Why Dont You Blog?

The Internet is broken. That’s what it feels like from my egocentric perspective.

This blog has become as slow as slow thing that has to be routed via one of Saturn’s moons before it even contemplates loading on my pc. I was already annoyed at not being able to see the content of a fair number of real comments, while being inundated with ever more subtly- Akismet-dodging spam comments. Add the irritation of not being able to comment on other blog’s posts - any comments I make are apparently sent but disappear into the ether(net) unless they are so short and irrelevant that they might as well be spam.

TW assumed that the blog had to upgrade to the latest Wordpress. Unfortunately he now has a connection that will stay on-line for about 2 minutes before it drops packets, and/or throws him offline, making my tortoise seem like a comparative gazelle with a rocket in its butt.

He upgraded. The blog promptly broke.

He fixed it. The blog dropped all its UTW tags for the past week. In fairness, the tag cloud had become well a mushroom cloud rather than a modest cumulonimbus. There were getting on for 3 thousand tags, with hundreds of semi-duplicates.

I culled them by about a hundred, insofar as it was possible, because it takes about a minute to delete one. (You have to wait while the page refreshes after each deletion. Think about that while you blithely tag everything to within an inch of its life…)

I recklessly reimported the tags using the UTW compatibility upgrade. I didn’t do any of the procedures that claimed to be “scary.” (I am a coward.) It now seems that I’ve lost the tags off a few more posts. And there is definitely no sign of the tag list that used to let us (at least try to) assign existing tags rather can carry on creating misspelled version and plurals of perfectly serviceable tags.

Bah.

So, sorry if this blog seems to be acting unpredictable. It will get sorted soon… … … …

Popularity: 24% [?]

Popularity: 24% [?]

It looks like not enough people made the correct devotions to Hermes and now we are not going to try and upgrade the blog this weekend. Heather has been sidelined by a cold and a fair amount of work and my internet access time is approaching the bare minimum. When we have more time we will look at what is required with the upgrade and give it ago. Please, keep making sacrifices to Ukko though.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Popularity: 38% [?]

Just to let you know we are planning to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3 over the weekend. As this is likely to change a lot of our plugins (such as Ultimate Tag Warrior), there may be some problems with the site while this happens. Please be patient and pray to Hermes that we get up and running again without any problems.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Popularity: 31% [?]

As a prelude to the WhyDontYou Comment Week (due to start tomorrow if we have the time ), we have taken Michael’s advice and put in a comment subscription facility. Now, if you find a thread you like here you can post a comment and, if you want to be kept informed of the debate, you can tick the box and get notification of follow ups via email. All good fun. Part of the idea behind us commenting a lot more next week is to help encourage discussions and share opinions via the blogosphere - which, it seems to me, is part of the reason they exist.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Popularity: 32% [?]

Now, we are as guilty of this as anyone else, but looking through the stats it seems that, on average and discounting bots, there is only one comment made out of every 250 page views on this blog. Part of the fun of blogging is getting feedback from others and learning from their ideas an opinions. To try and rectify this, WhyDontYou blog is asking everyone who visits and reads a post to leave a message — even if it is just a “You Suck” comment — and we will do our bit by beginning a “Comment Week” next week, where we will leave a comment on every post we read. Please join in and spread the word.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Just to let the faithful readers (both of you) here know, by wonderful coincidence all the authors here will be away on holiday over the period 1 July - 8 July, so it is quite unlikely there will be any posts.

Hopefully we will all come back refreshed, full of philosophical and atheistic vitriol and have loads of photographs to share.

Bet you cant wait…

[tags]WhyDontYou, Holiday, Site admin, General, Why Dont You[/tags]

Popularity: 22% [?]

Popularity: 22% [?]

This blog was tagged by atheist perspective I’ve shamelessly lifted an explanation of what that means from the atheist perspective site, which is excellent by the way.

We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
- Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
- People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
- At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
- Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Well part A is completed with minimal effort. Clearly the next stage must have to be the 8 random facts. Argh, 8 things about us that we wouldn’t mind going on the net - but are actually interesting enough to post. Damn that rules out almost anything I could put here….

Hmmm…. hmmm…..

1. Between us we have lived on or visited 5 continents. Antartica is one of the two we’ve never been to, although one of us has been close enough to swim in it’s waters. (Yes, it really is as cold as you would imagine).
2. Between us we speak - to a standard ranging from fluent (English) to pathetically halting (well, the others) - 5 languages and can make sense of a couple more with babelfish’s help. Oh yes, 5 languages Plus Latin.
3. One of us genuinely believes the Wire is the major artwork of the 21st century. This is a minority viewpoint in every sense, even on the blog.
4. We train with weights, more or less every day. One of us even got a certificate that will pay out thousands if anyone he trains gets injured, The other one has long been planning to enlist him as her personal trainer and do something spectacularly stupid…
5. One of us has become obsessed with taking photographs and keeps getting better and better digital cameras every few months. And the pictures are getting better all the time as well.
6. One of us refuses to accept any limitations, no matter how glaringly obvious, and hence persists in thinking she can do 3d graphics, despite the evidence of the senses.
7. Terry Pratchett remains the one author we agree 100% over and have obsessively read every book produced. (Not all good though- the “actual” sci-fi books are poo and the science companion is distressing)
8. CSS design is soundly despised by every one who has anything to do with this blog. Even their pets hate CSS.

Choosing 8 blogs was no easy task either. There were obvious choices - like nullifidian - who have probably already been tagged within an inch of their lives so would just get pissed off. However, I sprinkled my fairy dust over the atheist blogroll and found some worthy, if less familiar, contenders.

• Spanish Inquisition
• Bible study for atheists
• Allen zone
• Pink Proza
• The strong Atheist
• Evanescent
• ardvarchaeology
• Godfrey lazarus says

[tags]Blog Meme, Atheism, Wire, WhyDontYou, Why Dont You, Society, Culture, Travel, Languages,Blog, Meme, Blogs[/tags]

Popularity: 42% [?]

Popularity: 42% [?]

Sorry about the recent full blown outage we’ve suffered. To be honest, at the moment, I still have no idea what caused it. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 18% [?]

Just for general site admin / information purposes: we have added a new permanent page to hold the Why Dont You Blogroll. I am going to see how this goes for a while and then, if there are no problems, I will move the blogroll out of the sidebar where it currently lives.

The only hurdle I can see with this is that it may impact on any technorati link ratings. As far as I see it, each time we make a new post, the pages in the blogroll should all have their technorati authority link from us “refreshed” as it were (resetting the 180 count down). Moving them to a new page make cause problems - but as, at the moment, it seems technocrappi is not reading our outbound links properly anyway, it may not matter.

Please, let me know what you think about this.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Another short note, the promised site redesign is under way - and hopefully nearly completed! The new theme should look quite similar to this screenshot here, notably with only a single sidebar, and ideally has taken on board most - if not all - of the feedback we have received.

If all goes well, the style will be changed before the weekend and we can settle down to more ranting about idiocy.

Thank you for your patience.

[tags]blog, compuskills, site-admin, webdesign, why-dont-you, whydontyou, wordpress[/tags]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]