Category Archives: Discourse.net

Moved to a New Server

Posted on May 28, 2014 by Michael Froomkin

Discourse.net got a new server overnight and then crashed a few times. Here’s hoping the bugs get ironed out soon….

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment

Annals of Weird Marketing

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Michael Froomkin

Hello,

My name is Devin. I am an online website optimization consultant for small to medium size businesses. I came across your website www.discourse.net and have noticed that there are many things that can be improved on your website to help you rank better in the search engines and ultimately drive more traffic to your webpage. Currently you have a page rank of 2nd position of 5th page for the Keyword – Balance of Miami-Dade House Painter – this can be improved very quickly. I will be happy to review your site in more depth for and give you a free quote on how you can improve your traffic, which will ultimately give you more online visibility, increasing your revenue.

Balance of Miami-Dade House Painter? Really? Someone has written a program to send ads touting SEO services and that is the best they can come up with?

PS. After this post, I bet I make the 4th page for “Balance of Miami-Dade House Painter” at least! And without paying a penny!

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on Annals of Weird Marketing

What is Scorecardresearch Doing Here?

Posted on January 13, 2014 by Michael Froomkin

Excess of Democracy blog has a post about trackers on lawprof blogs. Coincidentally, I spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out why it is that gtmerix reports that discourse.net has this redirect, which both slows the site and amounts to a tracker on users:

I certainly didn’t put any of that in here on purpose. I have grepped all the code for this site and the words “scorecardresearch” and “specificclick” don’t appear anywhere in it. That means either something is inserting the code, or it is obfuscated in some way.

I can imagine three possibilities: (1) a plugin has some javascript; (2) something in the right margin; (3) a malicious code injection.

I tried disabling several of the plugins (but not all as some are essential), but nothing changed. I tried removing a couple of the most likely suspects from the right margin, but that wasn’t it. I don’t know how to look for the code injection.

Any thoughts on how best to track this down?

Posted in Discourse.net, Software | 5 Comments

What Gets Commentators Excited

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

I write a fair amount about politics here. And about the law. But what issue has the power to keep commentators excited ten years after I first posted about it? Knee Defender.

The fringes of the public sphere indeed.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on What Gets Commentators Excited

Ten Years of Blogging

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

My first substantive post at discourse.net was ten years ago, and Rose Burawoy, Political Scientist, an even meatier post, was only a few days later. I was horrified by Guantanamo and by the Padilla case.

A great deal has changed since then, for me personally and for almost everyone else. Padilla is out of the Navy Brig and in a Miami jail — but Guantanamo is still there. It is hard not get used to it, but we need to make that effort.

Meanwhile, the blogging project has become somewhat more erratic as I have become deeply enmeshed in other projects, particularly Jotwell and We Robot. And I’m trying to keep up my scholarly writing productivity too; something has to go, and as I result I write fewer long pieces here. But not none!

If you haven’t been reading for ten years straight you might want to look at an arbitrary list of discourse.net’s greatest hits. It has what I think are the best posts — not the most popular. If I were listing the most popular it would be a very different list, probably headed by How Not To Pick Up Women Online, which for some years was on the first or second page of Google for people searching that phrase without the “not”.

More importantly, if you have not already done so, please would you take a minute and tell me a little something about yourself? One of the greatest rewards of shouting into the wind is to sometimes hear a voice answer back.

Posted in Discourse.net, Guantanamo | 1 Comment

Miami at Night

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

Here is a photo of Miami at night because it has pretty clouds, and because I needed a test photo to see if I’ve fixed various blog issues.

Miami-at-night

Photo by James Good on Flickr and licensed subject to Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works license.

Posted in Discourse.net, Miami | 2 Comments