Category Archives: Discourse.net

For the past few days the blog has suffered from unusual slowness — yes, even more than usual — caused by heavy load on the server. The nice people at Dreamhost are moving me to what they say is a snazzy new server where the blog will zip along at a fabulous less sluggish pace.

Meanwhile, there may be brief weirdness. Please let me know if anything odder than usual persists.

I wonder sometimes if I should spring for faster service. But that would be expensive. And I like not taking ads. (This blog is privately hosted. My employer neither pays for it nor is in any way responsible for it.)

For reasons unknown, iraqbodycount.org has started serving a popup instead of its civilian casualty count, so I've disabled that part of the sidebar at least temporarily.

In general there's a fair amount of cruft in the sidebars — should I go on a sidebar diet to speed load time and looks?

UPDATE (8/1): Looks fixed?

According to TaxProf Blog: Law Prof Blog Rankings, this blog remains #15 on the popularity list for visitors.

Page views have slipped to 17th, perhaps because I've been taking it very easy on posting while on vacation; indeed the ten days starting Monday should also be slim as I'll be abroad and then recovering from jet lag.

I expect things may pick up once classes start in mid-August, and I go back to the academic year's daily rhythm — there seem to be more interstitial moments in those days. Or more meetings. Or something.

Over in the right margin I ask readers to tell me a little bit about who they are. I really enjoy reading the replies.

But unfortunately, in recent days someone has been abusing this for commercial purposes. I think it's being done by hand, the IP numbers vary, and the messages did give me pause as they all seemed plausible.

But enough already.

Today I deleted comments bearing the following monikers and timestamps:

acai diet 2009-07-05 17:13:42
Bangkok hotels Thailand 2009-07-05 17:08:22
Beta alanine 2009-07-05 17:04:46
Paypal Vcc 2009-07-01 18:19:37
Option trading 2009-07-01 18:16:58
Gold Chain 2009-07-01 18:15:03
loans consolidate 2009-06-26 17:41:22
small businesses 2009-06-26 12:22:53
Natural Stone 2009-06-12 02:24:12

If one of those was you, and you're a real person, please feel encouraged to resubmit it without a product name attached. Thank you.

I'm out today.

via SFDB Ecard Of The Day by South Florida Daily Blog

Politically correct update: It's been suggested to me that the message of the card above is the pernicious “wouldn't it be a shame if women didn't strip down to bathing suits on a winter holiday” rather than what I innocently took it to be, which was, “isn't it nice to be able to go to the beach.” I'm guess I'm just naive.

The Miami Herald has a new south Florida blog aggregator, they call the Community Blog Network and they've listed Discourse.net under Politics and Business.

Why “business”? Apparently, according to the editor who was kind enough to explain it to me, that's where both law and technology are being warehoused until they have enough blogs on those topics to fill their own sections.

For Herald blog readers new to Discourse.net, I should perhaps explain that I'm a professor at the University of Miami School of Law. I write mainly about politics, law, and technology, and sometimes repeat bad jokes. Civil comments are very welcome. You can read my legal articles here. You can read about me here and here.