As the resolution of computer monitors creeps up, the visual size of pixel-dimensioned page content has been shrinking, and web designers have been tweaking pages to compensate for the changes.

For example, when I first started posting my photography on this site, I would size the images to have a maximum dimension of 400 pixels. A while ago, I resized photos to 450 pixels.

Lately, that's been looking a little small to me, so I just bumped up the size again to 500 pixels wide. And if you take the time to click through to the larger image, you'll see a big and beautiful 900 pixel wide image.

Here's what the difference looks like:

(Click For Larger Image)

Beautiful, eh? I hope you folks continue to enjoy the photos.

About a month ago, I wrote a post about a school principal who ordered a strip-search of a 13-year-old girl accused of possessing prescription-strength ibuprofen. I thought it was outrageous, and I made the point that if any other adults had asked for a look at the girl's private parts they would have been rightly arrested for some sort of sex offense. To emphasize this angle, I titled the piece "It's Okay to Look at Naked 13-Year Old Girls If They Have a Headache."

I was a little worried that writing about naked girls would attract some funny kinds of attention to the site, but I didn't give it much thought.

Two people have now asked me about the John McCain ads appearing in the left-hand column.

Yeah. I've been noticing those too. Especially the big animated banner ad.

It's not me. That's the Google ads area. For some reason Google has decided that my readers will want to see McCain ads. Or else Google has noticed that people will click on them to drain money away from the McCain campaign.

Either way, if you don't like them, don't click on them, and they'll go away.

I've been reviewing what Windypundit was all about this year, and it turns out 2007 was the year in which

• I backdated my 2006 year-in-review posting to make it look like I posted at the last minute on New Year's Eve when I really posted it around 11:15 on January first.
• A mysterious object crashed to earth.
• The Windypundit Media Empire expanded. Slightly.
• The War on Drugs had its single greatest accomplishment.
• I correctly predicted a 24 plot development.
• I tried to analyze what went wrong with the war in Iraq.
• I apparently had some issues about dentistry.
• radio station owners had more integrity than some police departments.
• I thought way too much about the Apollo 11 plaque.
• The Mooninite invasion went public.
• I posted my first modest proposal about the war in the middle east.
• I posted my second modest proposal about the war in the middle east.
• I wisely never posted any more modest proposals for the war in the middle east because I wasn't accomplishing what I was trying to do.
• I reviewed Barry Cooper's Never Get Busted Again video.
• I thought way too much about unscrewing light bulbs.
• I proposed some radical ideas for criminal justice reform.
• I wondered if my logo had enough balls.
• My dad got sick.
• the Chinese government censored Windypundit.
• for a brief, shining moment, PageRank 6.
• I released my own clothing line.
• I endorsed a candidate for the office of Attorney General.
• I took some pictures of April in Chicago.
• Idiots called the Virginia Tech victims cowards.
• Lou Dobbs didn't know what he was talking about.
• The Kathryn Johnston case just kept getting worse.
• I accused the state of Illinois of fibbing to organ doners.
• I got a real surprise on my cell phone.
• I had some additional thoughts about jury duty.
• I explained why "Gas Out Day" wasn't going to work.
• Minky!
• I wrote about the amazing technology we have at our fingertips.
• I explained why we have copyrights, and why they expire.
• The goverment protected us from having meat that was too safe.
• We were invaded by strange creatures.
• I may have accidentally attracted attention to my blog with a misleading title that implied the blog entry was about Paris Hilton getting screwed.
• A model shoot at the Morton Arboretum had unexpected visitors.
• I took some nice photos in Milwaukee.
• The zero-tolerance folks reached a whole new level of stupidity.
• I planned to review Andrew Keen's Call of the Amateur but never followed through.
• I took pictures at the Gay Pride parade, with special appearances by Maria Pappas, Rudy Giuliani, Sheriff Tom Dart, Chicago's biggest car thief, and lots of other people, including these cool ladies on motorcycles.
• I tried my hand at photographing models Nicole and Theresa. 
• Hamas cancelled a children's show.
• I got rated.
• I suggested a few more prison sentences for President Bush to commute.
• I learned about Scott's law and then was tried for breaking it.
• We learned that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff relies on his guts.
• I wrote a parody of how other famous authors might end the Harry Potter series and dozens of people contributed their ideas in the comments.
• Shirley Bassey got the party started.
• Windypundit celebrated its fifth birthday.
• More model photos here and here and here.
• I found out what happened to the defendent I convicted.
• I pointed out a few flaws in an anti-immigration argument.
• I posted about some "evil" lawmaking, including the insincerity of free punishment, the pure greed of profitable punishment, the bullying of piling on, the overuse of license suspension, the unconstitutional license of administrative punishment, and the twisted complexity of DUI.
• Rudy Giuliani explained what freedom really means.
• I discovered a disheartening reminder of the depths of human depravity.
• One of the prosecutors of the case where I was a juror contacted me.
• The TSA tried to spot anxious people at the airport.
• Janet Jackson's nipple still caused controversy.
• Florida's Governor Charlie Crist set Richard Paey free.
• Virginia Postrel was diagnosed with breast cancer.
• I switched the blog to MovableType 4.
• I committed journalism.
• The Chicago marathon gave us all a preview of how the city would handle a terrorist attack.
• Ann coulter explained the true meaning of Christianity.
• I took 800 photos of the 2007 Chicago marathon.
• I started my scattershot posts, mostly to get something posted without having to write it.
• I tried to analyze the economics of snitching and got a little help getting it right.
• I wrote a little about my father's experiences in the army.
• I hoped for a revolution.
• I realized our court system does not protect our happiness.
• Windypundit's traffic increased for mysterious reasons.
• Congress and President Bush outlawed the light bulb.
• Mike Huckabee didn't know he was an ape.
• I gave my readers some Christmas cheesecake.
• I was so late posting my year-end round-up that I didn't even bother to pretend I'd posted it in 2007.

As with last year, Dave Barry's roundup was funnier.

Looking through the server logs for Windypundit, I noticed that my bandwidth usage was up to 40 gigabytes this month, which is pretty high. A little investigation showed that just over half the bandwidth consisted of this stock photo from last year:

That photo was served to the web 170,000 times this month. Since Windypundit didn't have anywhere near that many visits this month, I can only assume that someone has hotlinked the file into their own web site. Shame on them.

I just replaced that file with one about 1/4 the size, which should reduce my bandwidth usage by about 35% if people keep hitting that photo.

A couple of weeks ago, Windypundit was getting about 300 visits per day.

I just checked, and now it's getting about 400 visits per day.

Apparently, the less I post, the more popular I become.

[Update: ARG!!!  Lots of problems! Working on it...]

[Update: Okay, I think I fixed the problem by reloading the templates.]

[Update: Put back author names under the titles. Rebuilt static web pages.]

Windypundit has now been upgraded to run on Movable Type 4.

I started the process of porting Windypundit to the new software several weeks ago by building a test system. I rented space on another shared server and duplicated the whole Windypundit site on it.  I upgraded the blogging software on the test site from MT 3.34 (I think) to MT 4.  It was completely automated and went very smoothly.  Naturally, that wasn't good enough.

The templates for Windypundit are based on the templates released with one of the early MT 3 implementations.  I've tweaked them to work with the newer versions of Movable Type, but it hasn't always been smooth.  (Some of my regular visitors are familiar with all the problems with the comment pages.)  To fix that, I decided to re-implement all the templates based on the new template design that came with MT 4.

It took about two weeks.

By that time, the folks at Six Apart had announce the beta version of MT 4.01.  They were planning to fix a lot of little problems, so I decided to wait until they officially released the new version.

They did that last week.  So last night I backed up the live site and installed the upgrade.  Then I copied over all the PHP plugins I had written and all of the stylesheets.  Finally, I painstakingly cut and pasted all the templates from the test site to the live site (there were about 50 of them).  I just finished.

There are still a whole bunch of things I have to do, but the bulk of the site is working correctly.  The interface that us blog authors see is very different, but those of you who just read Windypundit shouldn't notice many changes.

That bothered me.  I did all this work, and there was almost nothing different that anyone could see, except for a few minor format changes.  That's how I wanted it to be, of course, but I still wished there was something on the site to show that everything had changed.  So I added a little dashboard menu bar across the top of the blog.  It doesn't do anything that couldn't be done before (in fact, all the old links are still in the sidebars) but the visual design echos the new look of MovableType.

I'll be making more changes to Windypundit in the weeks and months to come.  I still need to move all the CSS files into the templating system so I can manage them through the Movable Type interface.  I also want to re-implement all the static pages (such as the About page) using MT 4's new Page mechanism instead of as separate templates.

And I'm willing to bet that the comments system still isn't working smoothly...

I upgraded to Microsoft Outlook 2003 a few weeks ago, and I just sort of assumed that if anything went wrong there'd be error messages or something.

It turns out that Outlook and the Windypundit mail server aren't talking to each other. I didn't notice because I have about half a dozen email accounts coming into Outlook and all the others seem to be working.

I finally realized that people were sending me things I wasn't getting, and I realized what had happened. I checked the server and it has about 600 messages (most of them trying to sell me replica watches or making libelous innuendos about my genitals).

I'm trying to fix it now...

Regular readers may notice that I've replaced the Chicago skyline photo at the top of the page. It's an emerging tradition here at Windypundit that the banner photo is one of the few photos on the site that is not my original photography (mostly because I'm too lazy to trek to the lakefront).

The previous photo was a stock photo licensed from Matt Dula, and the one before that was a copyright-free Nasa photo taken by an uncredited astronaut.

The latest photo is by Ken Gibson, and it's taken from a collection of city skyline photos posted at Road Trip America.

I was planning to post this 2 days ago, on the 5th anniversary of my first post, but I was so busy with other things that I couldn't finish it in time.

Rather than looking back on the issues I've covered, I'm going to make this is a look back at the blog itself.

Windypundit

When I started Windypundit, it was the early days of blogging when Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit was the king of the bloggers and it wasn't totally uncool to call yourself something-pundit. It took me a while to get used to calling myself "Windypundit" when commenting in forums or on other blogs because it sounded so pretentious, but I forced myself to do it as part of my marketing effort for this blog. By now, I've been Windy for so long now that I'm used to it.

There was a time when I wished I had picked a classier name for the blog, but I'm stuck with it now. Other than a few unfortunate fart jokes, I have no complaints.

Technology

I found the early blogging technology frustrating, and I spent some time trying to write some small bits of blogging software to improve the process. Several times, I caught myself starting fairly large software projects, and I forced myself to stop so I could focus on the writing and not get caught up in the technology.

I decided I needed more capabilities than Blogger offered, so I switched to the MovableType blogging engine, which comes with full source code. Now I had a tool that was good enough for all I wanted to do, but which was still customizable enough to allow me to fiddle with it now and then.

Probably the most prominent bit of fiddling is the MovableType extension tag I wrote to post photographs with titles, drop shadows, and links to larger images.

Hosting

Windypundit started on Blogger, and was originally hosted on Blogspot, but I soon had Blogger publishing everything to the Windows box that hosted my corporate web site because Blogger didn't have photo hosting.

When I switched to MovableType I quickly found out that the Perl programming language under Windows didn't support everything I needed to do, so I switched to Linux hosting. I started with a dirt-cheap account at Loose Foot Computing. Later, I upgraded to 2MHost, which was a MovableType hosting partner, meaning they set up MovableType for me and upgraded it whenever necessary.

Eventually, I started to do more behind-the-scenes programming, and I needed a host that supported that better. I tried Hosting Matters for a while, but found them slightly too restrictive for my needs. Now I'm at Downtown Host which is a little more accomodating.

Photography

Photography is a recently-acquired hobby, so when I started Windypundit I never imagined I'd be photoblogging. Once I started taking pictures, however, I found that it worked well for the blog. If nothing else, I could always post one of my photos to keep the blog going when I was too busy to write anything.

More importantly, instead of commenting on someone else's work, I'm creating original source material. As much as I hope people are interested in my commentary, I know I'm just one of many people who has an opinion. On the other hand, my original photojournalism is exclusive to Windpundit.

In order to integrate more photography into the blog, I needed to find an issue that was both interesting and photogenic. My favorite subjects wouldn't really work: Economics is too abstract to photograph, and the War on Drugs is too dangerous. I finally settled on eminent domain abuse, and I've gotten a few photo spreads out of it.

My MovableType blogging software does some simple photo uploading, but it has no way to display photo galleries. I was tempted to build my own photo galleries, but I decided instead to get an account at Smugmug.

All original photos on Windypundit are served from Smugmug's very fast servers, where I have stored about 9000 photographs (many of them unrelated to the blog).

Traffic

Web traffic to the site has grown a lot less quickly than I hoped when I started. I wasn't expecting to be famous, but I was hoping to do better than I actually have. I suppose one possible explanation for the poor traffic is that my blog sucks, but now that I understand more about the blogosphere works, I think there are some pretty straightforward reasons for the low traffic.

To start with, my traffic stats were absolutely dismal during the first couple of years, which was both a result and a cause of my sparse and sporadic blogging. When I started posting more regularly around the beginning of 2005, my stats began to improve, which encouraged me to post even more. The word on the street is that it's important to post something every day, and three times a day would be even better.

I'm not a fast writer, and my day job keeps me pretty busy, so three-a-day is more than I can manage. That's why multi-author blogs tend to do better than single-author blogs like Windypundit. I took on Gary as a co-blogger this year, but neither of us expected him to post often enough to make a big difference.

Another reason why Windypundit doesn't get lots of traffic is that it's a multi-topic blog. Except for the blockbuster blogs like Daily Kos or Instapundit, most successful blogs tend to focus on a single topic that they cover very well, which attracts people who return again and again to see what's new. Because Windypundit is all over the place, I get fewer regular readers.

Finally, I just don't try very hard to take advantage of opportunities. In May of 2005 I had one of the very first posts on the web about Google Earth, and lots of sites linked to me. I got huge amounts of traffic. If I had been ambitious, I could have used the surge to launch a single-topic Google Earth blog.

Similarly, this post is the #1 Google result for the search phrase "Fucking Sprint" and people are still posting comments to it. If I were smart, I could have built that page out into a whole site for Sprint haters, with stories about the latest evil things Sprint has done, forums for visitors to discuss how bad Sprint is, cartoons, T-shirts for sale, and so on. But frankly, I got over it and have moved on.

As I write this, I've been getting surges of 5 to 20 times my normal daily traffic because I happened to do a post about Harry Potter right in the middle of Pottermania and several of the main Harry Potter sites have linked to me. The smart thing would be to quickly post a bunch of other Harry Potter articles and link to them from the first one to generate more links and return traffic...but I really don't have much more to say about Harry Potter.

Money

I've had Google AdSense up in the sidebar for a little over two years, and it earns me a low-three-figures income. At the very least, I'm covering my hosting fees.

I just started trying out Text-Link-Ads, which appear at the top of the left sidebar. I get paid a flat monthly rate for each of those, regardless of whether anyone actually clicks them. In a good month, I make 50 bucks.

I also have numerous affiliates, including Amazon and Adorama Camera. If you click through to either site and buy something, I get a small piece of it. I make almost no money this way.

Branching Out

In addition to the my Smugmug site, I also have a MySpace page, a Model Mayhem page, a OneModelPlace page, and a Yahoo profile. I'm also trying to start an archive site for storing useful information such as maps and data, but I haven't done anything with it lately.

Advice

I don't have a lot of advice about blogging, and even if I did, Technorati gives Windypundit a rank of 36,688 so you probably shouldn't listen to me. There's plenty of advice out there on the web and Google can find it all for you.

That said, here are a few tips for other minor-league bloggers:

Two bits of information I've found helpful are Joe Carter's advice for new bloggers and Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Design Mistakes for blogs.

Content is king. No matter how well you market your blog or how well you optimize it for search engines, the thing that unltimately sells it is your original content—what you blog about and how much of it is original with you.

That's not to say that you shouldn't also learn the basics of how to optimize your page for search engines. A little bit of Google PageRank goes a long way. Windypundit is somewhere near the high and of PR 5, which is not huge, but it's enough that when I post about a subject of less than national importance I can get on the first page of Google search results.

For example, in a search for either "chicago gay pride photos" or "chicago marathon photos" my page on that subject is the fourth result. I couldn't do that without some pretty good search engine scores. Note also, however, that both of these pages contain original content that no one else has.

The Future

I'm hoping to build-out the archive site a lot more, with links to my eminent domain photos, data files for Google Earth and Google Maps, and a variety of other non-blogging materials. Other than that...

Other than that, it will be more of the same.

Finally...

Thank you very much to all my regular readers for giving me good reasons to keep on keeping on.

Windypundit. Corrupting America's youth since 2002.

The Google ads to the left are chosen by Google, based on its analysis of the content of my blog. Sometimes the choices are a bit odd. Yesterday I blogged my review of the movie 300. So what ads does Google think are appropriate for a story about the amazing Spartan soliders and their fierce last stand at Thermopylae?

As I write this, here are some of the ads Google is showing:

As a blogger, I like it when people link to me. It sends me both visitors and search engine link juice, and I appreciate that. So I make a point of checking out who's linking to me.

Sometimes I get a surprising reminder that the World-Wide-Web is really world-wide, as with this link.

Thanks for the link, Ms. Maximova, I hope you said something nice. (Actually, according this clunky Google translation, the link to me is just a credit for mentioning the Goa'uld connection.)

Then there's Charles M. Rowland II, an attorney in Ohio, who posts a complete copy of one of my articles as one of his blog articles. He even copied my department title line.

His blog is obviously a marketing effort for his law firm, and it looks like he's re-posting content from a lot of sources in order to pad out the blog and attract search engines. I syndicate my content, and he did link to me, so I can't really complain. Besides, I kind of have to admire the in-your-face attitude of a DUI lawyer who links to Modern Drunkard magazine.

[Update: I was wrong, wrong, wrong. The folks at Text-Link-Ads clearly know a lot more about selling online ads than I do, because they held out and sold the space at their original asking price. I would have dropped the price a lot sooner and lost money.]

A few weeks ago, I signed up for a service called Text Link Ads which would supposedly sell ads on my blog. I installed their software on the site so that the ads would show up at the top of the left-hand column, right above the Google ads.

So far it's empty.

That doesn't surprise me, because their automatic ad pricing system claimed they could sell ads on my blog for $45 per month, which seemed awful high to me. I don't have all that much traffic, I don't post very often, I don't have a narrow focus, I advocate extreme libertarian political positions, and I swear a lot. It's not prime ad space.

What does surprise me is that the Text Link Ads pricing algorithm hasn't responded to the market signal. I'd assumed that by now it would be dropping the price on my ads until something sells.

It's not hurting anything, so I'll keep it around a while, but I was kind of hoping for a better result.

On the other hand, if you'd like to buy or sell links through Text Link Ads, click over to their site using this banner so I make money:

According to my Google toolbar and various search engine tools on the web, Windypundit has now risen to PageRank 6.

That's not exactly an awe-inspiring rank—my goal is PR 7—but it's nice to know these pages are getting more popular.

I promise to use my new powers only for good.

I'm making some technical changes to the blog, and comments are temporarily turned off.

Update: Now running off the new server...

Update: Nameservers have been pointed at the new server. If you can see this, you've received this page from the new hosting service.

Update: Typekey authentication is now working for comments.

I'm trying a new spam filter for my comments. Instead of showing you a CAPTCHA picture, it just asks you to type a word. It seems more stable than the previous plugin too.

Try it out.

Hi! I’m Gary the new Windypundit Art & Entertainment critic. I will primarily be writing about books, movies, TV shows and sometimes CD's that I have recently read, seen, or listened to. It will not necessarily include the most recently released movies or the latest books or CD’s - only what I may happen to see. I will try to stick to things I really like and point out some treasures that you may have missed. Who knows, as I get back into blogging, it may inspire me to keep up on more current fare.

My main topic will be TV as that is what I spend most of my entertainment time viewing. I may venture into some non-entertainment postings on occasion and possibly do some dogblogging to provide a balance to the catblogging you’ve grown accustomed to.

I hope this will be something that you, the readers and I will both enjoy.

This year I'm trying a new experiment and bringing a co-blogger on board here at Windypundit. Gary from Gary on TV (and stuff) will be joining me from time to time as the Art & Entertainment critic.

I've been wanting to expand my movie and television coverage, but I can't seem to get started. I'm hoping having a co-blogger will encourage me to post a few more things myself.

Gary's personal blog had a hard time building readership, but he's a good writer and he cares about the art of television and movies. I think you'll enjoy reading his posts.

I don't exactly have a master plan for blogging in 2007, but here are a few things I have in mind:

• Eminent domain blogging will continue with coverage of the Five Corners TIF in Des Plaines.
• I'm trying to bring on a co-blogger to cover the entertainment beat.
• I may actually get around to posting the little-awaited second half of my Drugs in the Workplace article.
• I'm thinking of tweaking the blog layout to make the main section a little wider so the photos will look better.
• More catblogging.