Blogging is Not Dead... Quite

I haven't exactly given up on blogging, but I have cut back a lot, and there's a couple reasons why.

First, the cancer, treatment, and the... Aftermath and recovery I suppose is the way to put it... They took a hell of a lot out of me. More than I have ever talked about really... More than I even understood until I changed some of my medications and got a bit back that helped me see more of... Just how bad it got.

Combined with that, I haven't bought a new gun, or even been in position to talk about one in... I dunno, Four years maybe? Five? I don't even remember... I think... Yeah the last time I bought a new gun was a couple months before we moved to Idaho... So four and a half years ago?

Oh wait... I did complete two gun builds while I was in Idaho. I had the base guns before we moved, but I actually finished the builds in April 2011. So three and a half years. I've been selling guns off ever since actually.

Since Boomershoot 2011, I haven't been to a single shooting event, training class, etc... I've even missed the last couple gunblogger rendezvous, and at GBR in 2011, I was so sick and had tremors and pain so bad I couldn't shoot, or even go to the range events, except for a couple hours of the first one.

Bringing us to the next reason. Basically, other than the Boy being born, my life has been mostly suck most of the time since late 2010. When I felt something would be particularly interesting, or I really needed to get something out on "paper", or needed to vent, I'd write something... But I didn't feel like being the " all misery all the time" blogger.

It's not all personal though, there's also been a change in the environment that has significantly impacted my blogging.

There has been a massive falloff in the quantity and quality of both bloggers, and blog refers and commenters.

Blogging is essentially an interactive, almost collaborative process. Bloggers get inspired, or irritated, or motivated, by other bloggers, and the ongoing conversation with their readers and commenters.

Its a virtuous cycle of ideas and interests and inspiration and motivation and feedback and continuous expression and refinement of ideas.

Except its not so much that anymore.

There's much less of it, and what there is, just isn't as good.

Oh, there's still good stuff, but a lot less of it, and its fewer, farther between, and harder to find.

Then, when you do find it, the engagement and feedback and interplay isn't there, so it doesn't generate more good stuff.

The virtuous circle isn't happening.

Honestly, its just not as fun or interesting anymore. I've still got plenty to say, but saying it through blogging isn't scratching the itch like it used to.

People who used to be blogging and commenting and engaging in long and interesting conversations... Now they're "writing" text bytes 140 character at a time... And half those are used for hash tags. Or worse, they're just exchanging memes and info graphics that other people made.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you can't talk about things with any depth or in interesting and original and insightful ways with stock photos and pithy captions.

Likes, and shares, and retweets may gratify the ego, but a conversation they do not make.

People are still reading blogs, but instead of reading the interconnected web of posts and comments in the blogosphere, they're reading single posts linked off of facebook or reddit. Most importantly, they're not really commenting on the blog posts themselves.

So, instead of the blog, I'm writing most of what I used to put on my blog, on Facebook.

That may seem hypocritical and contradictory given the paragraphs above, but its not.

I write short and medium length posts on Facebook, and I get more comments, more feedback, more interaction, than I EVER got blogging, even in the glory days. With the ease of reaching large audience who otherwise wouldn't have seen your writing with shares and likes et al... More people are taking what I'm writing and being inspired by it or motivated by it.

Unfortunately, it IS much more shallow interaction than the best days of blogging were. Its shorter, its less in depth, whatever you want to call it.. But at least there is an active conversation. An exchange of ideas and thoughts.

So, I save the really long or really deep stuff for the blog...

...Which by the by, no matter how good the post is and how much traffic the posts get still almost never gets more than a couple comments, most of which are either "good post, me too" or ignorant rants about how wrong and evil I am. I had insty link a post of mine last year, and still only got 15,000 hits on it, and NOT ONE COMMENT.

In fact, as I said above, it seems that most people are finding blog posts through twitter and Facebook, or on aggregator sites like reddit these days. Instead of commenting on the blog post, and sharing the converting with the author, they're writing their comments on Facebook, or the subreddit, or in tweets; and the conversation stays there.

So, I write the long deep stuff on the blog, and then I facebook it and tweet the link. I get no comments on the blog post, and dozens of comments and shares and likes on facebook and twitter, and other people write posts in response or are inspired...

...Which is kind of the point of blogging... at least for me.

3287 days? Damn, that's like, a million in internet years

Today was my 9 year blogiversary.

Damn.

Seriously that's like, a million in blog years.

Doncha know, blogs are dead now... it's all about the instagram, and the snapchat, and the tweets.

And I admit, this blog has been damn near dead for the last couple years.

Once I was heavily into the cancer treatment...

Well, you blog about what bugs you, and what's going on in your life... and what was going on in my life was kinda depressing.

Lately, I've mostly been doing short posts on facebook... mostly because that's where I see the stuff that irritates me most ;-)

But I'm still here. And I'm still writing... every once in a while.

Thanks for sticking around.

Oh damn... I missed another traffic milestone...

Apparently, according to the increasingly irrelevant and inaccurate sitemeter, I went over 3 million unique visitors sometime in the last 24 hours.

Or at least the widget on my sidebar says so... when I drill down into the stats I'm like a week or so away...

...and as we all know by now, sitemeter isn't even a rough guess anymore...

But what the hell, it's what I've used since day 1 so I'll go by that.

Oh and it also says 4 million or so pageviews... something like two weeks ago.

I'm a month short of 8 years on this blog (first post was valentines day 2005), I average something like 35,000 sitemeter uniques a month, with 45,000 page views (google stats say it's more like 65-75,000 pageviews a month)

And of course that doesn't count RSS readers, which I would guess would be about double that (about 3/4 of my regular readers are feed readers, and about 1/3 of my hits are regulars).

Also, a surprising number of people seem to use Lawdog, MadOgre, and Borepatch as their own personal gunblogger reading list. Like a couple hundred people a day, including folks I know are regular readers, always seem to reach me from their links (them, and the firearms blog, and gunblogblacklist are my top referrers other than google. Google runs something between 1/3 and 1/6th of my total traffic on any given day).

Before "all cancer, all the time" two years ago, I was close to double that... and frankly I think people were reading blogs more then anyway...

I'm actually surprised I've retained that much readership given how little content I've been posting, and how little quality of it... Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

The Guncounter Forum is Successfully Migrated

All,

As of midnight Sunday, April 8th, the Guncounter forum is migrated, up, and
functioning, with apparently zero data loss, on the new server.

Until the DNS change is made, the forums can be reached at
http://theguncounter.mgtt.net/forum/

I also have a redirect from the old server to the new, so that as long as
they're hitting the old (except via a specific bookmark), they'll be
redirected; but that should transparently go away when the DNS is changed
over.

The only weirdness will be the cookies on the board won't work until the
DNS change propagates. Once you stop seeing the forum at
http://theguncounter.mgtt.net/forum/ and start seeing it at
http://theguncounter.com/forum/ once again, the cookies will work again.

Again, please let me know about any other weirdness, either responding to
this post, or posting to the thread of the same title on the forum.

The Guncounter is Temporarily Down for Migration to New Servers

We'll be down until sometime tomorrow morning most likely. I'll update here if anything changes.

TheGunCounter Forums are Migrating Software and Servers this week

So, one presumes most of you know that I am a cofounder and administrator of The GunCounter forums, whether or not you happen to be a member or regular reader.

I am crossposting this here now, so that people who go looking for the forum and notice it is down at some point this week, will know what's going on.

Also, it should explain some why I'm a bit busy this week.

For several months, our hosting provider has needed us to migrate from our old server farm, to a new server farm with updated OS, libraries, tools etc... The old servers are running on worn out hardware, and obsolete software revisions, and need to be decommissioned.

One of the things hindering that process has been that we were two revisions back on our forum software, and the current revisions of PHP and MySQL (the underlying language and database for the forum software), were not bug compatible with the version of the forum software we have been running. Unfortunately, through several test cycles, I had not been able to successfully perform a non-destructive upgrade of the forum software.

With the newest release of the forum software however, in theory, there is both a seamless non-destructive upgrade path from the old version to a current version; and a compatible migration path to the newest revisions of PHP and MySQL on the new server farm.

So, around midnight pacific time last night, we conducted a number of maintenance and cleanup operations, got a full backup of the site and database, then upgraded the boards software to the latest revision. After the upgrade successfully completed, we tested it briefly, and then got a post upgrade full backup of the site and database as well.

All of this is in preparation for the move to the new server farm, which must occur before Sunday. We are working on the test servers for the migration now.

We hope to be able to conduct a seamless migration; shutting down for maintenance some time late Friday night or Saturday (at the latest. We may do it overnight on a weeknight if we're ready earlier), completing a migration of the forum and database to that point, throwing DNS over and then going live on the new servers.

In this process, there will be some disruption of service; as little as an hour or two for some (depending on how long it takes to do a final migration. It's not a small database), to as much as 24 hours, depending on exactly what corner of the internet you are in relative to our hosting provider, and how long DNS changes take to propagate.

In the changeover, the new site will most likely become accessible to different folks at different times, because of this. This isn't a bug or a deliberate rolling upgrade, it's just a part of how the core technologies of the internet work.

If all goes well though, most people should be able to access the site within a couple hours.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to successfully test a site migration thus far. We are hoping that the new revisions of all the software in question (php, MySQL, and phpBB), and some newly installed tools on the new server farm, will allow us to migrate successfully; and we will continue to work on this and test through the week.

However, no matter what, before noon on Sunday, the Guncounter will be on the new servers; because the old servers will be powered down.

If we are unable to migrate our current software, that may mean a change of forum software. Even if we are able to migrate the software, we may not be able to migrate the database properly and It may mean a loss of content. We hope not, we don't think so, but it is a possibility.

In the mean time, as I said, we upgraded to the latest forum software revision last night; and I need folks to be on the lookout for weirdness between now and then. Post any glitches, misses, bugs etc... here in this thread.

Thanks, and hopefully we'll get through this fully intact.

Testing Google+ integration

I haven't really done much with Google+ since it started up; mostly because most of my friends and family only use facebook. Also, when Google+ was started, there wasn't a simple way to automatically crosspost from my blog into G+. Then Google did a stupid thing and removed the post to plus function from its websites, (you can only +1 things, and even then only on some sites, or with certain browser plugins) and I basically ignored it from then on. Well, they came up with a way to automatically crosspost some time ago, and I finally got around to testing it now, with this post. Let's see how well this thing works shall we?

The Guncounters hosting provider is having an outage

Looks like the forums are down for a bit. Trying to get someone on the line now.

UPDATE: We're back. Our hosting provider was down for about 30 minutes. Hoping to find out what happened when they return my vmail.

Fixed my blogroll

Though I still need to do some manual editing, as this was an import from my RSS feed.

Fixed my sitemeter too.

Oh and from the state of it, looks like I REALLY need to clean up my RSS feed.

Successful migration from Echo on Blogger to Disqus on Blogger

As I wrote here: http://anarchangel.blogspot.com/2010/11/in-which-known-unethical-and-idiotic.html

JS-KIT has just upped the price of their already only marginally acceptable service (oh how I miss you Haloscan. Yes, you went down a lot, but otherwise you were simple, and you functioned well, with a good interface, and easy to use management tools) to the ridiculous rate of $120 a year, prompting me to finally get off my butt and find a way to replace them.

At the time JS-KIT forced me to migrate to Echo from Haloscan (a bit over a year after they bought Haloscan if I remember properly) there was no way to successfully export comments back to blogger, or to the other major commenting services, Disqus and Intense Debate. So I ponied up the cash they wanted (I think it was just $10) to move to Echo.

Well, as it happens, a couple months later, wordpress, Disqus, and Intense debate did come up with a comment importing engine for Haloscan; but not for the much more complex formatting and content of Echo comments.

I wasn't particularly happy with Echo, but I'd already paid the money, and my comments had migrated successfully, without any loss of content. Doing an import to one of the other services looked like it wasn't worth it.

In the mean time, Echo jacked up their price; and the other commenting systems (and wordpress the other major blog host) have all come up with ways to migrate comments from echo. Unfortunately, they looked rather complicated, and there was some risk of dataloss (especially in the wordperfect model).

So, I was presented with four options:

1. Migrate entirely to wordpress: Something I don't want to do, that is potentially somewhat irritating, and which has the potential for data loss. To get both comments, and the blog, synchronized; I would need to separately export them both, then set up a local wordpress install and run a python script designed to merge and resync the data into something wordpress could work with. Then I would need to import that data into my local wordpress install, clean it up, and export it to my live wordpress instance.
   
   
2. Migrate comments to intense debate: This also required an export, and running scripts on XML output; and again, carried a risk of data mangling.
   
3. Migrate comments to Disqus: In theory, this required an export, rejiggering of the XML import filters, and a reimport; but it seemed to be significantly simpler and more reliable than the solutions offered by Wordpress and Intense Debate.
   
4. Migrate back to blogger comments: This should have been easy, just requiring an upgrade to my blog template, then the removal of the Echo comment widget. More on this later.

All of these options required me to "upgrade" my blog template from classic .css to Bloggers "advanced layout" template; something I have resisted doing for four years. Unfortunately, all of the import and sync functions are dependent on being in "advanced layout" format, so staying with the old template just isn't an option anymore.

Initially I decided to try for option four, it being theoretically the simplest and most reliable.

Theoretically.

I of course had not counted on the incompetence of JS-Kit.

Echo comments are supposed to be continuously synchronized with Blogger comments, so that at any time, you can disable Echo, and bloggers comments will take over, without losing any data.

Theoretically.

Except that most of the time, for most users, it doesn't work. The Echo support forums are completely full of instances of people asking support to resync their comments etc...

On Sunday, I was one of them. Even after disabling, and theoretically forcing a resync, none of my data was put back into blogger.

This meant that under all the import functions I knew were working, I was going to lose my comments.


Late last night/Early this morning however, I decided to do a little more research into Disqus's custom comment import filters, and lo and behold I find they've gone and added a standard plugin to import the XML comment file that Echo exports.

So last night I signed up for, and installed Disqus, and starterd importing.

I am happy to report that it mostly works. I have lost some comments; but I'm pretty sure that's Echos fault, not Disqus, because I grepped the XML file for some strings from comments I  know went missing, and they aint there.

Also, I exported my comments file from Echo three different times, and got three different file sizes...

At any rate, there is a specific sequence you want to do this in to avoid difficulty:

1. Disable comments in Blogger: First thing, shut off comments in Blogger, so while you're working, things don't get even more out of sync; and put up a post letting your readers know comments are going to be disabled, and that the template is going to change.  Also disable comment moderation and email notification.
   
   
2. Export your comments in XML format from Echo: I recommend you export three times, to three different file names. If they are different sizes, you're going to want to import all three (Disqus won't create dupes)
   
   
3. "Upgrade" your Blogger template to the advanced layout: Use Bloggers upgrade funtion to install a new layout, and then add the elements and widgets you want, INCLUDING the Echo install widget (which you need to install from the Echo dashboard). This will allow you to function with the new comment systems, including Echo as it is theoretically supposed to work, Intense Debate, and Disqus. You may need to wait a few hours, if your comments are actually synchronizing between Echo and Blogger, for them to all sync up. Once the syncing is complete, you can remove the Echo widget.
   
   
4. Sign up for Disqus: While you are waiting for your comments to sync up, sign up for Disqus. It takes two seconds. If your comments are done syncing, or just don't work anyway, or you don't give a damn, you can temporarily reenable comments, and install Disqus on your blog (it's dead easy, with step by step instructions on the site). Configure your settings, making sure you disable new comment notification and moderation temporarily (otherwise as you import, your mailbox will be flooded with notification emails).
   
   
5. Reconcile and Import your comments: Ok, at this point, if your comments are fully synced with blogger, or not synced at all, you're good. Go and clean out any spam comments (there WILL be spam comments. Bloggers comment API has a weaknesses that allows spammers to post spam comments directly into the post archive without actually hitting the form. They show up in the admin interface, even if you never saw them in Haloscan/Echo) and then run a comment import from Blogger into Disqus.
   
   At this point DO NOT enable blogger comment synchronization, or conflicts and duplicates might be created.
   
   If your comments are NOT fully synced, you need to decide whether to keep what IS there, or to delete it and just go with the XML exported from Echo. If you keep the blogger comments, you might create dupes, but you might be able to keep content that the XML export missed.
   
   When the blogger import completes, check and see if any comments are missing. There most likely will be. That's why we have the Echo export XML.
   
   Clean up the comments in the Blogger import, then run an import on the Echo export XML comments. DO NOT RUN THESE IMPORTS SIMULTANEOUSLY. It will created issues.
   
   If your multiple export files ended up different sizes or on review have different content, import all of them, one at a time. Disqus will not create dupes of these, as each posts unique identifier will be the same across all the files (it may not be between Blogger comments and Echo comments, though it SHOULD be).
   
   Even after the import is marked as complete, it isn't really. They've loaded all the data up, but it will be several hours before all comments are linked with their posts. I'm going on 16 hours as I write this, and I'm still only about 3/4 done. I'm guessing someone with 5+ years of comments like me is going to have to wait a full day or more. I'd guess that no matter how much comment data you have, if it's not done in 3 days, you've got all you're going to get.
   
   
6. Clean up: Time to clean up your comments. The Disqus interface is pretty good for that. At this point you can decide to sync comments with blogger, or not. Personally, I say not. If you need to migrate again later, there are tools that can deal with Disqus format, a lot better than bloggers; and of course with Disqus you can force a comment resync at any time. By not syncing now, you don't have to worry about inconsistencies between the two. If you use email notification, now is the time to turn it back on. Then fix your template, and re-enable comments through blogger.
   

I'm a bit miffed that I still seem to have lost SOME comments; but by far the vast majority of my 5+ years of comments are alive and well, and in a format that is better and easier to use.

The only thing I don't like about Disqus, is that I can't make the comments go to a popup window; at least not as far as I can tell.

In which a known unethical and idiotic company shoots itself in the head

Earlier today, My JS-KIT dashboard for the Echo Comment system popped up with a little banner "Your Echo license expires in 29 days, click here to renew".

So, I clicked to see the renewal details... and then I saw the pricing...

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS A YEAR!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

Yeah, not just no but HELL NO.

So, I start investigating how to get rid of Echo comments... not so good... Apparently, nobodies comment service will import the XML file Echo exports to. The only way to migrate to another system without losing comments, is to resync back to blogger comments, then migrate from blogger.

In theory, Echo comments should be automatically synced to blogger comments... except they aren't.

In theory, this is because I'm using a legacy .css template for my blog, rather than the "new" blogger "advanced layout" templates (well... not "new" four years old now).

In theory, "upgrading" my template to a blogger advanced layout template will allow Echo to resync comments with blogger. Once that happens, then I should be able to add Disqus, or Intense Debate... or for that matter just migrate the whole damn blog (which I may do, to wordpress).

In the mean time, my template is hosed up. I've got it edited to the point that I can tolerate looking at it.

Now, as to the title above...

This is what happens when people who aren't too bright about doing business are put in charge. "Hmm... we're not making enough money here, lets make more by making this service that most people don't much like anyway, cost 12 times as much... Yeah, that'll be a great success".

First, they forced us into a paid upgrade. Next they screwed up our import and export capability. Then over the course of a year they give us an unreliable service with no support and dozens of failures. Finally they jack up the price to 12 times what we agreed to originally.

That is about the clearest case of corporate suicide I've ever seen.

Blogrolling has caved, decided to pack it in

Ok, so the last couple weeks everyone with a blogrolling blogroll (which includes about half of all the conservative blogs, and gun blogs out there) has been flagged as a malware distributing site by Google.

No, contrary to some overly paranoid folks (including a couple friends of mine. Sorry guys) this was not some left wing Google plot against right wing bloggers. It was purely a technical issue.

Google updated their malware detection algorithm to detect cross site scripting vulnerabilities. Because of the method that blogrolling uses to post and track their content, it looks like an XSS attack to Googles malware detection.

 This was utterly a false positive, and Google shouldn't have done it the way they did, but Google coded according to proper web standards. They aren't going to change it just to accommodate a few small web services out there, that use coding practices which are common, but insecure and not standards compliant.

Some might say Google did this on purpose to kill competitors, but I really don't think that's the case. It's a case of Google being a standards NAZI (as they have done before on other issues), and using their muscle to make others come into line.

Is it bullying? Not really. It's not playing nice with others either, but Google can always just say "Hey, we did it to standards. It's not our fault that you didn't".

Rather than update their code, blogrolling has decided to end their service. The coders who wrote the blogroll package no longer work for them, and it loses them money, so they've decided not to bother trying to update their code.

Accordingly, I'm removing the blogrolling blogroll from my sidebar. If you use blogrolling, I recommend you do the same.

I'll replace it with a google reader powered blogroll for now. See if I like it.

Google malware detection throwing a false trap on blogrolling

If you understood that title, you don't need any further explanation. If you didn't, you probably don't WANT any further explanation.

No, my website isn't distributing malware. Neither is blogrolling. Neither is tucows (which Google is ALSO throwing a trap on).

Sometimes freakers deliberately bomb legit websites on malware detection (through XSS, proxy poisioning, botnet report spamming etc...); as a DOS or IOS attack. Sometime malware detection is just plain stupid.

The Anger, it is MINE

Grrrrrrrrr....

Last month, my web hosting provider screwed up my billing on two of the TWENTY SIX accounts I have with them (I manage a bunch of web sites, domains, hosting accounts, mail hosting accounts etc...).

For some reason they were trying to bill to a very old credit card that expired in 2006. Now, they had been successfully billing me with the default method on file, for all my accounts, for over ten years now; and were still doing so for my 24 other accounts... I'm not exactly sure how or why this happened now, but OK, it did.

They called me up a few weeks ago, and over the phone we supposedly fixed it, so that ALL twenty six of my accounts, products, and services, were being billed in the same way.

That was the 8th of July.

Yesterday, the 18th of July, they deleted the accounts, AND THE CONTENTS OF THE SITES, without notifying me. I found out this morning when I got to a domain parking page instead of my personal web site (which up until yesterday, had been up continuously since 1993)

Apparently, they have been trying to re-bill the same old expired card, again and again, since our phone call.

It only took me over an hour on the phone for them to figure out this is what they had done. Against their own policy (which is 30 days past the first notice, which was 6/28), and somehow against the rules of the automated system.

I've been using this company for over ten years. I have spent, at this point, tens of thousands of dollars with them (both personally, and for all the websites I manage), for hundreds of different domains, hosting accounts, mail hosting accounts, certificate management, and related services.

This is NOT how you run a business. How you handle good customers, who spend lots of money with you. When someone has 24 accounts with you in good standing, and for some reason two of them are not, you find out why and you FIX IT.

After an hour on the phone with them, and their distinct lack of helpfulness, I informed them that I would be cancelling all my services with them, and that prior to the next domain renewal time for each of my 21 active domains, I would be changing registrars (it's a real pain to change registrars in the middle of the registration term, especially since I recently renewed a bunch of domains. 60 days on either side of the renewal can be considered a blackout period for a registrar change unless you want to deal with a bunch of extra crap).

So, now I need to find a new registrar and hosting company, find backups of everything, reformat everything how the new host needs it formatted, report... Then I need to change my mail hosting, and deal with the most likely several days of buggy mail transfer.

One of the sites has NO direct backup because it was built in a CMS. We'd have to rebuild the CMS elsewhere (presuming it was supported on that host) then reconfigure it to match, then import the old and incomplete exports... It just isn't going to happen, that site is lost for good.

Oh yes, this is going to be fun. Really.

Something that actually make Echo , and RSS, worthwhile to me

... and a substitute for my comments view all at the same time...

http://js-kit.com/rss/anarchangel.blogspot.com

In addition to the ability to subscribe to individual comment RSS feeds; Echo creates a comment feed, for ALL comments on all posts, automatically; for as far as I can tell, all blogs it runs on.

This comment feed actually gives me back the view I used to have of all my comments, rather than being stuck with the "moderate" interface.

It's so useful to me, I'm finally going to switch to using an RSS reader; rather than my longstanding practice of opening all my blog and news sites, in new tabs in firefox or chrome (I prefer seeing the formatting, sidebars etc... that site owners put on their sites).

I'm going to google reader for now, just because it is accessible wherever I go without any additional software, and without any additional subscriptions or memberships required. Plus it works fine on the iPhone, and Blackberry (and android too, though I don't have an android device... yet).

I've already gone and put the feeds in for all 150+ blogs, comics, and news sites I read on a regular basis. PITA, but with the awesome bar on firefox, less of one than it used to be.

Two Million in a little less than five years

A few minutes ago, this blog passed the 2 Million unique visitor mark, with just under 2.7 million page views, in about six weeks under 5 years.

So, here he (at least I'm assuming) is, our two millionth visitor:




The obscured google URL tells me that he was looking for pics of the Kel-Tec P3AT. Oh and if you didn't know (I din't until I just looked it up) Clarks Summit is near Scranton.

So thank you mr. Anonymous Pennsylvanian Kel-Tec searcher, for being our two millionth unique visitor.

After Midnight

We're gonna shake, jump, and shout...

Or something...

Actually, I'm not quite finished with the scope post, so it's going to be popped out after midnight.

As it happens, I'm also about 70 visitors shy of 2 million. So that milestone should tick over some time after midnight as well.

Almost There...

Sometime today or tomorrow, I'm going to hit two million unique visitors (and around 2.7 million page views).

AdBlockPlus default filter set is blocking Echo Comments

If you suddenly can't see comments on some of your favorite blogs, there's a very irritating reason for that.

It seems that in their most recent update, the AdBlockPlus filterset has started blocking all embedded content from JS-KIT, who serves Echo and Haloscan.

Looking through my logs shows it might have something to do with a specificclick third party cross site reference.

Several other plugins use the same dataset for their filters. If you're using one of these filters, you're going to need to add an exception to your filterset to be able to comment, or view comments, on any of the perhaps 1/4 of all blogs (or at least all active blogs, that are regularly updated. Most less active blogs just use the default wordpress or blogger comments) that use either Haloscan or Echo.

Just a guess, but I'd say this is because of all the antisocial asses out there (mostly linux users, and almost entirely firefox users -I use both, but I'm not one of the aforementioned asses) who report any java, script, or tracking cookie as spam or ads to their filtering services.

Meanwhile, here's a video tutorial on adding exceptions to AdBlock Plus:

UPDATE: Well, that was quick. Either JS-KIT updated or the filterset did, I'm not sure which.

Terms and Conditions

Whenever anyone has asked me, I've given them permission to reprint my original work for this blog under a Creative Commons license; but I never bothered to put up the license notice.

For one thing, I do prefer that people ask; if only so I know where I'm being reprinted, and what the reaction of that sites audience is.

However, I realized that not listing a license explicitly, makes it more difficult for those who want to repost/reprint legitimately to do so. Also, I'd like to further spread the message of the creative commons licenses.

So, as of today, my wife and I am officially licensing all content of this blog, and all other publicly accessible web content to which I retain copyright (including all materials published non-commercially on all other sites, and on all dates since the inception of any of our websites; and other materials we have published non-commercially online, that either of us still retain copyright to, and have not otherwise separately licensed); under the Creative Commons, Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, unless explicitly noted otherwise.

Yeah, there's a bunch of legalistic stuff in there, because I can't grant you right I don't have to give; and some of my content is used under fair use, or by permission from other sites; and some I've already licensed differently, or published commercially (which is also licensed differently) etc... So I can't just blanket give you all everything.... Too bad as it'd be a lot simpler.

That said, the core if it is pretty simple. Almost everything is licensed CC-BY-NC-ND.

What that means, is that anyone is free to reprint or republish my original work from this site, so long as they credit me and this site, don't alter it (including deleting or adding), and don't use it for commercial purposes.

If you wish to use content from this site for commercial purposes, please contact me at the address listed in my personal profile.

Commentary, parody, criticism, and reasonable excerpting for citation, are of course all acceptable fair use, and need not be covered under license.

I'm putting up a notice in the blogs template, that will show on the sidebar and footer; along with the explanatory link, and Creative Commons button:

The AnarchAngel by Christopher J. Byrne IV
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This button and link were created using the Creative Commons "License your work" tool, which formats the whole thing for you.

I don't think it's particularly necessary to do this right at this moment to protect myself, and I'm certainly not looking to protect a potential revenue source.

I just think that every blogger should understand copyright, and licenses, and how it effects them and their work; and should explicitly publish under a license (there are many others out there, not just Creative Commons).