychological frame of mind.
Conspiracy theorists are made, not born, my friend.
The Dark Wraith still cries out in the night, "Duck season, FIRE!"
Hi Dark Wraith,
wow you are ditching blogger and going to moveable type?
If I may ask why?
I really value your opinion and advice.
You see, I recently bought the domain name for pissedonpolitics and was planning to move my blog to it. I was going to stick with blogger.
Part of my reason for thinking of staying with blogger was that:
"well, it it's good enough for Dark Wraith, it's good enough for me..."
I've watched blogger after blogger move to word press and the three column format. I was Tempted to do the same many times.
But I stuck with blogger and my format all the while thinking about if I were to make a change, what would I do?
Anyway, what are your reasonings for going to moveable type?
I can tell by your post that the transition will get messy, but is there any continuity between blogger and moveable type? Or are you going to have to repost all your previous poss or link to an offsite archive?
Have you backed up all your previous posts before the move?
Just wondering. Blogger, moveable type, type pad, word press, ?? What's the best?
I realize best can be a combination of ease of use as well as style. I guess I am wondering which has the best combination?
Which has good style yet is not cumbersome?
Oops, sorry...one more follow up Q Dark Wraith.
Will you keep your blogspot.com?
I am wondering what I should do. Keep it? Redirect it to my .com?
Good evening, PoliShifter.
First, I need to apologize to you: you had asked me several of these questions in an e-mail message a couple days ago. I had not responded because I was formulating what I wanted to be a thorough answer, and part of the thorough answer had to do with what decisions I personally was going to be making. There is also an ethical issue through which I had to work in formulating a recommendation.
Down to business. Blogger is a free service provided by the public company called Google. Google offers free server space to just about anyone who wants to set up a Website. The Blogger service specializes in a type of Website called a "blog," which is short for "Weblog." Technically speaking, a blog is a Website that is periodically, serially updated; however, most people think of a blog in as being of a somewhat narrower nature. Any Website worth its salt gets updated from time to time. In fact, more technically sophisticated Websites can be automatically updated at regular or irregular intervals; but a blog, by most people's definition, has the added feature of real-time reader feedback availability. Whether you take the narrow or the broad definition of a blog, the Blogger service and similar services specialize in providing not just server space, but also in providing Web templates by which both the holder of a given site and the readers can publish content.
Therein lies the second and more important feature of blog services: they provide a relatively easy means by which content on the Website can be updated. The host can publish new articles and edit existing content, while readers can publish comments. Many bloggers eschew a publishing service's native commenting system and opt instead for an independent commenting service like HaloScan. They do this for several reasons: first, some bloggers don't know that Blogger has an embedded, native commenting service; second, some bloggers labor under the misconception that HaloScan is "safer" than the native commenting service. Several large blogs have found out in recent months that HaloScan has become Swiss cheese to an ancient spam attack routine. One of those big blog hosts simply refuses to surrender HaloScan and just go to the Blogger native commenting system. It's an interesting phenomenon; but eventually, a better understanding of commenting systems will probably set in, and the luster of HaloScan will disappear.
My own dislike of HaloScan has to do with care, custody, and control of the comments. The way Blogger works underneath the layers of simplifying ease, the host has control of the comments on the same server where the blog itself resides. With HaloScan, this isn't the case: the comments are on a completely different server, controlled by a completely different organization. That is inconsistent with my theory of blogging; but again, this is a matter of personal preference.
As I noted, and as I am sure you are aware, when you have a *.blogspot.com account, you have no direct costs. You do, however, have the implicit opportunity cost of blogging, and this can get quite expensive if you publish a lot, comment a lot, or otherwise attend to your blog for more than a short period of time each day. But as far as direct costs go, you're getting something free of charge that you would otherwise have to pay for were you not using Blogger or the free version of another service.
This leads to a political problem, you see. Many, many well-intentioned bloggers are talking about Net Neutrality from the perspective of having to pay nothing because Google has to pay nothing. (Actually, it does pay, but not nearly the cost of what it's using.) In my case, were I on Blogger's own servers, which I used to be, I would pay nothing regardless of how much bandwidth I used for all the services I run. However, because my Website is on a private Webhosting service, I now pay for both server space and for bandwidth. Now, the marginal cost of bandwidth for me is $1.00 per Gigabyte. I am burning the better part of 10 Gigs most months now. Part of that is because of the newsfeeds I run and the message board, as well as several ancillary services. Were I on Blogger, I would have no clue that there was actually a cost to what I was doing. (And as an aside, the marginal bandwidth cost is in addition to the free bandwidth and server space that's part of your monthly package payment. In other words, even though my monthly fee is plenty to cover my service space, the bandwidth bleed is so strong, now, that I have to buy extra bandwidth every month.)
In the olden days—a couple of years ago—hardly anyone had an issue with bandwidth limitations; but that doesn't mean we weren't talking about it. I could probably even dig up old message boards where the techs were talking about the coming drain on the seemingly infinite reservoir of bandwidth available for Internet uses. The killers are all the RSS stuff, the emergent video, telephony, and continuous data feeds of all types and manners. It was always looming, and now it's here: bandwidth is no longer what we call in economics a "public good," something where the marginal cost of one more user is effectively zero. Now, bandwidth is a genuine private good, where the cost of one more user is greater than zero. Worse, the marginal cost rises as more users enter the system.
Services like Google are living off that reservoir and handing it out as if it's still free. Unfortunately, the recipients of that unlimited access to bandwidth don't see behind the curtain: that reservoir from which Google is pulling is no longer infinite.
Enter, of course, the telecoms and their entirely disingenuous nonsense about "their" "pipes." That's utter baloney. (And no, it's not "balogna"; it's "baloney.") They are every bit the beneficiaries of a public good that was created and maintained for years by the federal government. More importantly to the present situation, no matter how much the Right-winger economists, public policy "experts," and assorted other paid hitmen want to make it sound like we've shifted the paradigm away from long-established public policy frameworks, the Internet remains a classic example of a "public good," not because it meets the economic definition, but because it meets the public policy definition. In that framework, those telecoms are "common carriers," and every step they make needs to have a regulatory fist on it to ensure that what belongs to the public serves the public interest even as private enterprise uses that public good to profitable ends. But at the same time, make no mistake: Google is making a literal fortune off a public good; and it's squealing like stuck pig because its free seat at the hog trough is being challenged. The same goes for eBay and all the other companies that are making their investors filthy rich: they're raking in bucks off a public good they've figured out how to appropriate (and drain) for their private benefit; and their big gambit is to insist that it's their customers who will be hurt if their free seat at the trough is jerked out from under them.
Moving along, now, PoliShifter, your blog doesn't have to be on Google's servers for you to use the Google platform for publishing. Many private Web hosting services will be happy to shift your entire operation over. All you need is a domain, and they'll take care of the dirty work (or at least most of it; you'll still have some clean-up to do, but it's almost trivial if your chosen Web host is good). These private Web hosting services will set you up so that you can continue to use Blogger, but most of the hosts will encourage you to get away from Blogger and go to another publishing platform. The one I use strongly encouraged me, when I moved from dark-wraith.blogspot.com to dark-wraith.com to get out from under Blogger and go to Movable Type. I didn't, and I regret that now. My only defense is that I thought my problems with Blogger all had to do with having my Website on their servers. As it turned out, those problems were only the tip of a major iceberg of incompetence, underinvestment, bad management, and possibly something far more sinister, although I cannot attest as a fact to that last possibility.
The one thing I would strongly recommend is that you NOT do what Blogger suggests when you make the transition off Blogger: do NOT under any circumstances cancel the Blogger blog address. Blogger says you should cancel it and then sign it up again. Somehow, this is supposed to make it so the *.blogspot.com version becomes a mirror site of the privately hosted version. It doesn't work that way, especially under the conditions now prevailing. I know of three bloggers who, during the transition off Blogger's servers, canceled their *.blogspot.com names, and when they went to sign them back up again minutes later, someone had already snatched them up! It's just ridiculous: so many millions of people are swirling around saying, "Yeah, I wanna be a blogger" that you can't let take your hands off a blogspot sub-domain name for even a few seconds.
It's better to just leave the Blogger version of the blog as a legacy site with a final post that tells where the new site is. Alternately, if you know how to do it, you can set a script in the *.blogspot.com version that will cause an automatic re-direct to the new site.
Now, ideally your whole blog should move when you do the transition. That means your archives and everything else will go right along with you. I cannot, however, attest that your Blogger comments will port, too. That's exactly where my big concern lies right now: are the comments that are attached to each and every post going to flow over to the new publishing platform? They should, but I don't know. It would be easy if I were using HaloScan; there wouldn't be an issue because the comments would be independent of my Website. But since I use Blogger's native comment system for publishing the comments, they are a part of the Website archives, themselves, which means I face the possibility that they won't port, at least intact.
I'll just have to see.
But aside from that issue, the transition should be almost easy. All you need to do is sign up with a good private Web host, set your DNS for your domain to the host's specification, and you're ready to go. They'll give you some instructions, and they'll want you to give them the username and password to your Blogger account. You'll specify for them that you want to move to WordPress or Movable Type or whatever, and everything will be taken care of. (And I really am making it sound a little easier than it will be; but it's truly not bad at all if you have a good, service-oriented host.)
Now, what's the best publishing platform? Here's the deal: many people say Movable Type is the most "powerful," but as I noted in the article from which this thread originated, that word "powerful" simply means Movable Type offers lots of features in its templates, so it looks like you're a coding genius or something like that. For me, Movably Type comes out on top for a few subtler reasons.
Quite honestly, though, WordPress is strong, and the main reason is that many RSS and related services seem to be highly keyed to the WordPress setup. In fact, if you peruse the FeedBurner site, you'll see all these neat feed deals that that have the little advisory "WordPress only."
PoliShifter, you're in this for the long haul. You're going to get well-known, but you'll get well-known faster if you have a well-structured blog with multiple feed avenues so the world has the ability to find out about your blog's existence. That might mean WordPress is for you. As for me, I always take the cold route from one place to the other, and I'm never one to advise people to follow my steps unless they really want to benefit from the journey as much as from the destination.
Now, in conclusion, let me hit the issue that was the subject of the ethical problem I mentioned at the beginning of this ridiculously long comment. If you want a private Web hosting service that will make the move pretty darned easy for you, I can offer you mine. I have affiliate status, so I'm going to make a nickel off the recommendation if you take it. The upside for you is that I can honestly attest that the cats at this Web hosting service bust their extra nut to help you any time of day. You send them a support ticket, they'll be back in your face sometimes within minutes. Like every place where techs hang out, you'll find one or two there who think they know it all, and they'll talk down to you. I've worked through that by eating a couple of heads off; but as a general statement, I've only rarely in my life dealt with a Web host where the techs really did work so hard to keep their clients happy.
Here's the real downside: you're going to have to start paying money. It won't be a lot at first, but when you start running into bandwidth problems, it's not going to be like Blogger where you have no idea that there's any problem. With private Web hosts, the more popular your Website gets, the more you're going to have to pay. You'll pay for server space, and you'll pay for bandwidth. And sooner or later (usually later, fortunately), you'll realize that you're paying a fairly serious amount.
The bad news is that you're not going to make enough through your blogging activities to pay for it; the good news is that, when you're paying that serious money, you'll know for a fact that you've become a professional blogger, both because real money is involved and because real people—the overwhelming majority of which you'll never even know exist—are coming to see what you have to say.
The Dark Wraith will now stop before his fingers drop out of their sockets from all the typing.
Just wanted to wish you a happy 4th, Dark Wraith. I must say this one really feels as if something’s lacking; and it’s not just the politics of the situation. Our neighbors have toned down the all-out bacchanal they usually throw themselves into with abandon - and that's not good. Its not good because I wanted to be sitting out on my back deck all this weekend watching my neighbors shoot off fireworks better suited to a small city (they usually always do this). It’s also not good because the drunken southern rock band is missing in action this year. I had sort of gotten used to all those reprises of 'Free Bird'. Humor aside - this tells me even the local good ol' boys feel something is wrong with their America - and that means the infection has finally reached down into the roots. So I guess I'm feeling a little - oh, I don't know; malaise isn't exactly the right word - but it’s all that comes to mind this AM. So - for what its worth - I do hope your celebrations have much more punch than mine this year. Have fun, take care and may tomorrow dawn better and brighter!
Good evening, Fat Lady Sings.
I am having the same impression of this Fourth of July. Even in this community with all its conservatives, Right-wingers, chickenhawks, and Bush/Cheney '04 bumper stickers on display, the mutedness of the celebratory atmosphere is gone. The swaggering, git-tuff-with-the-whole-world nonsense isn't on parade.
Tomorrow, when the military guard passes by me, I will as always stand and put my hand over my heart. (No, I don't salute; I'm not in uniform; and no, I don't stand when some civilian trots by swinging a flag like it's a personal badge of victorious honor.)
Tomorrow, as always, I'll stand. So will others; but I'll bet you the bravado is going to be replaced with quite a bit of introspection this year.
The Dark Wraith was sort of wondering when that would happen this time around.
Good Day Dark Wraith!
And Happy 4th of July!
I really appreciate your input. I will have to read your post over a few times so that it can sink in...especially since I have had a few beers tonight. I found myself closing one eye while reading your post.
You have my email...you can email me the cost of the hosting service you use that you recommened (and your affiliate ID).
I have a couple of sites hosted so I am not adverse to paying for hosting.
Though I must say I recently found a webhosting service for $0.95 a year...
Now I know you are spitting your coffee all over your computer screen...here is the link:
http://www.hostingboy.net/
Granted, I have not hosted throught them yet. I was only referred to them by a friend of mine.
I have been using http://www.dayanahost.com/ which is about $14 per year.
Anyway, the point is that I am not adverse to cost.
And while I realize I may never recoup the cost from Pissed On Politics, that is more of a labor of love.
I have other sites that are generating income, enough to cover by web associates costs, that if people in the blogosphere knew about they would likely thumb their nose at me.
But in my world, I have to do what I have to do. And I am not gentleman of leisure where I can just shell out money each month to run a personal blog that really no one is reading and those that do read it often run away screaming.
Be it as it may alas, my concerns over blogger are exceeding my patience.
Between getting up in the moring before work and having about an hour (a good amount of time mind you) to catch up on the news and update my blog, only to find that blogger is down...Or to sit there for 30 minutes as the blogger publishing icon keeps clicking and displaying 0%...
That and the recent privacy concerns have led me to the conclusion that I really need to get off blogger.
You have my email Dark Wraith so you can email me what webhosting service you are using, the cost, and the all important referal id so you can make your $0.05. If you can just refer 10 million people you'd be doing very well...
I guess perhaps Word Press may be the way to go, though I will feel somewhat like a conformist seeing as how most bloggers in our little cirlce have switched to word press.
Fortunately for me, while I get some comments on my blog, I don't nearly have as many memorable exchanges and dialogue with highly intelligent people as you have here.
In fact, there are quite a few comments on my blog that if they disappeared I would not shed a tear. I make it a policy not to delete posts...But if the one that said I suck, my blog sucks, and that no one reads my blog happened to disappear, I would not be overly upset.
Once again thank you Dark Wraith for your time in responding.
My main concerns besides moving to a new webhost is figuring out how to maintain my .blogspot.com AND have that redirect to my domain name.
I realize my traffic to pissed on politics is relatively low but dammit, I have worked hard to get the few repeat customers I have.
I would hate to have some dating service take over the .blogspot as they did to The Green Latentern.
That would kill me.
Good morning and Happy 4th, everyone.
As I read all the comments, I realize the legitimate concerns with blogger. However, as someone with very little time to mess with her blog, I find they do what I need, usually. I've been irritated by the (as polishifter says) update my blog, only to find that blogger is down...Or to sit there for 30 minutes as the blogger publishing icon keeps clicking and displaying 0%...
Right now, I'll take that irritation as moving the blog would cause even more irritation!
I don't write the indepth, thoughtful, stuff you guys write, anyway. It is good to know there are other options that are worth looking at, down the road. Thanks for all the info.
Good morning, Darkest One.
Moving week, eh? All I have to offer is a truck, beer and pizza pie. Oh, and a fan.
Call if ya need me. You know how handy I am with a hammer.
PS. My flag will be flying upside down. I'm not in the mood for all the faux, well, you know....
Good morning, Dark Wraith, good luck with your "perilous journey."
Your reply to pollshifter was very informative also. I look foward to reading about the "journey."
happy muted 4th sir wraith. and best of luck with your changeover.
roger the pirate
Dark Wraith,
I wish you the best of luck with your endeavors, I will be watching to see how you do, then I might copy you if I have a day where the news pisses me off so much I can't blog.
Thanks for the link to my OBL post, that story was like lighting a firecracker under my ass.
I loved your response to Yuri.
Good Morning Dark Wraith:
And a Happy Fourth of July!
So you're moving your weblog off Blogger and onto Movable Type. Good Luck to you--I can only imagine the hundreds of little problems that could occur moving a blog as complex as yours from one service to another. And I can certainly understand your concern regarding the comments section. The comments on your posts offer an incredibly rich vein of thoughtful ideas and analysis. They make this blog what it is.
I certainly am curious to learn more about your new website Truth2008.com/Truth2008.org. Will it be a blog, a news feed a la Drudge, or perhaps something similar to AmericaBlog or Daily Kos? Are you planning on posting the articles yourself, providing links to articles, or allowing bloggers create their own posts?
I am genuinely unsure about what publishing platform is going to most effectively render what I want, which is a newspaper-style format with multiple articles visible (in newspaper-like, multiple-column arrangement), but with the blog feature of commenting available on any article.
Here's some interesting links of blogs that may give you some ideas:
http://www.perrspectives.com/
http://www.politicalcortex.com/
http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=186966
http://www.watchblog.com/
http://tpmcafe.com/
Hope these sites give you some inspiration.
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith,
Happy fourth!
Good afternoon, SB Gypsy.
To you and everyone else, may you have a good Fourth of July. I trust that food, fireworks, and maybe even a decent band parading by are all on the agenda.
The Dark Wraith for his part will stay in his office and out of the heat and humidity... at least until the smoke clears tonight.
Good afternoon, Eric. Thank you.
That tour of sites was definitely informative. I saw an implementation very similar to what I'm after. The problem is that it uses Scoops, about which I had heard but knew very little.
Now I know more than I wanted to. Scoops is a CMS that tries to be incredibly helpful by creating a graphical user interface to design the front end of the Website. Just about anything can be put there as far as Website stuff and traditional blogging apparatus. The problem is that this phase of implementation is incredibly easy, but the back end is a seriously technical deal, at least to the extent that you have to know exactly what your server's specifications and capabilities are in terms of releases of Apache, Perl, and other software. You also have to know something about MySQL and how to configure it to work with the system you're creating.
All of that being noted, it is almost assuredly the CMS I'll be deploying.
I swear, Eric, there's no end to what one might need to learn thoroughly in this computer age. I run down one road until I'm good, then I have to go back and run down roads I saw intersecting the first road, then those roads intersect with other roads I'll have to go down, and on and on. And somewhere along the way, I go from being suspicious about W3C to being downright paranoid about it.
I'm getting too old for this. Come to think of it, I was getting too old for this when I wasn't getting too old for this.
Grr.
And let me repeat that: Grr.
The Dark Wraith longs for a return to the Middle Ages.
Best wishes on your endeavor. I'm eager to see what you come up with.
All the best.
Good evening, meEE.
Within the framework of what is called the "Standard Model" of quantum mechanics can be derived all kinds of interesting results, only a small portion of which have been teased out. Specifically, quantum chromodynamics is nascent if only because the model is so complex that only very localized, highly limited subsections have ever been explored so far. That will, of course, change as time goes on and computing power increases. It seems to me that, if the Standard Model is not repudiated within this century, we should be hearing of quite interesting results beginning late in this 21st Century or early in the 22nd Century.
Actually, we will hear no such things: those wondrous marvels of the mind are for future children to hear as lore in their old age.
For the time being, we must be content with what we think we understand about how the universe is put together.
A curious, if minor, result of our current understanding is that, under certain extraordinarily rare conditions, the universe can be made to go away. Such an event would happen nearly instantaneously, but it would be entirely thorough in flattening the universe—both that known as well as that we cannot see—into an essential nothingness.
Here's something even more interesting that derives from that hypothetical event: we can do this trick.
It would be completely by accident if we did so, the result of a quantum-level experiment with one of the latest particle accelerators; but it is theoretically possible that a collision we had created among particles could set off the event.
The probability of this happening is small to the point of being almost beyond comprehension as meaningful, but the probability is not zero.
I must consider this in the context of moving The Dark Wraith Forums from one publishing service to another: although I might very well make a grave, accidental error during the transition, such a mistake wouldn't be the end of the world.
Neither would it be the end of the universe, for that matter.
The Dark Wraith takes comfort in knowing that.
Good morning All....
I won't say it is nice to hear that others note a lack somehow in the 4th's celebration this year, but it is noce to hear that my own observations were most likely on target, rather than the product of either hormones or getting up at 3AM to open the store yesterday AM(and working 10 hours out of my scheduled 8). Yes, I have been forced kicking and screaming into the Asst. Manager's slot, and yet again our store is down to the manager, me and one other cashier. I'm heartily sick of overtime-it seriosly eats into both my homelife and computer time. Of course, the extra $$$ is nice...
Good evening Dark Wraith.
As you may know, I know a little something about MT. However, What you may not know is that I know where to acquire (at an exceedingly small price) a bare bones set of MT tags that would then make it much easier for you to..., say..., switch out the blogger tags for the MT tags.
Now, if you should already be aware of the bare bones MT tags, well then I guess we are done. However, if you are at all interested, drop me a line. I have an email posted at my blog now.
So long!
Good evening, Guy Andrew Hall.
Rook's Rant is MT?! Good Heavens, I need to pay better attention.
Yes, I might actually drop you a line here in the next couple of days. I'm really pulling my hair out trying to write a javascript to work like the one I have here that keeps track of how many new comments have been posted since a visitor's last visit.
I am finally beginning to get familiar with the architectural theory of MT, but it's a whole lot like work.
Yes, I might get a hold of you in the next couple of days... provided, that is, I don't go off the deep end first and become a hermit somewhere in the Ozarks.
They don't have wireless in the Ozarks, from what I understand.
The Dark Wraith might find that a good reason to move there.