December 31, 2005  

Two-Oh

It may not look like much, but Ascent Stage has undergone a major revision this past week. I only just got around to addressing the corrupt database issue from a while back and in the process took care of just about everything else that was bugging me about the site this whole year. So, in no particular order, here’s what’s new:

  • Browse by Topic category is back from the dead (the corrupt db killed it).
  • Browse by Date no longer sucks (as bad).
  • Movable Type has been upgraded to 3.2 — there are more features, of course, but the best is what seems to me to be faster rebuilds.
  • Trackbacks are off for the time-being — still searching for a way to prevent trackback spam as I have done with comments (which remain open). Ideas?
  • There is now a merged RSS feed for the main blog and the marginalia, thanks to Feed Digest.
  • My account at Last.fm, the site which catalogs my music played and powers the sidebar, has been upgraded. Those of you who listen to the streaming radio from Last.fm (which would be — checking — exactly no one to date) can expect it to be faster now.
  • There is now an actual error page for 404 Not Found. It is not properly catching errors yet, but it does exist.
  • There is now a consolidated Archives page as well as a single page listing every post to date.
  • Site code has been cleaned and modularized. You care not at all, I know. But the general de-crufting makes me feel good.
  • Search results and comment previewing are (finally) formatted properly.
  • I am using Library Thing to catalog my recent reading in the sidebar. Eventually I’d like to write reviews for the books that end up in the margin, but for now I am still cataloging my library.
  • For you usability folks, I’ve changed link colors slightly to better differentiate visited from unvisited.
  • I added the now-standard RSS feed icon to denote subscribable feeds.
  • Lots of other stuff that would bore you even more than the above, if that is possible.

There are some deep links that are broken still and I’ve not fully tested in IE or Safari, but for the most part the ship is seaworthy.

So, enough with the housekeeping. Time for 2006 content.

December 10, 2005  

Cleaning up the gutter

Quick note of thanks to Jeff for manning the marginalia links this past week. Good stuff. Just one question: how do you really feel about religion?

I’ve got a backlog of links to post so expect a dumping.

That is all.

December 2, 2005  

Guests in the margin

An experiment in perspective for the next week, Ascent Stage will cede control of the margin links to Jeff Greer, fellow geek, avid connoisseur of web goodness, and pal. Hopefully he’ll have some unique nuggets for us. Don’t let my broad readership down, Greer.

By the way, if you’re in a newsreader you’ll need to subscribe to the marginalia feed seperately to see it.

November 14, 2005  

More junk for your inbox

Those of you don’t use newsreaders and who hate coming to the site only to find it looking exactly like it did last time you checked may be interested in the e-mail subscription option I’ve added at the very bottom of the page. For the exceptionally lazy, you can avoid scrolling and subscribe here.

Check your junk e-mail folder for my upcoming posts on Viagra, mortgage deals, brazen teen nymphomaniacs, and East African investment opportunities.

October 19, 2005  

Please standby

Seems the blog’s database is corrupt — which has screwed up rebuilds, feeds, and search. Movable Type recommends upgrading to 3.2 and starting from a fresh db instance. Ugh.

So buckle up. It’ll be a bit bumpy around here for a while.

October 17, 2005  

Older blog entries

Talk about age discrimination. Older posts are the bane of blogs because (1) they virtually become invisible when they move off the home page and (2) they are the targets of almost all comment and trackback spam. And yet, and yet, we love them. We need to link back to them and bring them into more current discussions.

So, I appeal to you, blog readers, to help me with something that should be simple. I want to create an “Older Entries” link at the bottom of the home page that takes you back a few weeks sequentially so that you can continue reading after the cutoff point for posts on the main page. On these pages you could conceivably go “forward” again in time. I’ve seen this functionality on various blogs but I’m not sure how to do it in Movable Type. Gotta be a simple tag, archive template, or plugin, no?

October 1, 2005  

Happy birthday, Ascent Stage!

Plink! One year ago today I added a single drop to the ocean of blogs. 255 posts and 397 sidebar links later I ‘m still enjoying it. If reading this blog is 1/100th as pleasurable as writing it then maybe the audience will come back for year two.

In honor of this milestone I’m performing a few upgrades which I’ll roll out this week.

Thanks for reading, everybody!

August 27, 2005  

More than marginally better

Quick housekeeping note. I’m no longer fetching the marginalia links sidebar via a third-party RSS reformater. Instead, the front page now pulls straight from my del.icio.us account. Del.icio.us calls these Linkrolls and they are mighty speedy. Recommended.

June 10, 2005  

No one calls them microcomputers anymore either

Well the micropost experiment failed miserably. Culprit: time. Rather, lack thereof. I never got around to integrating microposting into the posting mechanism or the RSS feed/archives. So it was a manual process from start to finish. From now on all tiny posts will happen as regular blog entries. Better that way.

For the record, here are all the microposts to date.

++++++

My health club is promoting a kung fu class for three-year-olds. Short of an intro to electrical re-wiring I’m unable to think of a worse form of recreation for my child. Hee-yaa!

“Install a dashboard funtion which controls the speed of the wipers so that they keep time with the stereo.” from Idea-A-Day

My son is having trouble eating a hot dog. Wife thinks fast. Carves top of frank into a cone. Slits ends, inserts potato chips as foils/stabilizers. Presents to son as as rocket ship. Fascinated, he eats the whole thing in between blast-off noises. Brilliant!

How hard is it to get NASA back on track? Perhaps it requires a rocket scientist.

Yearn for a simpler time, Lego block spacegeeks? Can’t stand specialized bricks that can only be used to build one damn thing? The Classic Space forum is for you (and me, obviously).

Today’s philosophically-profound spam: “Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.”

Last week I installed a great snippet of code for the input forms on this site and have not had a single piece of comment spam since. I’m in a bit of awe at this hack and wish there were one for trackbacks too. And no, I am not telling you what it is, you crazed Nigerian Viagra-addled Texas Hold ‘Em Freak.

What do you get when you mix a Kraftwerkian vocoder, disco grooves, and an earnest profusion of power chords? Why, Robot Rock, of course!

The WSJ has a great article on “Rock’s Oldest Joke: Yelling ‘Freebird!’ In a Crowded Theater: For his part, Mr. Doughty suggests that musicians make a pact: Whenever anyone calls for “Freebird,” play it in its entirety — and if someone calls for it again, play it again. “That would put a stop to ‘Freebird,’ I think,” he says. “It would be a bad couple of years, but it might be worth it.”

iTunes as social icebreaker is an interesting idea. “Hi there, I noticed your taste in music is awful. May I buy you a drink?”

Note to person dumping the room service trays outside my door. If you are doing so out of compassion because you think I am hungry, thank you, but a knock would be helpful since I don’t really care for half-day-soggy cereal. If you are doing so because you don’t want it to clutter your slice of hallway, please stop. I have almost stepped into your breakfast wreckage twice now. Oh, and eat your strawberries or you’ll get scurvy.

Fugitive Haiku
Poet-of-the-month
No background check required
Please keep the award.

The plural of the word ‘mail’ is simply ‘mail’ so why do people consider ‘e-mails’ the plural of ‘e-mail’? This bugs me way more than it should.

There’s a guy who works out at my health club who uses the pay phone every time he is there. But he also has a cell phone. I see him on it all the time. This can only mean one thing, right? He’s having an affair. Has to be.

Note to interior designers. If we ask you to come over for a consultation on how to redesign/expand our home don’t ask me if I really need all the computers I have on my desk. This will not win you business.

Naples, Italy is on the peninsula’s southwest coast. Naples, Florida is on that peninsula’s southwest coast. Is this a coincidence?

If one were not careful overhearing others’ conversations in restaurants one could surmise that there is an entire stratum of society whose perception of Christianity is solely informed by The Da Vinci Code. This would be unfortunate.

I heard today that 6% of Americans have passports. Surely this will increase now that Canada requires a passport to cross the border, but good golly that seems suprisingly low. And I’m from the flyover states.

On a flight recently the pilot left the cockpit for coffee and a lav break, but not until a burly flight attendant — the burliest they had around, that is — positioned a metal drink cart perpendicular to the aisle as a rampart blocking access to the entire forward galley area. He just stood there with arms crossed glaring down the aisle. I’d never seen that before. You’d think a lockable door separating the main cabin from the cockpit/gallery/lavatory would do the trick, but clearly there are problems blocking passengers from emergency egress.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff. And don’t pet the sweaty stuff.” Written on a Vancouver pub window.

“Yeehaw!” is not a foreign policy. Not new, but this bumper sticker made me laugh.

“You know it is spring in Chicago if you are cold at Wrigley Field. When you are no longer cold, it is summer.” – LG

You don’t have it this bad, but you can probably relate. Prepare to waste a good a good half-day.

Why have the voicemail menu options always recently changed? And why won’t you tell me what has changed about them? Press 1 for recent changes. Would that be so bad?

Forgot this one on the friends-who-sell-stuff post. Actually, didn’t know about it. High school pal Diana Jacklich (now Hamann) is the Wine Goddess. Quite an appellation.

One of my favorite authors, Steven Johnson, is on The Daily Show tonight talking about his new book Everything Bad Is Good For You, a piece of tinder that has the blogosphere alight.

April 25, 2005  

Stabbed in the trackback

A while ago I installed a small script that disallows comments on this blog that are not actually typed in. That is, it looks for multiple keystrokes as opposed to one single dump of text — the behavior of a spambot (or someone who copies-and-pastes comments wholesale). It has stopped 100% of the spam I used to deal with daily.

Alas, the scourge of trackback spam persists. Does anyone know of anything that will effectively block trackback spam? Ideally it too would be a keystroke-based defense, but anything that really works would do. I’d hate to have to shut off trackbacks as they are one of the most innovative things about blogs!

Help?

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