Tag: blogging

Decisions, Decisions . . .

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The Smallest Minority began almost seven years ago – May 14, 2003. I started on Blogspot because, well, it was there, it was free, and it was easy. Shortly afterward, I picked Haloscan to provide comment service because Blogspot didn’t offer one, and the previous service I had selected sucked wind. Again, Haloscan was there, was free, and was easy. Then I picked Imagestation as a photoserver, but that didn’t work out too well, so I eventually switched to Photobucket. Again, at the time Blogspot didn’t offer the service.

As time went on, I elected to pay a small amount annually to improve the comments (longer comments allowed, as some of my readers are nearly as long-winded as I am) and for sufficient bandwidth with Photobucket to support the traffic I was drawing. Overall, I think this blog costs me something like $50 a year, tops.

Over the years, Blogspot has gotten to be more reliable and have more functions. It now offers commenting and has a photoserver – and it’s still free. Photobucket works very well.

But commenting? Not so much.

In December, Haloscan transitioned to Echo. I had very little choice other than to go along, as Haloscan’s archives exported in a format that does not easily transfer to any other system I’ve found, and at the time I had nearly 40,000 comments in the archives.

Trust me, those comments are every bit as valuable to me as the posts they are linked to.

So in December the Great Migration began, and lo, the comments transferred successfully!

But if I export my Echo comments now, A) the export doesn’t work properly, and B) the comments that export now go only back to December, 2009. Further, Echo seems to suck in the extreme. I have had NUMEROUS comments (as noted below) on the general suckitude of Echo, and now one entire comment thread doesn’t work, or at least it only works in Internet Exploder. I, as the owner of the blog, cannot access those comments from Echo’s moderation page. They will not load. And Echo doesn’t really have site support.

So yes, Echo SUCKS.

And also, since January, Blogger now paginates all of its blogs. I used to archive my blog monthly. If you called up say, April 2005, you got every post for that month on one page. Now you get about the last 20 for that month. Want to see what I wrote on April 1? You’re SOL. So I have to switch my archiving to weekly. It seems a minor issue, but I back up my blog on my home computer. Doing it weekly is a PITA.

So here we are. People have been telling me (literally) for years to get off of Blogspot. But there are dozens of blogs out there linking to right here. There are posts I have written still drawing significant traffic from those other blogs. I don’t want those links broken. I very much want my comments to WORK, but also I want them to come along with me if I move. A lot of my posts link to earlier posts of my own, and I want THOSE links to work.

I’m stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

At this point, I don’t have much of a reason to leave Blogger, but every reason to want to dump Echo. Any suggestions? (Assuming Echo will work?)

It’s Official: Echo SUCKS

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I’ve received numerous comments and several emails concerning the general suckitude of the Echo comment system. As one put it, “If you told me I’d be missing Haloscan . . .”

Now one entire comment thread, the one to this post, refuses to load for most people. I am unable to access the “moderation” function to look at and/or modify ANY comments at the present time. I tried to do an export of all comments (it’s supposed to go to an XML file). The system tells me it’s finished with the export, and the file is 12Mb, but when I download it, it’s 48Mb and won’t open.

I really don’t want to go to the hassle of moving to another comment system. There are about 40,000 comments on this blog from the last seven years, and I don’t want to lose them. I’ve saved all of them up to December, 2009 when I was forced to “upgrade” to Echo, but they’re not in a format that is exportable to anything else commercially available.

This SUCKS.

UPDATE:

Now this is fascinating. Under Firefox I can get into Echo’s moderation function, but whole pages of comments will not load. Under IE 8 Echo recognizes me when I log in, but tells me that I don’t manage any sites, nor will it let me add this site to those I manage. As far as Echo’s concerned, under IE 8, TSM doesn’t exist. Yet I can see the comment thread to the education post. I can even click on the “admin” button and log in. It just won’t give me actual, you know, administration privileges. WTF??

Rio Salado Open House

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Yesterday I drove up to Phoenix in order to have lunch with some Arizona bloggers and make a visit to the Usery Pass target range managed by the Rio Salado Sportsmen’s Club and Arizona Game & Fish. Attendance at the restaurant was slight, but I did meet the lovely Vox and her significant other, and Papa Todd, so my list of “bloggers I’ve met” has grown a little.

After lunch we visited the range. The facilities boast:

  • Covered shooting benches with target holders from 25 to 300 yards
  • A Practical Pistol range with 4 lighted bays from 25 to 50 yards
  • A lighted, covered 40-position Smallbore Range to 100 meters
  • Covered long range rifle and pistol silhouette ranges to 500 meters
  • High power rifle range to 500 yards
  • Sporting Clays Range – 12 stations, cart accessible, card based activation
  • 5-Stand, Trap, Wobble Trap facility with lights and voice activation
  • Indoor Air Rifle Range coordinated by our Junior Division
  • Restrooms, Activity Center, and Training Classrooms

They had it all set up for visitors to try, most of them for free, and the turnout looked pretty good. This is something I think I’ll bring up at the next Tucson Rifle Club board meeting.

I took a few pictures and shot a little video, nothing worth posting unfortunately, except this sign:

I doubt seriously anyone was killed or injured at the range yesterday, or on any range in Arizona. Gun ban control SAFETY advocates so often complain about how dangerous guns are, and they can be. They are, after all, designed to hurl small metal projectiles at high velocity, but that sign says why, in the overwhelming majority, the several billion rounds fired recreationally in this country each year harm no one.

On the other hand, while driving the 120 miles back home, traffic on I-10 East slowed to a crawl at one point. After about ten minutes of creeping along at about 10-15 mph tops, there were several lumps of clothing scattered down the right shoulder:

That was just a couple. There were at least five or six like those. Then there was obvious evidence that someone had lost control, and gone from the right shoulder into the median, and shortly after that, the scene of the accident:

A couple of miles further down the road in a closed rest area were a couple of ambulances and a Life Flight helicopter spooling up to take off. I didn’t get a shot of that.

Hopefully no one got ejected from the vehicle, but those lumps of clothing that looked like the were spilled from luggage makes me wonder.

I’ve never felt unsafe on a target range, but driving in traffic at highway speeds? And people think GUNS are dangerous?

The Free Ice Cream Freezer’s Busted

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I know that the First Rule of Blogging™ is Post Something Every Day™.

I ain’t feeling it.

I am, however, feeling the onset of Spring.

I hate Spring.

Itchy, goopy eyes; pre- and post-nasal drip; coughing fits that leave my chest hurting; sneezing; antihistamines that damned near put me to sleep at my desk, a serious case of the trots from the post-nasal drip; etc. etc. etc.

Did I mention that I hate Spring?

I’m Going to be in Chicago, Monday

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Anybody want to meet up for dinner? I arrive at O’Hare at 5:45PM. I’m staying over near West Chicago, probably Naperville. I fly out Tuesday at 7:25PM. I don’t know if I’ll have much free time Tuesday before the flight, but it’s possible.

UPDATE: Oakbrook Terrace, Ditka’s, 7:00PM.

Guns. Is There ANYTHING They Can’t Do?

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– there we all were, an amputee librarian, a gay man from the Northwest, a retired globehopping Navy guy, a Lear jet pilot, a Texan in a kilt, a couple of Nerds from New Mexico, and a young woman who castrates calves – all brought together by the most unlikely of things, an apparatus designed to hurl little lumps of lead at high speeds. – Breda, community

Oh, and blogging.

Blogging Update

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Blogging Update

There’s been a lot going on in the world and I haven’t been commenting on it, at least not on the blog. I’ve been lucky to get one or two (short) posts a day up, and those are pretty much linky, not thinky.

I’m pretty damned busy at work, which is a nice change from the previous several months. I’m working overtime, too, which is eating into my evening hours but funding some stuff that went on hold when I got laid off in December. I’m also trying to catch up on my reading. I’ve got five or six books that were loaned to me literally months ago I need to finish and return, plus I’ve got a stack of my own to plow through, and a LONG list I need to acquire.

Anyway, this is just notice that blogging at TSM will remain light for a bit, and at the moment there is no Überpost stewing in my head (dammit).

Carry on.

Reasoned Discourse

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Reasoned Discourse

I appear to have offended Markaphasia. Apparently through an act of omission – I haven’t written anything condemning Joseph Stack’s re-enactment of 9/11 on an office building in Austin, Texas earlier this week in his attempt to wreak vengeance upon the Infernal Revenue Service. Since, according to Marxadelphia, Stack was obviously part of the America’s version of “The Base” (aka Al Qaeda), my omission is obviously tacit approval of his act.

I’ve left a comment over at Marxy’s blog, which, BTW, is titled a most martial “Notes from the Front”. Is that the Eastern Front, or the Western Front, I wonder?

Anyway, suspecting that the comments over there might degrade into what we in the Gunblog Community derisively term “Reasoned Discourse,” I’ve decided to print my comment in its entirety here as well:

Once again, Markaphasia, you illustrate just how right I am when I say that you are a perfect an example of the Left in this country. Thanks.

You say that you “have stated previously that it was only a matter of time before people who think like Stack start committing acts of violence.”

I believe I’ve been saying it longer than you have, since 2003 at least. I’ve also said that such acts are the acts of people pushed beyond their thresholds of outrage, and they’re not helpful to my side of the argument.

Now, one thing I’d like to point out is your lack of reading comprehension. You state, in quotation marks (that’s “verbatim” just so you know): “As has been said many times at TSM, ‘the time for reasoned discourse has passed.'”

Really? Please point, by means of a hyperlink, to that phrase in any post I’ve written. You just accused me of wanting to kill you – “As a Holocaust survivor once said, ‘When someone says they want to kill you, believe them.'” – using those words as your evidence.

The closest you will come, I believe, are these words from my recent and oh-so-accurately titled Überpost What We Got Here is . . . Failure to Communicate:

Their vision is an activist vision, while the constrained vision is a largely passive one, intent largely on limiting the power of government to judge or interfere with individuals exercising their individual rights.

It is, indeed, a conflict of visions, and the time for passivity is over.

Which you, apparently, have read as a call to arms for “the base” to rise up and kill . . . you?

And you call us hyperparanoid?

Indeed, the time for reasoned discourse is over. It does not, however, follow logically that the alternate to “reasoned discourse” is violence (except if you’re a Leftist.)

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, repeatedly, the Left, the Unconstrained Vision, believes that talking and reason is all that’s necessary to prevent violence, but when that fails, all they have left (no pun intended) IS violence. On the Constrained Vision side, we believe in deterrence.

Or as Clint Eastwood once so famously said: “Go ahead. Make my day.” 😉

Quote of the Day – American-Occupied America Edition

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Quote of the Day – American-Occupied America Edition

I mean, you’ve got to be a decadent Westerner to wake up; note “Dammit, my computer’s dead”; unplug the mouse and keyboard from it and plug them into the spare computer sitting on the desk right next to it because you couldn’t be bothered to go find your netbook and power it up and then whine wirelessly to all your friends on the intertubes about how much your life sucks. – Tam

Working on the Sidebar

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Working on the Sidebar

You may note some changes on the sidebar. There are more to come. I intend to group the “Best Posts” into categories (already done in a few cases) but there’s much more to do. The blogroll has been updated. If yours is there, please make sure it works properly. If yours isn’t there, and you think it ought to be, please do email me. I’ve got some stuff to do today, and I probably won’t get back to this until tomorrow, but so far, so good.