Rare open thread

I'm having cable problems, so no computer to easily write a post. Feel free to discuss your old compsite girlfriends, exchange dog recipes or wax poetic about anything on your mind.

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Rare Tuesday Night open thread

I'll be busy Tuesday night so I won't be making a post. Ordinarily I would just skip the post without making mention of the fact, but I generally post a Stratfor Hot Babe, er... I mean article on Tuesday nights so I thought I would give a heads-up for those looking for it. It will be posted Wednesday morning this week.

By the way, try not to crash Google's servers filling up the comment section with witty and/or insightful remarks. They get pissed when that happens.
 

Saturday Night open thread

I'm going to San Francisco next week on vacation. If you don't hear from me after a week it will mean I've been kidnapped by vegans, fed a diet of granola to break my will, and forced to bang on a bongo drum in support of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. If that happens, please send a SEAL team to rescue me.

Blogging will be light, although I hope to be able to post the Stratfor articles, and perhaps some pictures. Also, with luck, one or more of the other contributors will kick in with a post or two.

You may have noticed that there is a new contributor called The Robotolizer. This is a project I've been working on. It is a robotic blogging program which scans the internet and constructs blog posts. It is written in Visual Basic and JavaScript, so you know it has to be an advanced piece of software. 

I think I have all of the bugs worked out, but regardless I'll be turning it on so it can generate some posts while I'm vacationing. Hopefully it will function properly, but if you see a mess of gibberish you'll know why.

I've added a new blog Borepatch to our blogroll. For some time it has sat at two degrees of separation from Flares. I've seen it mentioned several times on some of the blogs we link to, and I even linked to Borepatch in the post We'll vote for the Village Idiot before we vote for you lot. Be sure to check it out from time to time.

The Robotolizer project has slowed me down on some of my other chores. I'm still slowly working my way through the years adding tags to the old posts, and of course I haven't forgotten about the Mystery Package.
 

Sunday Open Thread

I use these open threads to report on any site maintenance I've been doing.

Some of you may have noticed that about a week ago, for a brief period of time, there was a post rating mechanism under the posts. These interfered with the polls so I removed them. 

In thinking about it, I also realized that, since this blogging business is only a pastime to me, I didn't really want a rating system that might cause me to chase traffic rather than just posting whatever nonsense interested me.

At the same time I was fiddling with the rating system, I also replaced the icons that allow one to share a post on various social media sites. It always aggravated me when the box would pop up if you moved you mouse over one, so I switched to a version without that automatic pop-up feature. 

In the right rail I moved the 'Recommended' links under the 'Blogs of Interest' to group my links to other sites. This required me to move list of 'Contributors' to the far right rail so both they and the blog links would be visible without scrolling down the page.

The most ambitious thing I've done is add a 'By Category' list to the right rail (under the list of Contributors). This allows visitors to review posts in just their area of interest while ignoring topics that don't interest them. I don't know how much people really use things like that, but from time to time I have done that on other sites.

The problem with adding that feature is I've long used the labels to make cheesy jokes, so I'm having to sweep back through all of the posts to tag them properly. At the moment I'm working my way through 2009, and dreading the work 2006 is going to entail. 

Occasionally I am making minor edits to the older posts, but I am not changing their content, only cleaning up any malformed HTML that is causing problems with the site's template.