Category: Navel-Gazing

Hey, new stuff on the blogroll! Well, semi-new stuff, but I felt like noting it.

• DonkeyRising is demographer’s Ruy Teixeira’s blog about Democratic strategy. It’s a little rah-rah but insightful and informative.
• The Decembrist is Mark Schmitt’s blog; he was formerly one of Bill Bradley’s senior aides. Solid stuff from a political insider.
• The American Street is a new group blog with David Neiwert as a contributor. They need to fix their layout but I’ll read Neiwert’s stuff anywhere.
• Tofu Hut is funny and worth a peek, although he better get back to movie reviews soon, cause I want to read more of that. Please.

As per Phil Ringnalda’s advice —

I’m experimenting with rebuilding individual archives when an entry gets a TrackBack ping. If you have trouble pinging me, please let me know about it. Also, you might try setting a longer value for PingTimeout in your mt.cfg file.

I made a couple of changes to improve load times and rebuild times (thanks, Ginger, and man are you ever right). I’m no longer bothering with “Recent Entries” on the sidebar, cause like anyone ever used those. I also killed most of the sidebar on the category archive pages and replaced it all with a full list of entries in that category. And there’s no full category archive pages anymore, because that didn’t scale very well.

Now posting new entries takes a sane amount of time.

Anyone else had weird problems with Kung-Log in the last couple of days? Like… since the new year? And I can’t download a new version because the guy who wrote it is doing a new for-pay version called Ecto, which I would happily buy but it isn’t out yet.

Zempt hasn’t been ported to the Mac yet. NetNewsWire is good, but you have to pop up a modal dialog box to edit your extended entries. I am beginning to feel very edgy; I’ve grown addicted to saving drafts and working on posts over time. (Just wait till you see my favorite movies of 2003 post.) I need my fix.

I’m futzing around with ljcrosspost, a new plugin that automates crossposting between MT and LiveJournal. If it wipes out all my LJ posts, I will be very sad.

… OK, it’s a nice plugin but it doesn’t really make it easy to customize the post title and it doesn’t provide easy access to the permalink — so I can’t easily create links back to the blog side of things. Maybe in a couple of revs. It’s a damned cool idea, though.

From time to time, people ask me why I link to and read right-wing bloggers. The simple answer is “Because I want to see other viewpoints.” However, Tacitus just provided us with a clear example of the kind of integrity and honesty I find deeply valuable.

How could I not read a conservative thinker who’s that honest? That’s not an enemy, that’s a fellow human being who happens to disagree with me.

Blogroll loading has been a touch slow for me lately, either since Blogrolling.com got a little slower or for some other reason. Thus, I put together a quick and dirty caching system which should speed matters up. If you see “(Cached.)” under one of the blogrolls, now you know why.

See the extended entry for the code used; no support or warranty is available. You’ll want to know a little PHP to use it.

That was easy enough. Admire my brand-new title-based individual entry URLs, which will permit me to migrate hosts, databases, and even blog software without losing my permalinks should I ever feel the need.

The redirection solution I’ll use when I get around to fixing my archive permalinks comes from Elizabeth Lawley. (Shelley has some notes as well.) Clever stuff. MTEntryID needs padding, though, and Shelley’s quotes got smartened. Word to the wise.

Mark Pilgrim has tips on archive names, which are pretty good even if I don’t mind having .php on the tail of each URL. Which I don’t. But the keywords trick will be very useful, since my post titles tend to be cryptic.

Jay Allen just released a beta of MT-Blacklist. It’s really easy to install; you copy three files into various places, go to a Web page, and you’re good to go. So of course I installed it.

If anyone has any trouble posting comments, let me know.