Category Archives: Discourse.net

As you can see (if you are not reading this via the RSS feed), things have changed around here. I’m now on WordPress, and the blog has a totally different and I think much better more modern look. The old template was more or less hand-coded by yours truly back in the day when just having a unique template was an achievement.  If all goes according to plan, not that it ever does, there will be more changes over the next week or two as I work out any bugs, and then, once the dust settles, maybe play around a bit.

Please be patient with me if things go funny from time to time. The new system is much more complex and (I hope) flexible than the old.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Incidentally, I should mention that right now the comments are set very restrictively, and just as a temporary measure I have to approve the first comment by every poster before it goes online; once you have had the first one approved subsequent comments should appear automatically. As soon as things are a bit more organized, I’ll change that, probably to a system that lets logged in users post more freely than drive-by commentators. (Currently the option to become a logged-in user is disabled. One thing at a time.)

One major difference between WordPress and Movable Type is that WP wants to build a page for every visitor, while MT builds a static page whenever new content is created, then serves that page up to visitors. Obviously, static pages are much faster. So WP users throw in a cache, which speeds up pages. I’ve got one, but it remains to be seen how well it performs and whether this cheapo shared server is up to the job. 

So here too, please be patient while things get sorted out.

UPDATE (12/8/2010): I’ve switched to a much simpler theme.   Perhaps not as elegant, but so far easier to live with.

I got invited to a local bloggers' brunch and had a very good time. There's a write up at South Florida Daily Blog, Blogger Brunch Bonding.

What struck me the most besides what Rick mentions — and the moment where the woman from the next table joined in was almost a Woody Allen – Marshall MCluhan moment — is that we're all of an age. Where are the young local political bloggers? On Facebook?

Sometime Real Soon Now™ the blog will go dark for a day or so, and when it emerges, it will be running on WordPress, and have a brand new much more modern look. If all goes well, all the current pages will be ported to WordPress versions of the same posts, with the same URLs. And no content will be lost. (Look! A flying pig!)

I imagine there will also be a period of tweaking and bugswatting after that happens, so I'll ask for your patience.

Exactly when we'll pull the trigger, I'm not sure, but some time between this Monday and next Monday seems most likely. I hope you will like the results; I'm quite sure folks will let me know if they do not.

Hey, I see that the Discourse.net Sitemeter count over there in the right margin went over 3 million. I guess that says something, right?

I put more faith in the 'unique visitor' count, which is just over a million and I think might actually be meaningful, but most blogs use Sitemeter (probably because the numbers are higher, more egoboo) and I collect it so one can compare apples to apples. More than six thousand entries, more than 16,000 comments. Never would have guessed when I started all this.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

I think this is a very striking image:

Copyright © 2008 – Mirko Ilic Corp All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

As I work on a blog redesign, it's one of my favorites for a theme. But unfortunately, both its verticality and its greenness make it hard to use; it looks like I'll end up with something a bit less striking, more soothing, and much more horizontal, as a banner.

The artist — whose work came to my attention because of this great image regarding court decisions supporting gay rights — very kindly gave me license to use it if I wanted to.

That ugly question mark in the right margin that was my Google Page non-Rank is finally gone only five weeks after Google “reconsidered” Discourse.net post hack attack and put it back into the index.

This comes just in time for the major blog makeover, which is proceeding apace. I hired experts to convert the database to something WordPress would love, and the conversion routine seems to work. The next step is design. The plan is to start me out in a souped-up version of a free Woo Theme; the issue is what sort of soup.

Earlier entries: That's Odd (7/6), Google Woes (8/3), No Joy From Google (8/12), Got 'em (8/13); Partially Rehabilitated (8/15).