It has been pointed out that my blogroll is deficient, so it's time for a few additions, corrections, and deletions.

First of all, one of my regular daily stops is the Honest Courtesan, written by retired call girl (and Nobody's Business guest blogger) Maggie McNeill. She's a good writer with mad research skills, and her blog takes a frankly libertarian approach in advocating for the rights of prostitutes and other sex workers. Also, now that she has declared me a Friend of Whores in her blogroll, I feel guilty about not having added her to the blogroll already.

(Marital tip: I told my wife about this right away. Being declared a "Friend of Whores" is really the sort of thing you want to get out in front of.)

I could have sworn I'd already added Eric Mayer at Unwashed Advocate (formerly Military Underdog), but he wasn't on the list. He is now.

I often thing Jack Marshall is very, very wrong, but his Ethics Alarms blog is usually thought-provoking and has been a continuing source of Things to Blog About.

I'm an on-again/off-again player of EVE Online, and one of the best blogs covering spaceship-to-spaceship combat is The Altruist, by Azual Skoll from Agony Unleashed.

Lindsey Beyerstein has stopped blogging at Focal Point (which I have removed) and is now blogging at Duly Noted.

What little I know about cryptography, I learned from Bruce Schneier's books, and I'm a regular reader of his blog Schneier on Security, which is about more than just computers.

WolframAlpha gets added to the resource page.

Marginal Revolution was listed in two places, but is now listed in one less place.

Pete Guither's Drug WarRant has moved, as have Norm Pattis, the Underdog Blog, and Seeking Justice.

Kip Esquire isn't blogging at A Stitch in Haste anymore, The D'Alliance is closed, and Jamie Spencer has stopped blogging at Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer. Woman of the Law is long gone. As is The Matlock Blog.

Blonde Justice hasn't blogged in about half a year, but she gets a pass.

BlogNetNews.com has been replaced by a squatter page. 

2011 was kind of a busy year for me, especially during the latter half of the year when -- after 10 years in the part-time consulting racket -- I returned to full-time employment. It really cut into my blogging time, and I want to thank all of my loyal readers for sticking around. In any case, here at Windypundit, 2011 was the year in which:

• I argued that bloggers shouldn't tone it down. (In that post, I responded to Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik's call for less vitriolic speech by pointing out that "A dozen guys like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann--or a thousand bloggers like me--couldn't begin to do as much harm with words as Sheriff Dupnik's SWAT team could do in one bad day." A few months later, they had that bad day.)
• I wrote about keeping the balance between insensitivity and despair when writing about the kinds of issues I cover.
• I discovered that Chicago had a real criminal defense blogger in Marcus L. Schantz.
• Chicago had a bit of snow.
• I reviewed a few episodes of The Chicago Code (episode 2, episode 3, episode 4).
• I explained how flat legal fees are a form of trial insurance.
• I explained one reason there's a blogging gender gap.
• I discussed the math behind drug-sniffing dogs.
• I discovered street terrorism.
• I argued that SWAT shootings are inevitable.
• Like everyone else, I had some thoughts about Fukushima.
• I explained why it's hard to decide who to vote for.
• For some reason, I was almost shocked that big media companies are scumbags.
• I promoted a couple of local businesses.
• I argued for strict liability for wrongful imprisonment.
• My co-blogger Ken complained about the Qur'an-burning reaction.
• I found the coolest geek website ever.
• I ran into some costly geese.
• Sprint annoyed me again.
• Chicago didn't get a space shuttle.
• I complained about a Stalinist feature of American criminal trials.
• I discovered that even best-case immigration is annoying.
• I offered a defense of some street photographers.
• I responded to the horrifying contention that there are no innocent civilians.
• The Weird Al-Lady Gaga battle exploded.
• I was so angry at the world that I totally missed it when my co-blogger Ken posted this for Easter.
• Rogier van Bakel, Rick Horowitz, and I launched the new Nobody's Business blog.
• I blogged about the scandal that Obama is afraid to confront.
• I bravely spoke out in favor of killing Osama bin Laden.
• I explained that Trump is crazy.
• My cat Dozer died.
• I gamed the Alexa blog rankings. (Back down now.)
• I explained libertarian compassion.
• I complained about unnecessary seizures of computers.
• I posted a compilation of clips from porno movies.
• I proposed a model jury instruction on reasonable doubt.
• Joel Rosenberg died.
• The TSA...did what they do best.
• I drove to Avalon and back.
• I argued that Caylee's law would probably do more harm than good.
• I explained why the iPad is more futuristic than the space shuttle.
• I got a new kitten.
• I learned the two of my nemeses have teamed up.
• I explained a point of etiquette to Wayne LaPierre.
• I denounced the idea of a debt ceiling.
• I won a lawsuit.
• I reviewed Declaration of Independents.
• I met Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie.
• I fell for a Paul Krugman parody.
• I paid some medical bills.
• I wrote one last 9/11 post.
• I called out the University of Wisconsin Threat Assessment team.
• I found the flaw in the new iPhone 4S.
• I went on yet another beep hunt.
• I explained why Jana Svrzo might not be a psychopath.
• I discovered that some people don't know why you shouldn't let your kids lick lollipops from strangers.
• I revealed the conspiracy against Lindsay Beyerstein.
• I did some math about GPS tracking.
• I joined the call for a national conversation on law enforcement.
• I wanted to emulate the DEA in a plan to stop auto accidents.
• Business Insider paid me a compliment.
• I'm still confused about the mortgage crisis.
• I owned the #1 and #2 Google search result for "Obama's left testicle".

Happy New Year everyone!

I've had a few job interviews recently, and although the subject has never come up, it seems likely that, in this day and age, someone at one of these companies is probably going Google me, and the first thing they'll find is this blog.

Uh-oh.

So...If you found this blog because I applied for a job at your company or because someone at your company is thinking of hiring me as a consultant, there are a few things I should probably explain...

I'm not like this all the time. I'm not that guy who just has to slip politics into every conversation. ("The project is over budget? Sounds like it's run by a bunch of Liberals!") I know how to turn it off. In fact, I really only turn it on for the blogosphere and for private conversations with other people who share my interests. I understand that some subjects are not suitable for the workplace.

I'm not going to blog about company business. I might end up blogging about some interesting things that happened while I was on the job ("I was in Phoenix on business and someone stole my rental car!"), but I'm not going to blog about company business unless your media policy permits me to talk about it. I understand that some things need to stay confidential.

I'm not going to blog on your dime. If reasonable personal use of the internet is one of the perqs of the job, I'll probably take advantage of that to do some blogging or answer a few comments in my spare time. But other than that, I won't be working on my own projects while you're paying the bill.

I'm not a freak. As a matter of public policy, I think we send too many people to jail for a lot of things that should be legal. That doesn't mean that I want to do those things. I can comply with your workplace policies.

We can talk about the blog. If something on this blog makes you uncomfortable enough that you'd consider not hiring me because of it, tell me about it. If I'm otherwise a good fit to your needs, it would be a shame not to at least try to work something out.

I look forward to working with you.

Thanks,

Mark

It's the end of another year, and time for me to look back at what I've been doing here at Windypundit, just to see where I've been and maybe to figure out where I'm going from here.

With that end in mind, 2010 was the year in which

• I first questioned the propriety of the TSA's full-body imaging system...a full 10 months before it became cool to do so.
• I tested Avvo again, and got a result of sorts.
• the Hayek vs. Keynes rap video hit the internet.
• I blogged about the President's State of the Union address, which is getting to be a bit of a bore. Blogging about it, I mean, is getting to be a bit of a bore. State of the Union addresses have been boring for as long as I can remember.
• I blogged about the Republican response, using last year's response to see if anyone noticed. No one did, but I decided it was a stupid trick to play, and I won't be doing that again.
• I explained the basic statistics behind scientific tests and scientific truth.
• I declared Rock 'n' Roll Party In The Streets the best rock song in the world.
• I explained how to survive Scott Greenfield.
• I discovered the Garrity Rule.
• I still had no idea why we don't encrypt all our email.
• I discovered a perjury trap in the census forms.
• Mirriam Seddiq returned to the blogosphere.
• I discussed the immigration consequences of criminal convictions.
• I added to the complaints about the murderous cops of Fairfax County, Virginia, although this piece I wrote for When Falls the Coliseum is even better.
• Bill Clinton tried to blame anti-government agitators for the Oklahoma City bombing.
• I confessed that despite being a libertarian, I can't stand pot.
• The Illinois legislature passed a reasonable-sounding bill to address the "sexting" problem.
• Former U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan lost her race for Congress.
• I met Scott Greenfield, Amy Derby, and some other people.
• I explained why selling internships is not unethical.
• Peter McWilliams was ten years gone.
• Congressman Bob Etheridge assaulted someone who annoyed him.
• Dozer met the cat pillow.
• I posted the Nicholas Brothers' cool dance scene.
• I was puzzled by inductive cooking.
• The Supreme Court's lazy handgun ruling hit Chicago.
• I found mixed messages about drugs at a Louisville gas station.
• A few people got life.
• Blago decided not to take the stand.
• Andrew Cohen embarrassed the entire male half of the human race.
• I found some great tips for young girls who want to slut it up to get that cute boy to ask them out.
• I disavowed any rumors that I am an FBI agent.
• I explained why criminal defense lawyers are like flushing toilets (warning: much less funny than it sounds).
• I asked readers to suggest a few protest songs.
• On the anniversary of my father's death, I posted some of his favorite music.
• A computer scientist made a pretty good claim to have solved the P≠NP problem...but not quite.
• I explained my unease with the 9/11 memorial.
• I dissed classical mythology.
• Warlord Joe Arpaio kept getting away with it.
• Ken Gibson joined the Windypundit family.
• For me, 9/11 passed into history.
• Ken posted about skirts and terrorism (not as fun as it sounds).
• It might be a trap, but I was 100% behind this.
• Ken explained why cops were protesting for the right to beat up people in wheelchairs.
• I explained why public defense is free.
• And why lawyers shouldn't be forced to work for free.
• I voice my suspicions about the ineffectiveness of the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative.
• The idiots at 1010global.org released the dumbest promotional video ever.
• I thanked the Jews.
• Chicago cops frightened some old people.
• I discussed the cost of murder.
• Science defeated another virus.
• I announced plans to rebuild my blog templates. I'll be sure to let you know if it ever happens.
• Ken called out mother nature for the bitch that she is.
• Suffolk County in New York enacted the dumbest criminal registry yet.
• I propsed a career change.
• I made one of those digital puppetry movies to illustrate one of the more perverse aspects of software requirements.
• Some cops sued the Chicago Police Superintendent in order to derail an investigation of their actions.
• A U.S. Attorney abused her grand jury powers to silence a critic.
• Denver welcomed our new alien overlords.
• I explained why police stop-and-search is a lot like stop-and-molest.
• I whored out my blog for Avvo.
• I explained what Machinima is.
• Orleans Parish took a hostage.
• Skyline sucked.
• I learned that civil forfeiture was even more bizarre than I thought.
• I became worried that the TSA would metastasize.
• Wikileaks. Need I say more?
• Joel Rosenberg was arrested.
• The terrorists almost discovered the secret of road salt.
• The TSA continued to suck.
• A villain popped up on the radar again.

Have a Happy New Year! See you all in 2011!

Attention lawyers: I want to take this opportunity to tell you about an exciting new way to help out one of your favorite blogs! I'm talking about Windypundit, of course! I know we're one of our favorite blogs because you're here now, reading this. Even if this is the thousandth blog you're read today, there are millions of other blogs out there, and that puts us in your top tenth of one percent!

As I'm sure you're aware, all the authors here at Windypundit are volunteers. We do this work because we love it. Nevertheless, producing this high-quality content involves certain out-of-pocket expenses. We pay hosting charges for the blog itself, we pay hosting fees for some of the high-quality photographs, and we pay fees to a content distribution network so the blog loads quickly. In addition, we incur expenses for our computers, our cameras, photo processing software, and so on. Basically, providing all this high-quality content for free means we suffer financially, and you don't want that on your conscience, do you?

Good. Here's how it works:

Over in the left-hand column you should see an ad for the Avvo website. (I've also scattered several helpful ads throughout this post) I'm sure you've all heard how Avvo is using the power of their social networking(-ish) website to leverage law firm marketing by empowering legal consumers. Your potential clients can now search through thousands of lawyer profiles on the Avo site to find the best match for their needs, and if you're not careful, they might pick someone besides you!

Even if you've only heard of Avvo in passing, you may have noticed that Avvo has created a profile for you or your law firm based on publicly available records. But did you know that in order for you to take full advantage of Avvo's amazing services, you have to register and claim your profile?

Well, here at Windypundit, we've taken steps to make that easy. All you have to do is click that Avvo ad on the left (or any of the ads embedded in this post), and it will take you straight to a special page on the Avvo site where you can claim your profile. It's just that easy!

Now here's the best part: Even though claiming a profile costs you nothing, every time one of you claims a profile by clicking the logo on the left, Avvo pays me ten dollars. That comes out of their pocket, and it costs you nothing! So if you love Windypundit and you love the idea of Avvo, and yet you haven't claimed your profile, now is the time!

But perhaps you are ambivalent towards Avvo. Does that mean you shouldn't bother to claim your profile? No. Not at all. Even if you never plan to use your Avvo profile, it's still a good idea to claim your profile as a way of locking out nefarious tricksters who could steal your unclaimed profile. Unless you act fast, your customized profile could be stolen by a random prankster, a disgruntled former partner, a dissatisfied former client, a disturbed ex-spouse, a pedophile, or even a terrorist!--and they could post anything they want in your name--libelous comments about competing lawyers, racists jokes about local judges, even some hard core donkey porn! You don't want that, now do you?

Sure, Avvo will tell you they have some sort of verification process, but you know how things work on the internet, right? Why take chances? Claim your profile today! Don't forget: You'll also be supporting this fine blog.

I know what some of you are thinking: What if you hate Avvo? What if you believe that Avvo stands for the kind of cheap, ethics-free marketing that is ruining the legal profession? What if you pray each day for Avvo to fail and for its founders to burn forever in the fires of hell while demons feast on their flesh?

Well, that's even more reason to click the Avvo ad on the left and claim your profile! Don't think of it as joining Avvo; think of it as draining ten bucks from Avvo's marketing budget! And you know that ten bucks comes right out of Avvo's bottom line! They're a bunch of money-grubbing scum, so hit them in the wallet where it hurts the most!

In fact, why stop with just claiming your profile? Contact your friends, spam your listserves, post a link to this page on your website. You could start a movement that ends up costing Avvo hundreds or thousands of dollars in affiliate fees! It's like you're stealing money from those bastards, and it's totally legal!

So take action now! However you feel about Avvo, your course of action should be clear: Claim your profile! Tell your friends! Act now!

It's been a few years since I made any big design changes here at Windypundit, but I'm beginning to think it might be time for something different, and I'd like to ask for you, Gentle Reader, for some help.

The impetus for this change is the release by Six Apart of a new major version of the Movable Type blogging engine that powers Windypundit. I tried upgrading to it a couple of nights ago, but it replaced all my templates with the default template, so I undid the upgrade. I could probably figure out a way to prevent that problem (e.g. read the manual), but I've decided to take a different approach. I'm going to start with the default template that comes with the new version of Movable Type and build on it to recreate the Windypundit site from scratch. The result should be a whole new Windypundit the works correctly with all the Movable Type features.

Almost everything about the blog design is up in the air. I've started to make a list of changes I'd like to make: 

1. Rebuild the site using the new Movable Type templates to make sure the site can use all the new features.
2. Declutter the sidebars by removing some items and moving others to separate pages.
3. Use a slightly more modern looking design. Windypundit isn't supposed to look like the latest fad in web 2.0, but I wouldn't mind a few more modern touches.
4. Change the color scheme to be a little more vibrant, but without causing eyestrain.
5. It might be time to change the logo. Logos with swoosh marks were a cliche long before I started using mine.
6. I'd like to add a few small graphic accents, like bullet points or something, just to give the site a few unique touches.
7. I want to keep the page SEO friendly. For example, if you check out the page source, the first big block of content is the text of the first post. The sidebars are placed at the end of the page, after all the text, and CSS positioning is used to place them to the left and right of the main text block.
8. It's time for a new banner image.
9. With multiple authors, I think I need something more prominent than a byline to distinguish us. Perhaps it's time to add avatars to the posts.

I'm expecting that I can re-use a lot of the same template code. For example, I'll keep a lot of the CSS styles that control the look of blog entries, because I don't want to have to go through all the posts to restyle them.

The Windypundit page uses the YUI Javascript framework to implement a few features. For example, to reduce the perceived page-load time, several of the third-party content areas--Google ads, Amazon ads, TTLB, etc--are actually loaded to the bottom of the page and then moved into place in the sidebars using some Javascript in a trigger. A similar technique is used with the main menu, which is itself implemented using YUI, to move it to the top of the page. I didn't want the menu to be the first thing Google saw when it scanned the page, but CSS alone can't do that kind of positioning.

The problem is that Yahoo is replacing YUI 2 with YUI 3, which isn't ready yet and looks likely to break some stuff when it comes out, so I'm thinking of switching to a different Javascript framework, probably jQuery, simply because it's one of the most popular frameworks.

Also, I need to change the way I handle photographs. I currently host them on Smugmug, which offers a few nice features such as on-the-fly resizing, but it's a bad practice to rely so much on a single third-party service. I'd like to host the photos on the blog server, but I may have to write some software to get the features I want. More on this as it develops.

How I Could Use Your Help

Since I got a lot of suggestions when I asked for help finding protest songs, I figure it couldn't hurt to beg a little more and see if any of you have some ideas about my site design.

(A) If you're a regular reader, or even a passing reader, I'd like to hear your suggestions for improving the Windypundit web site design.

I've tried to make the Windypundit site design as simple and uncluttered as I can, in the spirit of sites such as Google, craigslist, or Facebook. (Yeah, the Facebook page is cluttered, but it's cluttered because it offers a lot of functionality: There are very few purely decorative elements on a standard Facebook page.) There are very few design elements on Windypundit which do not serve a purpose. For example, the right sidebar is set off with a background color because otherwise the text in the sidebar is confusingly close to the main text in the center. Except for the logo and the banner image, almost every element serves a purpose.

Got suggestions? Got something that bothers you? Let me know.

(B) By tradition, I don't use my own photography in the banner image, so the image has to come from somewhere else, and I'm taking suggestions. I've done two aerial photos and two skylines. I'm thinking my next one will be of some kind of Chicago landmark. Not the water tower, and not the friggin' bean or anything else in Millenium park. More likely some characteristic buildings or infrastructure. Maybe the Michigan avenue bridge. Possibly just a traffic jam. With a pothole.

The banner image should not have distracting shapes, colors, or content, and it should have room for the Windypundit logo. It doesn't need to have a blank area, but I have to be able to overlay stuff on the image without ruining the composition.

Since using an image in the page banner might not count as photojournalism, I'm a little more concerned about the legal issues. I'll need to have the legal right to use the image, either directly from the photographer or else from a stock agency, unless it's in the public domain. The image should not contain any identifiable people unless they have signed a release. The composition should not depend on any prominent copyrighted or trademarked content such as a sculpture, advertising, commercial signs, or trademarked buildings.

If you know of an image that would work, send me a link to it. If you created the image, I'll credit you.

(C) If I decide I'm tired of this logo, I could use some help picking a new one. Suggestions? Thoughts? Designs? Same legal rules as the banner image.

If you think the site is perfect the way it is, that's okay too.

[Update: Two more design goals for the site:

• The site should generate code compliant with the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard.
• The site should meet general accessibility guidelines where applicable.

]

I'm pleased to welcome Ken Gibson to the Windypundit family.

(I call it a "family" because being a blogger here at Windypundit is just like being a member of a family in which we work together with a spirit of cooperation and unity.  Also, he's not going to get paid.  And I'm Dad.  Not one of those modern TV dads who's befuddled but enlightened and tries to be friends with all his kids. No, I'm one of those '50's TV dads who expects to be obeyed.)

Ken's been sending me emails about interesting stories for a while now, and sometimes I even write about them. Ken and I also get together once in a while to have long, drawn-out discussions about civil liberties, science, police misconduct, lawyers, outer space, education, business, and video games. Sometimes I get a post out of these discussions, too. Ken is also the photographer who took the photo of the Chicago lakefront that I use in my banner.

Ken and I both got our degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and before that we both attended the same high school, where we had several classes together, including the English class I mentioned in my post dissing classical mythology. It turns out Ken disagrees with me about mythology, and that's going to be the subject of his first post.

You know that old saying about how a good friend will help you move a dead body? Ken's not that good of a friend. So if he tells you he knows nothing about any dead body -- and besides he and I were both twenty miles away across town at the time -- it's because that's exactly how it happened.

Some of you may have noticed that Windypundit was unavailable for parts of Saturday.

It turns out that my hosting provider migrated Windypundit to a new server sometime in the last week or so. Normally, they'd also change the entries in the nameserver, which is the server that provides the link between the "windypundit.com" domain name and the IP address of the server that hosts my content. However, for reasons too boring to go into, I use a third-party company for nameservice, so my hosting provider has no way to make the change.

They are aware of this issue, and sometime last week they sent me an email explaining exactly what changes I had to make...which I kept meaning to do.

Anyway, for much of the past week, when you or I pointed our browsers at windypundit.com, we were using the old server, not the new one. That lasted until sometime on Saturday, when they finally shutdown the old server, and Windypundit went off the air.

I've changed the nameserver entries to point to the new server, and that's where you're reading this. There was still a problem, however. You see, the copy of Windypundit on the new server was made several days ago, so it didn't have anything recent, including my post about the Tweet-up meeting at the Fairmont hotel, the comments to that post, and drafts of several other posts I had started.

By poking around in the Google and Bing page caches, I managed to put the tweet-up meeting post back together, along with everyone's comments (although the dates are off). But since they were never published where Google can find them, I can't think of any way to get back the drafts of my new blog posts.

Bummer.

Update: I probably also lost emails from the past week too, so if you were trying to send me something, please send it again.

Reading the latest at Not Guilty, I realized that my blogroll is a bit out of date, not in the least because Not Guilty isn't on it. I have short descriptions for each blog in the list, so even for blogs I already have, I might have to change the description.

Let's see, going through the categories...

Bloggy Goodness

Hit&Run

Cataloguing every inch of our daily slide down the slippery slope towards a more totalitarian state.

Reason

Free markets and free minds.

I don't need a link to Reason and Reason's blog. I'll just keep Hit & Run. And I'll put the spaces back in the name.

Virgina Postrel

Author, columnist, brings depth to the simplest subjects.

That doesn't seem quite right. Maybe "Author, columnist, and famous kidney doner."

Majikthise

Your basic working philosopher.

Lindsay Beyerstein has moved her blog to Big Think and renamed it Focal Point because she's doing some video media now, and when you say Majikthise out loud, it sounds like she's one of the less well-known Bond girls.

A Stitch in Haste

Kip Esquire, lawyer, investment banker, and full-time pop scholar.

These days Kip's blog is just a digest of his daily twitting. I'll let him stay a little longer, but with the description "Kip Esquire, mad twitterer."

War on Drugs

Vice Squad

Vice, in all its forms.

Jim Leitzel's blog has stopped publication. Out it goes.

Last One Speaks

Injustice in the war on drugs.

Libby seems to have changed the thrust of her blog since I wrote that description. I'll change it to her tag line ("A complicated woman with simple tastes") and move it out of the drug war section.

Vigil for Lost Promise

A counterweight to the DEA's exploitive site.

The link was bad. It now goes to Pete Guither's site.

Chicagoland

The So-Called "Austin Mayor" Blog

Just a tad to the left of my usual tastes, but always very interesting.

This blog has stopped publication.

Blawgs

There should be lots of changes in this section.

26th St. Bar Association

Chicago criminal defense.

This blog seems dead, so I'm going to remove it, despite the hope it brings that a Chicago crimlaw blogger will emerge.

CrimLaw

A big, goofy, ballcap-wearing prosecutor who even likes dogs.

Lammers remakes himself every month or so, so I should probably change that description...but to what?

Blonde Justice

Funny stories about criminal defense.

Blondie doesn't post much any more, but she stays, because she's Blonde Justice.

Crime & Federalism

Legal analysis and bitching about federalism issues.

Not so much with the federalism lately.

Seeking Justice

Tom McKenna, Virginia prosecutor on a mission from God.

It keeps getting crazier, but that's still a good description.

Woman of the Law

Defendin', datin', drinkin'.

The blog may be shutting down, but she's a fun read so she stays for a little longer.

Prosecutor Post-Script

Sarena Straus, author and former Bronx D.A.

This blog seems dead, so I'm removing it.

Iowa Champion

Iowa criminal defense

This blog seems dead, so I'm removing it.

Resources

Bird Flu Breaking News

A bird flu news and blog aggregator.

Okay...I can safely remove this.

Citizen ICAM

Map of recent criminal activity in Chicago.

Link broke. It's history.

CIA World Factbook

A brief summary about every nation.

It moved, so I changed the link.

That wraps up all the changes. Now for all the new additions to the blogroll...

First, there's Mirriam

Not Guilty

A lawyer in search of a clue.

That was my summary back when she couldn't decide what kind of work she wanted to do. It stays until I can think of something better.

Second, Norm's back. Wait, let me check...yes, he hasn't taken this one down in a fit of...Norm...yet, so the link goes back up with the same description as last time:

Norm Pattis

Norm will fight for you!

Now for the truly new blogs on the roll. In the legal section:

Gamso - For the Defense

An Ohio criminal defense lawyer

I'd love to think of something better, but I haven't read enough yet.

Crime and Consequences Blog

Because we're just not punishing people enough

Criminal Defense

It's like a criminal defense blog, but from Florida

D.A. Confidential

Making prosecutors seem just like normal lawyers

Graham Lawyer Blog

Interesting writing about the law.

The Matlock Blog

Young Shawn Matlock discusses criminal law in Texas and beyond

He's not really "Young" Shawn anymore according to Greenfield, but I've got nothing else.

New York Personal Injury Law Blog

Better than you'd think from the SEO-friendly name

West Virginia Criminal Law Blog

Also better than you'd think from the SEO-friendly name

South Carolina Criminal Defense Blog

And one more that's better than you'd think from the SEO-friendly name

It's your fault I can't come up with better descriptions.

I'm also adding a new section for geeky computer stuff which includes the following blogs:

The Daily WTF

Crazy stories about bad things inside computer software and how they got there.

xkcd

Extremely geeky comics

Google Blogoscoped

Smart writing about search engine technology.

And it's about time I collected up a few economics blogs:

Steven Landsburg

The Armchair Economist

Greg Mankiw's Blog

Aurhor of the most popular macroeconomics textbook

Marginal Revolution

The margins are where everything happens

Megan McArdle

Business and economics

Then under Media, I'll add

Roger Ebert's Journal

A great writer and a useful film critic.

And under photography, I really ought to include these guys:

Strobist

How to light everything in the world with speedlights

I think that will do for now.

I like to end each year with a review of some of the things I've been posting about. I don't know if any of you care, but it's always interesting to me to see where I've been. This year I expected the pickings to be pretty slim because of all the turmoil surrounding and following my parents' passing, but it turns out I wrote quite a bit.

In fact, here at Windypundit, 2009 was the year in which

• I asked my hosting provider to move this blog to a new server.
• I explained four ways to answer the question "Have you got something to hide?" Be sure to read the comments for Pete Guither's awesome fifth answer, and few more from Jdog.
• I explained the hedge from hell.
• I explored my love-hate relationship with 24.
• I uncovered the Shanghai Chooke domain name scam...er, well, linked to someone who uncovered it.
• I got peeved at some of the bad tech in 24.
• I started using Amazon Cloudfront to serve the blog design elements.
• I slammed a stupid anti-legalization argument.
• The Obama presidency had its high point.
• I explained how to think about the problem of innocent people in jail.
• The Nazi Zombie uprising reached Austin, Texas.
• I invited people to make my dream of being a published author come true. It didn't work.
• I explained the difference between armed robbery and civil forfeiture.
• The war on drugs reached the century mark.
• I shredded a really stupid argument about evolution.
• I explored Apple's vision of the future...from 1987.
• A cop wrote a silly blog post about Ryan Frederick's conviction.
• A prosecutor wrote a silly blog post about my response to the cop's post.
• A cop tuned up a 15-year-old girl for hitting him with a kicked-off shoe.
• I explained how to keep people from walking off with your pens.
• A minor genius took on Google and won.
• I accepted the loss of Pluto as a planet. But I will Never Forget.
• I fought with my computer.
• I tried to bring back Friday catblogging.
• I explained how The Stimulus could go wrong.
• I gave my wife some tips for a gunfight.
• I welcomed Jennifer to the blogroll.
• My mother got very sick and I moved in with my dad.
• My mother died.
• My wife posted about my mom.
• I smacked around Robert J. Samuelson for his absurd attack on Obama's cap-and-trade plan.
• I discovered that Melrose Park was not Mayberry.
• I tried another video blog. And it also sucked.
• I decided to enter the legal education market.
• My dad told us it was time to put him in a nursing home.
• I explained how much government is enough.
• I evaluated Obama at 100 days.
• The Supreme Court once again showed how much it trusted police.
• USLaw.com didn't bother me as much as it bothered Scott Greenfield, but then they turned psychotic.
• I posted some random thoughts about my mother's passing.
• I fired an open volley in my healthcare blogging, elaborated on it later, and then again some more. 
• I put my dad in a nursing home and got to go back to my home at last.
• I commented on a shocking incident of police thuggery.
• I tried to apply logic to the testimony of a gang expert.
• I discovered that Justice Thomas may be a little crazy.
• Lori Drew was acquitted...which was almost certainly a good thing.
• I finally managed to work Lincoln's 1838 address to the Young Men's Lyceum into a blog post.
• I posted some pictures of fireworks.
• I claimed the title of greatest criminal defense blogger in Chicago and no one has risen up to dispute me.
• I decided to try Chitika.
• I got the story behind a slightly controversial photo.
• I had a depressing vision of how the ubiquitous surveillance in 1984 could actually be possible.
• I speculated about crossing the border with an encrypted hard drive, and then I got a few real answers from a Customs lawyer.
• I started to explain why identity on the web is complicated, and got some puzzling responses. I'll have to finish that someday.
• I explored some of the mysteries of minimum wage.
• I learned that Avvo Answers really was as bad as everyone says it is.
• My father died.
• I explained the evil of coupon settlements.
• The Ninth Circuit tried to clean up the mess that is computer search and seizure law.
• I questioned the ethics of force catheterization, and got a less-than-awesome response from the AMA.
• Norman Borlaug died.
• I found some truth in rock and roll.
• I noticed that a lot of children are being charged as sex offenders.
• The feds came after bloggers who get free stuff.
• Photography was still treated like a crime.
• I questioned the level of happiness in the kingdom of Bhutan.
• I thought about the economics of the death penalty.
• The Minnesota Supreme Court reminded me that sometimes the law is really stupid.
• I gave the world a glimpse of the complex technology of my everyday life.
• Mary Beth Buchanen's reign of terror finally ended.
• A woman who supplied Eliot Spitzer with hookers had a few questions about his ethics.
• Meep.
• I spoke truth to zombie alarmism.
• I explained why the public option and healthcare reform are redundant.
• I complained that juries are kept in the dark.
• I was thankful for my friends.
• Muvico screwed over its customers.
• The Warlord of Maricopa took crazy just a little bit further...
• I explained why people on the internet seem so rude.

See you all in the new year!

My mother died in April, I moved in with my father for a few months to take care of him until I could find a nursing home, I moved him to the nursing home, I cleaned out his apartment, and I straightened out his finances. Now my father's died too, and I just got back from visiting his brother and sister and taking his ashes back to where he grew up in Kentucky.

I guess I just don't have a lot of mental energy left over for blogging these days. Sorry.

On top of that, it's the start of the busy season for my largest client, and one of my on-again-off-again clients is on again.

I'll try to get things going again around here as soon as I recover.

I don't usually announce new additions to the blogroll, but maybe it's time I start.

The libertarian world first noticed Jennifer as a commenter on Reason magazine's Hit&Run blog, where she could usually be counted on to say something intelligent and snarky.

Jennifer's actually a professional writer, with columns published in the Hartford Advocate and the New Britain Herald. One of my favorites is her piece on the Connecticut law against playing poker for money, which has an exception for games played among friends:

"It's an illegal activity," Young explained. Before anybody can play Internet poker without going to jail, "there has to be a law on the books permitting it." And there isn't. So the Advocate asked: where card games are concerned, would it be accurate to say that which is not allowed is prohibited?

"It is prohibited," Young agreed.

Unless it's among friends. So how long does it take for two strangers to legally qualify?

"We haven't really traveled down that road ... I think it's something the courts would have to work on," Young said.

The Advocate also wondered if sexual activity could form the foundation of a legal friendship. If you meet a stranger at six o'clock and have sex with him at six-fifteen, can you legally play poker in the afterglow?

I've been reading Jennifer's blog, Ravings of a Feral Genius, for a couple of years now, but I only just realized I never added it to my blogroll. Until now.

Welcome to the blogroll, Jennifer.

Joel Rosenberg has been a co-blogger here on Windypundit for a few months, so I think it's time to give him an "About" page. I asked him if he wanted to write it, but he told me to write it myself. So I did.

Actually, the page is not so much about Joel as it is about my attempt to write something about Joel. I've managed to turn his "About" page into yet another post about me. I think he deserves that for being too lazy to write it himself.

Anyway, here it is, the "About Joel Rosenberg" page. I'll put the link in the sidebar when I've heard what Joel has to say about it's accuracy...especially about those years he spent in Afghanistan smuggling heroin and guns for the mujahideen. (Just making sure he reads it.)

People used to talk about how Google was going to build a "web-based operating system." Personally, however, I'm more interested in what Amazon is doing. We all know them as a big retail e-commerce site, but running a site that big requires an incredible amount of web-based infrastructure. For the past few years, they have been commercializing their infrastructure to become one of the most influential companies in the cloud computing arena.

A few months ago they introduced Amazon CloudFront, which provides a content delivery service for making static web content available to users worldwide.

Let's say your corporate website has a lot of multimedia content---photos, background images, Flash animation, video, Ajax---like, say, Amazon. When people visit your site, their browser first downloads the main HTML for the page, and then it downloads every single multimedia component on the page.

Modern browsers try to be smart about this---starting to load images before the HTML is done, and fetching several images at the same time---but it all takes time. In addition, the round-trip times tend to be longer as your users get further from the server. If you're in Silicon Valley, people in San Francisco will see short load times, people in New York will have more of a wait, and people in Berlin could have an agonizing wait as every graphical element of your page is fetched across the Atlantic.

Arbuably, the best solution is to simplify your web site and remove all the extra content items. A site like Facebook does a pretty good job of this, but the folks who run Craigslist take it to an extreme---the home page is entirely HTML without any graphic elements.

If you can't simplify your web site, you can still take advantage of the fact that most of your graphic and multimedia content is static. That is, a query from the browser will return the same image or file every single time. Even when the media content changes every time you hit the site---as with the background images at the home page for Terminator: The Sarah Connot Chronicles---the changes are done by changing the HTML to refer to a different image URL. The image served from each URL is always the same.

(That T:SCC site is an excellant example of the kind of site I'm talking about. Every time you refresh the page, it downloads about 190 files, none larger than 60,000 bytes, and some as small as 100 bytes.)

If all of this data was generated dynamically---the result of a database query, or the personalized content of a social networking page---it would be very difficult to make it faster. But with static content, you can put copies of the data on multiple servers around the world and then arrange for browser queries to hit the closest server: Users in Los Vegas get files from Los Angeles, and users in Atlantic City get files from Newark.

This is called a Content Distribution Network (CDN), and although the concept is simple, the implementation is very expensive. You need servers all over the place, preferrably colocated at the internet peering points for maximum speed, and you have to work with the Internet backbone operators to arrange for proper routing.

Only the largest companies can afford to operate their own CDN, but smaller companies can buy these services from specialized CDN providers (Akamai is probably the best known). The plans I've seen start at around $1000 per month for basic service, so you'd only use a CDN if you already had a huge amount of web traffic.

Amazon Cloudfront changes the math on all that. Like all Amazon Web Services, Amazon charges for Cloudfront only when you use it. There's no minimum charge. Use a penny's worth of service, and they bill you a penny.

This has allowed me to host all of the static design elements of Windypundit on Amazon Cloudfront. (Images in my posts are still served from my hosting service, except for my photography which is all hosted by Smugmug.) Pull up the properties of any image that's part of the page design, and you'll see it's coming from the cf.cdn.windypundit.com domain, which is mapped to an Amazon Cloudfront server.

Here's how it prices out: I load all the images to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), paying 10 cents per gigabyte transfered plust 1 cent per 1000 items uploaded. Then I pay 15 cents per gigabyte per month to store it.

When someone loads my page, their browser sends requests for static content to the nearest Cloudfront server in Ashburn VA, Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle, St. Louis, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Asia, Hong Kong, or Tokyo.

The first time any server gets a request, it fetches the file I uploaded to S3, which costs me 1 cent per 10,000 requests and 17 cents per gigabyte trasfered between S3 and the Cloudfront server. Cloudfront then serves the file to the end user which costs between 17 and 23 cents per gigabyte transferred, and between 1 and 1.3 cents per 10,000 requests.

(Cloudfront pricing varies depending on the location of the server, and the costs of operating a data center in that location. The United States is cheapest, and Japan is the most expensive.)

Those numbers sound small, but this service is not cheap. In December when I started doing this, Cloudfront fulfilled 775910 requests totalling 2.593 GB in the United States, 179103 requests totalling 0.629 GB in Europe, 5957 requests totalling 0.020 GB in Japan, and 32305 requests totalling 0.108 GB in Hong Kong, costing me (including the 7 cent charge for S3 activity) a grand total of $1.69.

Since my hosting service only charges me about $10 per month, this is a 17% increase in my hosting costs. I've incurred another 73 cents so far in January, so it looks like that's a reasonable estimate of my usage.

My biggest concern is that I'll take a bath in service charges if my usage spikes for some reason---such as getting an Instalaunch or Slashdotted or a high rating on Digg. In theory, the additional traffic will eventually convert to more regular readers and therefore more ad revenue, but that takes a while, whereas my Cloudfront bill is due immediately.

The real questions are, does this make my site any faster? And does that higher speed encourage more people to visit? And do the extra visitors translate to more revenue?

The truth is, although the site feels like it loads faster, I haven't actually benchmarked it, and I don't track my conversion numbers, so I have no way of knowing how much money this is making me. I just did it because I thought it was cool.

I've had Windypundit moved to a new server. If you are reading this, then the windypundit.com DNS Address records have propaged to you and you are seeing the correct site.

Comments are temporarily disabled while I do some site maintenance.

Co-bloggers are urged to not contribute new material right now because it might get deleted.

Update: Back up for now.

Because of some problems I'd been having where the image handling library would crash part of the MovableType back end, I had asked my hosting service to migrate Windypundit to a different server with all-new software.

I did a backup on Thursday night, and then they scheduled the move for Friday night. I asked them to notify me when they started and ended the move, but they misinterpreted my request and thought I had asked them to coordinate with me before they started. When I didn't answer their midnight email, they didn't do the move.

We've rescheduled for tonight, but I don't want to have comments and posting down another day, so I've reenabled them. If the move doesn't go smoothly and I have to restore from backup, I'll lose some work. Similarly, if someone leaves a comment during the move, it could get lost.

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

• I made a fearless election prediction.
• John Dvorak and I found common ground.
• I introduced you to the swell guys on the Lima SWAT team.
• I piled on Ron Paul, and then again, and then one last time.
• I pondered the market failures in 22-inch wiper blades and Dulce de Leche ice cream.
• I explained why preventing deep linking is stupid and wrong.
• I designed the FEAR card.
• A guy running for office gave me an interview.
• I endorsed Barack Obama...for Governor of Illinois.
• I tried to find a polling place.
• Despite the stiff competition from Florida, Chicago showed that it could still screw up an election.
• I relived the thrills of rear wheel drive in winter.
• I explained how to pick a wife.
• Steven Spielberg and I had something in common.
• My wife and I bought a new car.
• I explained a crucial distinction in internet technology.
• I gave Ken Lammers a tag line.
• Playmobil released this charming toy.
• I explained why we shouldn't ignore prisoners.
• I explained why I love economics.
• It was okay for some people to look at naked 13-year-old girls.
• Chicago launched its war on tiny little baggies.
• The game was the game.
• I explained what it means when the Governor of New York is "linked" to a prostitution ring.
• The FBI raided people for clicking on the wrong links.
• I explained how I'd been wrong about Iraq in a post that was itself kind of wrong about Iraq.
• I clarified my position on jury nullification.
• Senator Mike Gravel. Helter Skelter. It is what it is.
• All was not actually revealed. (If you click on only one link, make it this one.)
• I found out "Slit Skirts" wasn't as cheerful as is it sounds.
• I tried to pump up my search rankings, but you all didn't do your part.
• I told the truth about elevators.
• I explained to Kip why some people claim to like competition but hate the free market.
• Police pretending not to be police claimed that Sean Bell should have known they were police.
• I made all the pictures bigger.
• I discovered Photoshop Disasters.
• I planned to entertain the little people in my media empire.
• I rated the RAV4 at 5,000 miles.
• I partied with Radley Balko.
• I finally wrote about the most evil law of all.
• Kip explained about the gay whales.
• The Chicago defense bar woke up to the blogosphere.
• I finally tried cleaning my camera's sensor.
• I felt people don't suck.
• The Chicago police demonstrated their crimefighting skills.
• The El Camino police demonstrated their fabulous educational skills.
• I explained Gayvolution.
• I explained that not all sodomy is buttsex.
• People tried to convince me that it's okay for the police to shoot babies.
• I discovered a very weird Trek mashup.
• I dabbled in video blogging. (If you click on a 1000 links, you can still skip this one.)
• A moron responded to my slam of the El Camino police.
• A typical libertarian ran for Senator in Kentucky.
• The Supreme Court gave gun owners a pat on the head and a scratch behind the ears.
• I reviewed a pretty good book about cross-examination.
• Radley Balko trashed my home town.
• I posted a driving video.
• I took pictures of fireworks.
• Norm split.
• A court misunderstood statistical sampling.
• I set myself up for a tragic movie disappointment.
• I did my third and so-far-final videoblog about the heartbreak of owning an SUV last summer.
• Barry Cooper released another DVD.
• Georgia State Troopers smelled good.
• I revealed my criminal past.
• I explained the personal pain that gay marriage has cost me.
• I looked into some of the math behind DNA matching.
• I took a few nice photos of Powers Lake, Wisconsin.
• I took a few nice photos of Jennifer.
• The Lima drug raid got uglier.
• and I explained why.
• Rob Gillies wrote one of the best news ledes ever.
• Cops got the right to break your stuff.
• The TSA continued their fine work.
• I set myself up for another tragic movie disappointment.
• A took the Maya Angelou personality test.
• Rob Nesvacil almost kinda sorta blamed right-wing pundits for an assination plot against Barack Obama.
• I said I'd do more healthcare blogging...and maybe I will someday.
• There was no rain.
• The interweb did what it does best.
• Richland County gave its cops some weapons of war.
• The USDA made it illegal to test for Mad Cow disease.
• My blog got a visit from a Hollywood producer.
• I had some questions about teen sex.
• Mark Bennett had some bad weather.
• I was awakend by a knock in the night.
• The State of California made a liar out of me.
• I asked the government for my share of the bailout.
• Knight Rider sucked.
• Clay Aiken made a shocking revelation.
• Joel Rosenberg cost me some money.
• PR6!
• I May Have Underestimated the Badness of Our Economy
• Once again, the government forces people to watch pornography.
• I come out in defense of prurient interests.
• Paul Krugman won a Nobel prize
• I had a vision of our economic future.
• I defended indecision.
• I retouched Sarah Palin.
• Rick and Brittany got married.
• I had the natural response to James Carville.
• I explained the link between legal blogging and science fiction.
• I proposed a new multi-author blog.
• We did something we can be proud of.
• Red State went crazy.
• I started my series on Obama Derangement Syndrome.
• I took on some help.
• We gave $700 billion to a guy that didn't know what he was doing.
• I posted my three-part defense of prostitutes and their customers.
• Privacy theives invaded the D.C. subway.
• I explained why subway searches aren't exactly a big win in the War On Terror.
• I lamented the rise of the prison industrial complex.
• I responded to some criticism of my prostitution posts.
• I explained my solution to the auto industry crisis.
• My out-of-town co-blogger tried to get me in trouble with the local police.
• Congress stole Christmas.

Happy New Year.

I've made a few small changes in the layout of the blog. I got tired of the rounded corners on everything, so I got rid of them. I also changed the structural relationship between the right sidebar and everything else on the page, and I changed the way the pieces of the header fit together. Also, the content no longer floats in the middle of the browser window. It's now stuck to the left margin.

It I'm not entirely pleased with the way the right sidebar relates to everything else on the page. It seems a little too visually heavy or unbalanced or something. I don't really have the design vocabulary to describe the problem, let alone the skill to find a solution. I just know I don't quite like it.

In any case, I think this layout will make it slightly easier for me to customize the page design in the future.

The folks behind the Typealyzer web site claim to be able to analyze the text of a blog and determine things about the personality of the author, and presumably the readers as well.

I ran it on Windypundit and here's how it describes us:

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generelly prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

I like it.

I'm a software developer by trade, and that's a pretty good description of the personality traits it takes to be a good software guy. Even the name "Mechanics" is right: Software geeks are mechanics whose tools are all other pieces of software.

People who know me might think otherwise, but yes, even that final sentence about how we "enjoy adventure and risk" is dead-on. I spend all day every day sitting on my ass in front of the computer and eating fatty foods. Is that risky or what?

One of the subjects I'd like to cover more on Windypundit is the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. I haven't been posting much about RKBA issues here, in part because the Republicans didn't try to push a lot of gun control measures through Congress, and in part because I just got sick of it all back in the '90's.

With the Democrats in control of the federal government again, I expect some gun control measures to start their way through the legislative process. It wasn't a big issue during the election season, but politicians have a way of returning to their roots once the election is over.

On the other hand, the Supreme Court's decision in Heller made it clear that the right recognized in the Second Amendment is an individual one, without specifying what that actually meant. This means there are a lot of courtroom battles ahead.

All in all, it looks like we'll be reading a lot more about guns and gun control in the near future.

With that in mind, I'm pleased to announce the expansion of the blogging team here at Windypundit with the addition of Joel Rosenberg (yes, that Joel Rosenberg). Joel is a firearms instructor from Minnesota, where runs the Twin Cities Carry Course. Online, he posts to his Open Sites LiveJournal page and operates the Twin Cities Carry Forum.

Joel was recently mentioned in a City Pages article by Ward Rubrecht where he gave this great quote:

[Joel] suggests that after five years, mild-mannered Minnesotans have finally learned that a gun tucked into a waistband isn't the sign of a blood-hungry nutcase.

"It's like the gay couple that moves in down the block," he says. "At first some people get upset, but after a while it's just like, 'Yeah, that's just Joe and Todd.'"

I first noticed Joel in the comments over at Simple Justice where I was struck by the fact that even though he clearly had an emotional investment in the issues, he was willing to accept the possibility that he could be wrong, willing to consider alternative explanations, and willing to believe that despite their errors, his opponents were sometimes acting with good intentions.

I hope that my lengthy introduction hasn't put too much pressure on Joel to perform. I don't expect him to hit the 10 ring on every post. On the other hand, he's the first co-blogger I've invited who I didn't know personally, so if he's too much trouble, he's outta here! No pressure, though.

His first post is coming up, so be sure to say "Hello."

Hey Everybody! Guess What? I've Just Set Up a Facebook Page For Windypundit! Now You All Can Visit Me There! Then You Can Read The Articles I've Posted Here! And You Can Leave Comments! Or Discuss Something!

The folks at Facebook seemed all excited about it. I don't get why it's such a big deal, but I'm trying.

I just noticed that Windypundit is up to Google PageRank 6!

Again.

Last time I hit PR 6, about a year and a half ago, it didn't last very long. This time, I'm going to try to make it stick. I suppose the best way to do that is to publish high-quality, timely, and original content that attracts attention and starts discussions in the blogosphere. In fact, I'd like to think that's what I've been doing all along.

But what if I've already gone as far as quality content can take me? What if, in order to go further (PR 7, where the cash really rolls in) I'll have to do something more? Clearly some SEO tactics may be advisable. To that end, I'm going to pursue a multi-pronged strategy.

First, I've begun a program of small improvements. For example, I just took the menu at the top of the page and moved the code for it to the end of the page as sent from the server. When the page finishes loading, a bit of Javascript moves the menu to the top of the page. This shortens the apparent load time, makes the page easier for the visually impaired to navigate (because their page reader doesn't have to skip all the menu links), and moves the blog content closer to the top of the file for better search engine indexing.

Second, blatant link whoring. (See title of this post.)

Third, in order to encourage you folks to post my stuff to sites like Digg or Reddit or Del.ico.us, you may notice that I've added a few social tags at the end of each blog entry. Like this:

I've been exploring the new version of the Movable Type blogging engine, and I've decided to try turning on some of the caching options.

For various reasons, I run Windypundit in dynamic publishing mode, which means that every time someone refreshes the page, the back end rebuilds the entire page from scratch. That's a little slow, but the new Movable Type allows me to specify parts of the page that are generated once and then cached, so that next time someone requests the page, those parts are pulled from the cache instead of being rebuilt from the database.

I'm not sure any of you will notice a change. Most of the loading time for Windypundit is spent on third-party Javascript thingies such as advertising and statistical counters.

Let me know if you notice a difference. Especially if I broke something.

I just upgraded the Movable Type blogging software that powers Windpundit from version 4.01 to version 4.21. I did it for all the usual reasons---better, faster, stronger...

No, maybe not stronger.

Movable Type is supposed to be easy to upgrade. Just download the gzipped archive of the latest version and dump it right on top of the existing MT installation. Then I just login to the control panel and it kicks off the automatic upgrade process which integrates the new data files, updates the database, and so on.

Everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. I did the upgrade early this morning and Windypundit was back up in a few minutes.

Then I tried to log in and post something, and all I got was a missing-file error. No menus, no posting interface, nothing.

I poked around and couldn't find anything, so I logged a support ticket at Six Apart, who make the Movable Type blogging engine. I also logged a support ticket with my web hosting provider, Downtown Host, in case they saw anything unusual on the server.

The Downtown Host people got back to me pretty quickly, and we exchanged a few ideas, but they couldn't find anything. An hour later, Six Apart sent me a message back asking for information and pointing out that my support agreement had expired.

The Six Apart support agreement costs $99 per year, but I decided to renew it because last year they helped me with a problem that I never would have found myself. After renewing, I answered their questions and told them I had renewed my support agreement.

Two hours later, they asked a couple more questions.

After another hour, they suggested the problem might be in the ImageMagick toolkit used by MovableType. I had found dozens of 25MB core dumps from the perl interpreter on the web site, indicating that perl had crashed while trying to build the main user interface dashboard.

I asked Downtown Host to reinstall ImageMagick for me, and they did, but that didn't help.

After this, I tried something on my own. I dumped the fresh Movable Type 4.21 install into a separate folder and renamed the folders so that the fresh install would run Windypundit. Then I tried to login to the publishing back end again.

This time it worked. Of course, without all the custom templates and plugins I use, the main Windypundit front page was totally hosed up. But I had proven that the problem was with something in the Movable Type software folder---as opposed to a database problem or a server configuration problem---and it was some file that my old folder had in it that was different or missing in the fresh install.

So I put my upgraded MT folder back and downloaded both it and the fresh install to my PC, ran a comparison between the directories, and spent started poking about temporarily deleting or changing files on the live website until I finally found the change that made it start working again.

Movable Type is indeed mysterious. I don't know how, and I don't know why, but all it took to get Movable Type working again was to delete one small image file sitting in the mt-static/upport/uploads folder.

Here. Take a look at the culprit:

That's Joel Rosenberg of Twin Cities Carry. I guess he tried to upload a profile picture of himself when he was leaving comments on my blog, and somehow that one file made everything blow up.

Windypundit is published using the Movable Type blogging engine from Six Apart, and they've just released an interesting sounding update. I think I'll switch to it in the next week or two.

I may have to rebuild the templates that create the look and feel of this site, but even if I don't, I'm getting a little tired of the current look of the blog and I'd like to change it.

Any suggestions?

New stuff to add?

Anything I should borrow from another site?

Anything you want to see gone?

Leave comments please.

Some of you who've tried to leave comments have probably noticed that it doesn't work very well. The Captcha codes---those annoying strange characters you have to type---just aren't working right. This is a bizarre and frustrating bit of misbehavior out of the Movable Type blogging engine. So much of it normally works so well.

I've disabled Captcha codes for now, and I'm trying a different approach to avoiding spam.

So leave a comment, and we'll see how well it works.

My birthday's coming up on the 26th, and I just wanted to share my Amazon wishlist in case anyone out there really loves me!

[DELETED]

(There should be an Amazon widget above this line. I'm curious if it works in a blog post.)

Update: I've deleted the wishlist because it no longer linked to the right stuff.

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.

Just now, I was checking my search keyword statistics at Google Analytics, and found that these are the top seven searches leading to my blog:

More than 98% of them were new visitors. Does that mean that 650 people found their way to my site looking for naked 13-year-old girls? That's just awful.

I did a Google search for "naked 13 year old girls", and it turns out Windypundit is the 7th hit. Given such a high score, I guess I should say "Welcome" to all the representatives of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies who've taken the time to drop by. Keep up the good work!

Most of the other hits looked like stories about crimes against children (as was my own post). A few of them looked a little suspicious. I didn't dare click the links to find out, of course, because that could lead me places I don't want to go. I don't recommend you try it either.

(I've heard that activists opposing child sexual exploitation sometimes get in trouble when they wonder how easy it is to find child porn on the web and decide to investigate it themselves without thinking through the implications: If they find child porn, they are guilty of possessing child porn. The first site they find will almost certainly be a law enforcement trap, and that will get them arrested.)

I was nervous just having done the search, and I closed the window as soon as I could.

Damn, this just creeps me out.

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.

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.

I just spent a few hours reviewing the last year of postings to see what Windypundit was all about. For me, 2006 was the year in which

• I had my 100,000th visitor
• we found out the truth about executed murderer John Kenneth Coleman
• the President gave us the important news that "the state of our Union is strong--and together we will make it stronger"
• the law finally caught up with Joey "The Clown" Lombardo
• I got my D200...eventually
• Blonde Justice showed us just how smart she was
• I saw the coolest video ever
• I explained just how wisely I married
• a bunch of people went looking for "flexible fuckers"
• Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face
• I found out about MySpace
• white-boy rap was all the rage
• Virginia Postrel gave up a kidney for a friend
• Lance Corporal Thomas Amos returned from Iraq (and was recently promoted to Corporal)
• I posted a few questions for Matt to ask the G
• I explained just how much the republicans are starting to look like Democrats
• I broke into a friend's house
• I discovered an important lesson in an old Clash song
• The Hawaiian government admitted I was right
• I wrote a letter to ATT which they never answered
• Heather Mac Donald snubbed my request for her phone number
• a 17-year-old girl thought I was creepy
• I found out about the saint of good parking spaces
• I gave the blog a makeover
• the Institute for Justice used one of my photos
• I took some photos of the Jeff Fest
• I figured out who the Reason Pillow Girl was
• I photographed someone taking a dive
• I explained how the law of supply and demand already affects organ donations
• I went to my first blogmeet
• I got some bad news about my personality
• Windypundit 2.0 arrived
• I explained what I think SWAT raids are really all about
• Ken Lammers changed sides
• Windypundit changed hosting services
• I discovered OK Go
• the DEA had a deceptive exhibit at the normally-reliable Museum of Science and Industry
• the Pluto haters won
• I lived life on the edge
• I crushed on Natalie Portman just a little
• I got some schadenfreude
• I still can't get this out of my head
• My wife and I lucked out in an election of our own
• we observed the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks
• Thierry Legault got a really cool photo of the International Space Station
• I had jury duty
• I tried libeling Michelle Malkin
• I sold a photo
• Glenn Renolds gave me a mini-instalaunch
• My trashing of the TSA got an interesting response in the comments
• I explained the significance of the recent U.S. population milestone
• I started eminent domain blogging again
• I posted over 1700 photos of runners at the 2006 Chicago Marathon
• Glenn Reynolds gave me a much bigger instalaunch
• I explained my political philosophy
• I encountered the Des Plaines TIF
• A young lady magician put on quite a performance
• I made a shocking admission
• I had fun freaking the squares at MADD
• I got a message from Linda Paey
• I gave the children some important advice about drugs
• I backdated a 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 arout 11:15 the next day.

Sorry if that was too much about me. Here, go read Dave Barry's review of 2006. It's much funnier.

My day job is keeping me kind of busy lately, so I haven't been blogging as much as I'd like to. I was looking at my stats to see how this was affecting them, when I noticed something interesting. Of the top 20 search terms leading people to Windypundit, six of them—including the top four—were about O.J.'s now-cancelled book, If I Did It.

That's a pretty clear example of the power of celebrity and gossip.

I guess if I want to attract more random people from search engines, I should blog more about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and adoption, Janice Dickinson and car accidents, Tawny Kitaen and cocaine, whether Naomi Campbell beats her assistants, Nancy O'Dell (whoever she is), Pamela Anderson's breakup with Kid Rock, Paris Hilton and/or Lindsey Lohan (for whatever it is this time), Star Jones Reynolds' career, Tom Cruise (not that there's anything wrong with that), and because she's still getting press, Princess Diana.

Or if I don't have time to blog about them, maybe I could at least mention them from time to time.

Update: I could also mention poker, pornography, and the conspiracy to cover up the truth about 9/11 and whether the illuminati are involved. Also, I forgot to mention Britney Spears earlier.

People who know I'm into photography sometimes ask me for advice about buying a camera, so I've been planning to put together a holiday buying guide.

Amazon, however, showed me a better way. They have a feature called aStore that allowed me to build my own online store—called WindyShopping of course—through which I can sell products from Amazon's Camera and Photo department. There's a link to WindyShopping at the top of the left-hand sidebar.

I don't own every item I sell in the store, but I have researched all of them and I believe they are good cameras at good prices. I've included commentary on every item explaining what I like about it.

I suggest you also click one of the Adorama Camera links on this page and lookup the same items there to compare prices.

Of course, if you buy through the Amazon store or through Adorama, I get a piece of the action. Even if you don't buy what I recommend, just by following a link from my site to get to Amazon or Adorama when you make your purchase, I'll get a piece of the action.

If you like what I'm doing here, I'd sure appreciate it if you helped me pay for the products and services I use to create this blog by doing some of your Christmas shopping through the links on this page.

Thanks.

I just checked my Adorama affiliate account and found out someone purchased something for $100 through this site. Thanks, whoever you are. My commission off of that will cover a few days worth of my hosting fees.

I buy most of my photographic equipment from Adorama Camera. Their site is well-organized and easy to search, and they have a good checkout process that provides detailed tracking information. They also have excellent customer service if you have questions about an order.

I'm an affiliate, which means that if you get to Adorama by clicking the Adorama link in the sidebar, I get a piece of the action off of anything you order.

They say the big purchase this season is a flat-panel television for your home entertainment center. If just a few dozen of you will buy a JVC GD-V502U 50" Plasma Large Screen Display Monitor, Windypundit will be swimming in dough.

So, if you're thinking of getting camera or video equipment for Christmas, check out Adorama and see if you can find what you want. Shop around. Compare prices. If you like what you see at Adorama—and you want to support my blog—just click through to them from my site and place your order.

I'd certainly appreciate it. Thanks.

Glenn Reynolds gave me an InstaLaunch for my post on Shooting Your Fans In the Foot. Like the last time, it was on a Saturday night, but unlike the last time, this one rocked: I've had 8000 visits to that page.

Even better, I checked my AdSense account, and I made $17.

Of course, being from Chicago, I wonder if I'm supposed to kick some of that back to Glenn...

I'm getting more comment spam than ever before, so I've added Captcha codes to comments, meaning you have to look at a picture and type the characters you see in order to leave a comment.

Try it out on this post. Let me know if you have trouble.

I think I just accidentally deleted a posting. The MovableType page that displays all your entries allows them to be selected just by clicking, and I must have accidentally selected it while deleting one of my draft posts that I decided not to finish.

I hope I didn't delete anything else.

Update: It was just the "Tiny Testicles" post below, so I wasn't going to try to get it back, but it turns out Bloglines already had a copy, so I was able to reconstruct it in about a minute. Good to know.

I've just finished migrating Windypundit to a new hosting service. I changed the DNS nameserver pointers to use the new hosting provider, so as soon as that propagates out, everyone will find me here. If you can read this, it already works for you.

For the last few years, I've been using 2MHost to host Windypundit. I picked them originally because they're a Movable Type Hosting Partner. If you're thinking of trying the MovableType blogging engine, the Hosting Partner approach works pretty well. You get all the flexibility that comes with using Movable Type, but the hosting service does the heavy lifting of installing and upgrading Movable Type.

So why did I switch? Well, one of the advantages of using a Movable Type Hosting Partner is that you don't have to pay for a Movable Type license. The Hosting Partner has one, and you get to use theirs.

However, with the recent version 3.3 release, Movable Type went back to giving a free license to non-commercial bloggers, so I don't have to worry about the cost anymore.

Also, 2MHost wasn't the most reliable host, and their customer service wasn't all that great. That's not a knock on 2MHost. They're a discount hosting service, and for $6.95/month they provided much better service and uptime than I expected.

Now that I'm earning enough in ad revenue to cover reasonable hosting costs, I've moved to Hosting Matters, which is the service that all the big dogs are using.

While I was at it, I upgraded to version 3.3 of Movable Type, which meant that I didn't just copy the database over, I had to import all the templates by hand and merge my customizations into the new templates. I'm not quite done with that. If you post a comment or try the search box, you'll still get the Movable Type default page design.

I've never really understood how trackbacks work. In fact, for over a year now, trackbacks haven't been working. I get lots of notices of spam trackbacks, but not a single legitimate trackback ever. I assume something in my Movable Type blogging software is swallowing them up, but I don't know where it happens.

I'm giving up. I've removed the trackback-receiving page from the site. I know some people live and die by trackbacks, but I just can't take the spam anymore.

[Feedback has been disabled for this page because it appears to attract a lot of spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

Earlier I pointed out the exciting changes to Windypundit when it became Windypundit 2.0 (summary: rounded corners).

Now I bring you the next step: AJAX. That's right, the hottest new trend in web site technology. The Windypundit page now makes background queries back to the Windypundit server to update its content.

In keeping with the dedication to usability and customer service that brought you rounded corners, I now bring you live AIM status. The box on the upper right (yes, the white one with the nice rounded corners) displays my AIM user ID and status if I'm available. You can then click it to reach me in AIM. If I'm not available, it shows nothing. But best of all, if I change status, the display changes without having to refresh the page. All through the magic of asynchronous HTTP queries.

Don't believe me? Just watch that box for a while until it changes. It shouldn't be too long, because I change my AIM status 2 or 3 times every day. Be careful not to miss it.

Windypundit is now Windypundit 2.0.

"Web 2.0" is the big buzzword going around the web these days. There are lots of discussions of what constitutes a Web 2.0 site—interactivity, interoperation, customization, Ajax, user-designed content, blogging, social networking, syndication, wikis...the list goes on and on—and the web business bigshots are all picking sides and trying to win the battle to define what is really Web 2.0.

In upgrading Windypundit to Windypundit 2.0, I've done extensive research on sites that are widely acclaimed to be Web 2.0 sites, and I've discovered the following list of critical Web 2.0 features:

• Rounded Corners

As you can see I've added panels with rounded corners to the right-hand sidebar. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

As an extra bonus Web 2.0 feature, I've also added drop-shadows to all the photographs I took myself.

(Some sites have drop shadows on rounded corners, but that exceeds my research budget. If enough people hit the tip jar, I just might try to implement it. Go ahead. You know you want it.)

Rounded corners and drop shadows. Just one more way I'm keeping Windypundit at the leading edge of Web trendiness.

I just received a comment to my Soggy Computers article that I wrote almost two years ago. Usually comments on something that old are pure spam—the spammers are hoping I won't notice comments on the old stuff—but I'm not so sure about this one. The message, in its entirety, is

Sorry for this

That's it. No links of any kind.

I've had the same basic layout on this blog for about a year now, and I'm getting a little tired of it. So I decided to make some changes. By the time you read this, the first layer of changes will be in place, so if you want to see the design I'm tired of, you should look at this screenshot. (If it's hard to read, you need to tell your browser to display it full size. If it looks ugly, you're seeing it correctly.)

I needed some help, so I emailed Philipp Lenssen, the proprietor of Google Blogoscoped, for a little advice.

I'm thinking that I'd like to try to build up my blog into a little more of a web presence, and I'm wondering if you would mind taking a look at it with an eye toward increasing traffic to my site. Sort of like an informal SEO advisor...

I have two goals in mind:
1. Attracting attention to myself.
2. Making money.

What I'm looking for is kind of a close-reading of the structural elements of the blog, links, google stuff, things like that, as well as advice on posting and marketing practices.

Philipp knows a lot about search engines, and he's working at becoming a professional blogger, so I figured he'd be a good source of advice. I also like his approach to improving search-engine results for a site, which I would characterize as post great content, make a name for yourself, let other people link to you.

It was some article of Philipp's that convinced me to create an About page with my picture on it and put up a best-of section in the sidebar. The best-of list helps first-time visitors get a better sense of me and the bio and photo make it easier to get to know me, and therefore to rememeber my blog.

Of course, I had some limits:

I'm not planning any major content changes. I know I could get more traffic as a single-issue blogger, but that's just not going to happen. I'm probably not willing to avoid the puns and allusions in my article titles either :)

The next day, Philipp sent me a list of suggestions, most of which were pretty good, and some of which I was willing to do. He also included a mock-up design for my the new Windypundit.

That design is a little too extreme for me, and some of his suggestions don't fit my blog's purpose, but most of what he had to say was dead-on. Based on his suggestions, I've already make a number of changes:

• I removed the repeating "skyscraper windows" background image and just left the background almost pure white.
• I got rid of the borders around my photographs, but I left them in place on all the other images (downloaded from othe blogs, promotional images, stuff like that).
• I grouped the main body and left-hand columns together, and added borders that help suggest it's a separate piece of paper.
• I added more whitespace between the left and center columns.
• As in Philipp's example, I left the right column "lying" on the background.
• The left sidebar now has a pure white background. (So does the center, but it always did.)
• Philipp suggested I switch to a sans-serif font, but fonts without serifs often look awkward to me in large blocks of text. On the other hand, not even the New York Times uses the Times Roman font on their web page like I did. My solution was to use the Georgia font. It still has serifs, but it's a more open and inviting font than Times Roman. Also, it's the font the New York Times is now using on their website.
• I separated the banner at the top from the rest of the blog with some whitespace and a heavy border.
• I lightened up the banner image to go with the generally lighter look of the whole page.
• I removed the dark and ugly ad boxes that appear on the individual archive pages.

Nearly all of these changes were accomplished through changes to the CSS style sheet. I didn't have to change any HTML generated by the blogging software, except to remove the ad blocks. (They just had to go.)

I'm still planning a few more changes, but some of these will be more work to do:

• Generally brighten up the colors of the blog.
• Replace the NASA shot of the Chicago beachfront with some other photograph of my own to fit the newer color scheme.
• Get rid of the purple color used for visited links. I'm not sure why that's there, it's not one of my design colors.
• Re-arrange the navigation features, icons, and badges of the blog, so they don't contribute to making this blog look exactly like all the others.
• Either use a smaller banner image and move it down into the "page" with the main text—allowing the right hand column to rise to the top of the window—or move a bunch of navigation features up into the banner area so it functions like a control panel for the blog.
• Maybe quit some of the TTLB communities and remove their links from my blogroll.
• Make the Windypundit logo a bit larger.

Update: Here's what I did in phase 2 of the blog makeover:

• I couldn't find any photos in my own collection that would work well in the header, so I bought a Chicago lakefront photo by Matt Dula from iStockphoto for $3.
• I decided that muted colors work better for the type of content I'm publishing, so I won't be adding brighter colors. However, since the new photo doesn't have large patches of brownish-yellow like the old photo did, I got rid of the brownish-yellow accents in the headlines and sidebar links and replaced them with a light blue.
• I got rid of the purple links, although some of the blue ones are looking a bit purple-ish.
• I made the banner image smaller, and moved it down into the smaller "page" within my main page—allowing the right-hand column to rise to the top of the window.
• I put the Best-Of section and Department list into pop-up menus on the right-hand side to remove some clutter from the left margin.
• I built my own vector version of the Windypundit logo in Photoshop, which gives me a lot more control, so I made it bigger and I made it blue instead of white.
• One of my design points is that every clickable part of the page should have a rollover response to emphasize that you've found something you can interact with. Since I have my own version of my logo, I made a white version which I use for the rollover. Some of the link icons to other sites are still static, but I think everything I provide now has a rollover response.
• Philipp wanted me to move the Google ads out of the left-hand column, but my ad revenue more than doubled when I moved the ads from the right-hand column to their current position. I'm scared to move them somewhere else. As a compromise, I've slid the left-hand column down the page a bit so the reader's eyes will read the headline first.

There are still a few things left to do:

• Continue re-arranging the navigation features of the blog so it looks a little cleaner.
• Replace my rickety home-grown menus with a bulletproof menuing system off of some JavaScript web site.
• I'm still thinking about quitting some of the TTLB communities.
• Maybe add a few colored accents.

"flexible fuckers"

Other popular search terms:

• lee tamahori cruising (5 visits)
• shoe fetish (4 visits)
• 007 director prostitute (2 hits)
• simcity new orleans (2 hits)
• lets go cruising with lee tamahori (2 hits)

And some one-hit wonders:

• anti-panty
• "barter for sex"
• strip clubs in virgina
• sprint automatic bill pay sucks
• "bodies started turning up all over town"
• dry ice bombs legal texas
• desert eagle gunshot sounds
• "my fucking ears"
• how to find hookers in chicago
• valkenvania
• "death by flatulence"
• compare benjamin franklin and oprah winfrey

Thank you very much to someone using the internet service provided by Satyam Infoway (a.k.a. sify.net) in Delhi, India at 3:41:30 this morning. That was Windypundit's 100,000th visitor.

The visit was, of course, to my Google Earth page, which is responsible for much of the traffic to this site. The referring URL was blank, but it's got to be a search engine.

The first non-Google-Earth visitor was number 100,011 via Telus Corporation (telus.net) in Vancouver, British Columbia who found my second Nikon D200 page via a Canadian Google search for "nikon d200" at 6:13:32.

At 8:45:16, visitor 100,034 surfing via Ameritech (ameritech.net) in the Chicago area found my eminent domain page with a Google search for "korean song do market arlington heights illinois international plaza".

Finally, at 9:25:16, a hit to the main page with visitor 100,043 surfing via Bredbandsbolaget AB (bostream.se) in Ngrden, Vastra Gotaland, Sweden. The link came via Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped about page, where he inexplicably includes a quote from me praising his site.

Lastly, at 10:33:59, visitor 100,067 surfing via Optimum Online (optonline.net) in Great Neck, New York hits the main page directly, without a Google-related referring URL (unless their browser hid it).

Thank you, all, for dropping in to see me.

Now let's enjoy 2006!

I've added a link on the right in the Resources section for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's page for bloggers. Lots of stuff about the legal issues affecting blogging.

Now this is kind of cool. At least it is for me.

I'm not sure why, but Rajagopal Sukumar over at Sast Wingees Speaketh has named me Unsung Blogger of the Week. He has posted my answers to an email interview .

Guess what everybody? I just broke the $200 mark on my Google AdSense earnings! And it only took seven months!

Somehow, I just don't think I'm gonna make it as a full-time blogger.

I've just joined the Life, Liberty, Property Community at TTLB, which is a group of 87 blogs—now 88 blogs—that share a belief that the purpose of government is to protect our inherent rights, identified by John Locke as the rights to Life, Liberty, and Property. Note their link button in the right-hand bar.

Welcome, by the way, to anyone who's dropping by thanks to Eric's New Member announcement for me. Check out some of my "Best Of" links in the left-hand bar to see the sorts of things I write about. (Eric spells my name wrong in the announcement—it's Draughn, pronounced just like drawn—but that's okay, I'm used to it. Besides, I couldn't spell his last name either.)

I'm hoping that joining this community will help me find other bloggers with similar interests, will lead to new ideas for articles, and will maybe draw a little more traffic my way. For my part, I need to start contributing regularly to keep the community's stats up and to help draw more attention to it.

I've fixed another one of Jakob Nielsen's top ten blog design mistakes that I mentioned earlier by creating a Best of Windypundit collection of articles to introduce newcomers to my blog:

• Greatness
• The Greatest American
• MADD Man
• Freedom Isn't Free
• Wedding Night
• Cal Thomas's 24-Hour Torture
• Protecting Prostitutes
• Protecting Prostitutes, Part 2
• The Wealth Un-Race
• Be the Good Guy
• Great Moments in Data Mining
• Whither Joe Batters?
• Soggy Computers

I picked articles that people have said they liked, or that show how I like to think about various issues.

Also, because photographs are easy to skim through, I added links to the entire series of photography-based departments:

• Eminent Domain
• Photoblogging
• Catblogging

Now I think I only make four of the mistakes on Nielsen's list, and three of those are design decisions. That leaves only Irregular Publishing Frequency, which will probably always be a problem.

I've just asked my hosting service to upgrade Windypundit to the latest version of the Movable Type blogging software. If you don't see any more postings, you'll know something went wrong. That's not a knock against the fine folks at 2MHost, I've just done enough software upgrades to know things can go wrong.

I mentioned earlier that Windypundit makes seven of Jakob Nielsen's top ten blog design mistakes. I've fixed two of them by adding an "About Me" page to the left sidebar.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen's top ten blog design mistakes. Windypundit makes seven of them, maybe eight, depending on what my future boss thinks of my opinions.

(Hat tip: Philipp Lenssen.)

Windypundit is now page rank 5.

I few weeks ago I accidentally helped break the Google Earth story and got linked from Slashdot, which resulted in an inundation of visits to this site.

People have been asking what that's like. Take a look:

You can see it all. The left half of the graph is my initial pitifully low traffic. On May 28th, you can see a bit of a bump where Google Blogoscoped linked to me. Then, right at the end of the month, I get a link from Slashdot. Slightly after that, ten thousand visitors drop in.

That arcs down beautifully for the next couple of days, and then starts to pick up again when I get linked from some 3D sites. That was arcing back down until today, when there was a slight uptick. I'm guessing that's just rebound after the weekend.

Sigh. I'd rather people visited my site for my my witty writing, my beautiful photography, and my erudite opinions. Instead, everyone just wants to see Google Earth. Then again, I've made ten bucks in Google AdSense. Woo-hoo!

I don't want to get too involved in blogospheric self-reference, but I want to thank everybody who's visited Windypundit in the last few months, and I especially want to thank Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped for sending me an enormous amount of traffic.

I started Windypundit in July of 2002. I didn't work at it too seriously, and I let it go for a while, but then I started posting regularly again at the end of last year.

In April, after almost 3 years in existence, Windypundit had its thousandth visit. They were starting to come faster too, so I figured the 2000th visit would take a lot less than three years. I had no idea what was coming.

When Google sent me the link to the Google Earth Beta, I tried it and I thought it was pretty cool, so I grabbed some screenshots and posted an article.

Then I checked Lenssen's site and noticed he didn't have anything about it. So I sent him an email. I thought he might be interested, and I thought the information and screen shots might get me a few visitors.

Several hundred people arrived on each of the next few days. Then, as near as I can tell, addict3d picked it up. And then mighty Slashdot picked it up.

Nine thousand people dropped by that day. Another five thousand have dropped by since then. Unbelievable.

This is all about one post, so I expect it to die down pretty fast. Only about 1000 visits so far today. I'm no longer feeling the love.

Actually, I'm kind of relieved. I had contacted 2MHost to find out what to do if I ran out of bandwidth, just in case this continued. (God forbid I get Instalaunched!) They said they'd take care of me.

So thanks, Philipp, for the original link; thanks A^C^E for the addict3 post, thanks Zonk at Slashdot, and thanks to all my readers, old and new, for visiting.

Now let's see if I can scare up some actual content...

Wow! The things that happen when you're away from the blog for a day...

I just got a link from Slashdot, via an earlier Addict3d.org link.

That sent me over nine thousand visits on Tuesday.

Uh...Hi there everybody!

I think I've got to find out what 2MHost does if I hit my bandwidth limit. Do they charge me or shut me down? And which would I prefer?

This has produced a bit of a spike in my stats:

Update: And those 9000 visitors earned me exactly 23 cents from Google Adsense. I don't think Windypundit is going to be a profit-making venture...

(The low revenue is not at all surprising: I had the ads placed in a bad position. I was less interested in ad revenue and more interested in what Google thinks my site is about.)

Update: This is amazing. I'm getting visitors from everywhere:

And check out the browser share. You know you must have a link from Slashdot when there are more people using Firefox than Internet Explorer.

Let's take a look at a picture of Ripley:

Ripley

The HTML for that looks like this:

<div class="art-photo-l">
<a href="/archives/2005/images/20050401-IntroducingRipley.jpg"
title="Ripley"><img alt="Ripley"
src="/archives/2005/images/20050401-IntroducingRipley-thumb.jpg"
width="400" height="300" />
</a>
<p>Ripley</p>
</div>

(I've simplified the HTML in these examples slightly for readability, so they may not work as shown.)

That's kind of messy, especially when I have to do that for every photo I want to post. I often get it wrong.

Even worse, if I want to do a blog-wide change to something about the photos, I have to edit every entry that has photos. (Unless the change only affects the CSS and not the HTML.)

So I wanted to try replacing those big HTML blocks with something simpler that abstracts away the HTML that implements it. I started by using Brad Choate's MTMacro plugin for Movable Type. It's well documented and easy to use, so within a few minutes I had boiled the text down to something like this:

<MTWpArtPhoto
  image="20050401-IntroducingRipley"
  title="Ripley"
>

And it worked great. I'd type this little bit of code to replace the photo HTML in each blog entry—which made them a lot simpler—and the HTML sent to the browser was the same as before. The only difference is that I don't have to maintain each one separately.

I'd changed about a half-dozen of them when I remembered I also had to change the templates for the various archives. After making the change, I clicked on an individual article link and got this message:

The requested page could not be found.

Smarty error: [in mt:35 line 15]:
syntax error: unrecognized tag 'MTMacroApply' 
(Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 556)

Now archive templates are just like the main template, except that I have all the archives set up for dynamic rebuilding. When a visitor requests one of those pages, Movable Type builds it and serves it on the fly. I do this so I don't have to rebuild all the blog pages whenever I make a template change. The main page, however, is static. That's for efficiency, so it doesn't have to be rebuilt every single time a visitor checks it.

I disabled dynamic content and rebuilt the entire web site, and sure enough, everything worked fine. So MTMacro doesn't work in dynamic mode for some reason. Well, it hasn't been maintained in a while, so perhaps it missed a Movable Type upgrade. Fine. I'll build my own special-purpose Movable Type plugin to implement the MTWpArtPhoto tag.

It took about an hour of tinkering to figure out how plugins worked and to create a dummy plugin to test with. I tried it with dynamic pages and it didn't work at all. The MTWpArtPhoto tag just got copied into the outgoing page. A little more research led me to the Process Tags plugin, which allows you to turn on tag processing in blog content. Try it again...another error message.

What the heck? It's almost like plugins are broken in Movable Type with dynamic content. But that can't be, because all those plugins are such big part of Movable Type...time to do some research.

Well, it turns out SixApart did break plugins in dynamic templates. Plugins that add new tags have to be built with PHP and/or something called SMARTY. I didn't bother to look up what that is. It would be nice if SixApart had documented this.

Movable Type's dynamic publishing mode supports plugins as well. The architecture is different, but should be familiar in some respects.

That's it. That's all they said about plugins. I don't know about the rest of you, but it's not immediately obvious to me that this means that dynamic publishing is implemented in a completely different way from static publishing and all the old plugins won't work.

I wrote a simple dynamic plugin, and it doesn't look too hard, but it only works for the dynamic pages, not the static main page. I'd have to jump through the hoops to make the main page dynamic too, and that will be a bit inefficient. If I want it to work both ways, I'll have to implement both Perl and PHP versions of the tag. And I still haven't tested if PHP plugins work from blog content...

I'm sure there's some reason why the developers did it this way, but the result is frustrating as hell.

UPDATE: I decided to try to implement both versions of the MTWpArtPhoto tag after all. This required me to program in two languages I hardly ever use: Perl and PHP.

The first step was to figure out how to get the new PHP-based plugins to be processed in the blog content. With the Perl plugins, I used the Process Tags plugin from Adam Kalsey. It allows me to do this in the template:

<MTEntryBody process_tags="1">

That's all it takes to get Movable Type to expand tags in the blog content on static pages. However, Kalsey hasn't gotten around to implementing the "process_tags" attribute in PHP yet, so it doesn't work on dynamic pages. I took a look at how the Perl version is implemented and decided to try to implement my own version.

It looks like this:

<?php
function smarty_modifier_process_tags($body,$args) {
    global $mt;
    $ctx =& $mt->context();
    if ($ctx->_compile_source('entry body', $body, $_var_compiled)) {
	    ob_start();
	    $ctx->_eval('?>' . $_var_compiled);
	    $_contents = ob_get_contents();
	    ob_end_clean();
	    return $_contents;
    } else {
        return '<p><strong>Error compiling blog entry'
        . 'with Process Tags.</strong></p>' . $body;
    }
}
?>

I based this on the implementation of the MTInclude tag, and there are parts of it I don't understand that I just put in there because they were in MTInclude. In other words, this is cargo-cult programming. But it seems to work.

I'm now working my way back through all the older blog entries and modifying them to use the new photo tag.

Taxes done (getting money back), day job slowing down, back to blogging...

I've decided to add Google AdSense advertising to the blog. It's not so much that I want the money...Well, actually, I do want the money. It's just that with my stats, I'm not going to be getting the money. That first $100 check should take about a decade...

Anyway, it's not so much that I want the money, it's that I wanted to know what Google thinks my blog is about...and now I do.

Google thinks my blog is about cats.

Well...I'm back.

By now, the new nameserver entries should have propagated out to everyone who reads this. (I think there are a few of you.)

Windypundit used to be served by a low-budget Windows-based business hosting service called LFC Hosting. For a pretty low monthly fee, they hosted both my business site and this blog. They have a great many features turned on for this price, including MYSQL and Microsoft SQL databases. If you know how to build web sites, have a small budget, and don't need to support high-volume web traffic (i.e. the web site does not constitute your primary business activity) then LFC is a good place to start.

The downside is that their servers are a bit slow, probably because they squeeze a lot of sites on them to save money. Readers of Windypundit might not have noticed it, because once the page pops up they just scroll down the page. I, on the other hand, am always clicking around the MovableType user interface, usually updating and rebuilding either postings or site templates. The 2-5 second pauses each and every time were getting quite painful.

Now, for only a few dollars per month, I'm hosted with these guys:

They're a MovableType Hosting Partner. The servers are linux-based, and I guess that means they run Perl a lot faster. MovableType, let me tell you, screams on the 2MHost server.

I'm enjoying this.

Windypundit is moving to a new server.

Back up in a few hours I hope.

After the Sprint post below, I decided to add content rating information to this site. I'm now rated by ICRA.

I selected some pretty heavy content ratings. Although most of this site is rated PG, I'm clearly capable of going off the deep end now and then. Also, if violent or sexual topics come up, I want to be able to discuss them seriously and, if necessary, explicitly without having to censor myself. Important topics are best served by frank and unflinching discussion. Plus you never know when I'll link to naked pictures of Charisma Carpenter.

Converting from Blogger to Movable Type.

Very busy...

I'm in the process of converting this site to use XML and .NET because I'm a programmer by trade and I want to learn how.

However, I've had an actual paying programming job for the last month, and that's used up all my spare time so I can't update the site.

I'll be on hiatus for a while...

To the two or three of you out there reading this: Sorry. Actual paying work has been occupying so much of my time that I barely have time to keep up with my reading, let along writing something.

The good news is that I'm off of Blogspot. Also, I'm planning to convert all this to an XML based system, just because I think I can.

Even Virginia Postrel's posting schedule is looking better. Sigh.

Wow. This blog's stats have shot up noticably due to an amazing number of visits from people wanting to know more about Madelyne Toogood. Weirdly, several of them appear to be looking for nude pictures of her. I still don't really think this story is worth the ridiculous amount of coverage it's been getting, but I'm beginning to understand...

I guess any publicity is good publicity but did the Blog Report really have to link to my site with this tag?

Is This Flatulence?? No It's The Windy Pundit!!!...

This is a serious site about serious issues, dammit!

Sigh...Hello to you folks visiting from the Blog Report. I'm so sorry to disappoint you if you came hear looking for some kind of dirty humor site. Fortunately for you, there are plenty of places to find that kind of thing on the web.

I'm somewhat less sorry if you came here looking for something about flatulence. You're on your own, pal. Nevertheless, unsurprisingly, the web can help you out with that:

• Flatulence (definition)
• Flatulence Explained
• What causes flatulence?
• Can Flatulence be Controlled?
• Flatulence Filter Customer Stories
• Flatulence in Literature
• Death By Flatulence
• The Long and Loud History of Flatulence
• farts.com

Hmmm...I hope writing "flatulence" all those times doesn't push me to the top of Google's hit list for that word...

[Update: Most of these links are probably dead by now.]

I've now joined the Central Illinois Blogging Society Web Ring run by Bill Dennis Apparently, he's an actual journalist with, like, writing skills and everything. That's right, people pay him for his writing. Not only that, he does real journalist stuff like cover events and interview people, bringing actual new facts to light.

By comparison, my only paid piece was a technical article for VAX Professional magazine about 10 years ago. A big part of my reason for writing this blog (aside from the ego trip of having people read my rants) is to improve my writing skills by practicing them regularly. I need a lot of practice. Even a short thank-you note like this takes me way too long to write.

He says he's letting me join his web ring because he likes my stuff, but I suspect he's just trying to pump up his membership stats. I can live with that.

[Note: This article has been updated to remove dead links.]

I just noticed in the stat logs that Bill Dennis gave me the traditional Bloggerville house-warming gift: A link from his Bill's Content page.

There's only one referral in the logs, so I assume that was just Bill checking the link, but it was still cool. Thanks.

[Note: This article has been updated to remove dead links.]

Just flipped the Public bit on the Blogger settings page. Five hits so far, all from me. It's a start.

Welcome to my blog. I'm a software developer living in Chicago. I'll be talking about government, guns, software, news, economics, warfare, driving, and whatever else suits my fancy.

I would like my postings to have the intelligence of Virginia Postrel, the wit of UThant, and the posting frequency of Instapundit. Instead, I'll probably get the intelligence of Homer Simpson, the wit of software documentation, and the posting frequency of Virginia Postrel.

The world awaits.