I run the web server that hosts this site, so the only one who can suspend me is me. Actually, it’s a virtual private server (VPS) that InMotion Hosting has running in the cloud somewhere, and if they got mad at me, they could certainly kick me out, but it wouldn’t result in the web server showing an “Account Suspended” banner because there wouldn’t be a webserver.

I’ve just been changing servers. InMotion provisioned the server when I come on board, but they haven’t been upgrading it much since then. To be sure, I get a variety of security and maintenance updates to the software on the server, but they are still somewhat limited in what they can upgrade while I’m using it. So every few years I spin up a new hosting plan and move all the websites^[1]I host a few sites for friends. over to their bright new home.

Despite the complexity of modern hosting, it usually goes remarkably well: Using the cPanel management platform, I download a backup of each site from the old server, upload that backup onto the new server, and then switch the CloudFlare front-end to point to the new server’s IP address. It only takes a few minutes per site. Then I suspend the site account on the old server, so I can be sure that I really am serving the site from the new server.

This time that step was even easier, because the new versions of WHM have a slick transfer tool. I just give the new server my login credentials for the old server, and it connects over and lists all the sites. I pick the ones I want to move, and it downloads and installs them on the new server. All I have to do is switch IP addresses at CloudFlare.

There were a couple of glitches, however, which is why you might have noticed some problems. The rest of this post is about those glitches.

The first glitch was that something that didn’t work right with the origin server certificates. You may have noticed that my site shows up in your browser as having a secure connection — the URL starts with https and the certificate is valid. Normally, that would happen because I went through the traditional process of generating a digital server certificate and having it signed by a trusted authority. Here, however, it’s happening because your browser isn’t talking directly to my server, it’s talking to the proxy servers at CloudFlare and they add the appropriate SSL/TLS certificates on my behalf as a free service. It’s one click and you see a secure connection between your browser and CloudFlare.

The connection between my server and Cloudflare is a little more complicated. I could use a traditional SSL/TLS server ticket, signed by the appropriate authority, and CloudFlare would accept the signature to authenticate my website. But it turns out I can avoid doing that work by generating and installing a certificate that has been automatically signed by CloudFlare. No ordinary browser client will accept such a certificate, of course, but Cloudflare will. And that authenticates and secures my connection through CloudFlare to your browser.

The problem was that some of the certificates did not get installed in the new server, and it took me a while to figure out what had happened. During that time, I was switching back and forth between servers, so you may have caught a glimpse of the “Account Suspended” banner when I switched servers before I remembered to unsuspend my account. Eventually I got it sorted out.

The second glitch was far more confusing: Some of the posted images on my browser weren’t loading in the web pages. I verified that the server was sending 404 Not Found errors for those image requests. But why?

I quickly realized that the problem was with thumbnail images. If a page requested a full image, the server found it, but if the page tried to load a thumbnail, it wasn’t found. I checked the directory where all the media for posts are stored, and the thumbnail files were missing. There are ways to force WordPress to regenerate the thumbnails, but…this was ringing a bell…

I had done something unorthodox many years ago, and now I was paying the price.

It all started because I don’t like the way WordPress handles thumbnail images. If you upload a file named fluffy-cats.jpg, WordPress will immediately generate a bunch of pre-configured thumbnails, and give them names that encode the sizes: fluffy-cats-100x100.jpg, fluffy-cats-270x270.jpg, fluffy-cats-500x300.jpg, and so on. The problem I had was that it would put these thumbnails side-by-side in the same folder as the original image, creating a lot of clutter. For better or worse^[2]At the time, media management in WordPress was very primitive. It’s gotten better over the years, and I probably wouldn’t worry about the thumbnail clutter problem if I faced it today., I decided to change how this worked.

I wrote a WordPress plug-in to provide dynamic thumbnails on demand. WordPress operates as a front controller, meaning that it analyzes the URL of each web request and responds to it by generating the page content from its database. For the sake of efficiency, however, the Apache web server first checks the filesystem for a matching file. If it finds one, it serves it directly, without ever involving the WordPress code. On the other hand, if it doesn’t find the file, it still has to fire up WordPress to generate the response.

What my plug-in did was hook into WordPress to respond when the Apache web server couldn’t find an image file. So if a request came in for FluffyCat.jpg, the Apache web server would find that and never forward the request to WordPress. But if the request was for a file using the standard sizing notation such as FluffyCat-100x100.jpg, Apache would discover that there was no such file and forward the request to WordPress, where my plug-in would locate the source FluffyCat.jpg file — all 5 megabytes of it — resize it to 100 by 100, and send it back to the requesting browser client.^[3]Yes, this is less CPU efficient than pre-generated static thumbnails, but the generated files are still going to be cached by CloudFlare, so I’m not too worried about the additional load on the processor.

For some reason, that wasn’t working. WordPress was never seeing the request for the resized file. I poked around in the logs, and it didn’t even look like Apache was receiving the request. What the heck?

As it turns out, there’s one more layer to all this. The VPS is running a lightweight web server called nginx as a reverse-proxy cache, meaning that it keeps copies of the responses to some requests and next time it sees one of the same requests, it fills it directly from its copy without involving the Apache server or WordPress.^[4]This was another reason I wasn’t too worried about generating the thumbnail responses on the fly.

On the new server, however, there’s an added twist: For certain types of static content — files that rarely change, such as images and videos — the nginx server serves them up directly. And if it can’t find the matching file it doesn’t forward the request to Apache. It just sends a failure code. So Apache — and therefore WordPress – never receives the request, so the image is never generated, and nginx sends the dreaded 404 Not Found response.

To fix that, I had to learn yet another bit of technical arcana: nginx web server configuration files. By itself, that’s not too bad. I’m familiar with the basic principles of a web server, and nginx is well-documented. But of course there was a complication… InMotion Hosting doesn’t edit these configuration files by hand. They have scripts to do that. So I had to learn the hosting service scripting system first. Fortunately, they actually wrote documentation explaining how to use their nginx scripts. I just had to change a couple of things and re-run the scripts and it worked.

That was enough to get the sites up and running. Since then, I’ve got full site backups running, so I think I’m ready to tell InMotion to deprovision the old server. It should be smooth running from here…until the next time.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Still Here

WordPress has been threatening us with their new Gutenberg editor for months now, and I guess it’s finally arrived, despite the fact that the trial Gutenberg plugin has been getting abysmal reviews.

What the hell were they thinking? Gutenberg is trying to be some kind of low-rent page builder, allowing users to drag and drop feature blocks into a page. People who use WordPress to build commerce sites love that sort of thing, because it gives them complete control over the design of every page on an individual basis. I use WordPress for blogging, however, so I hated Gutenberg on sight.

Look, I just want to write stuff. I don’t want or need to make every single page look unique and different. Blogging for me is about content, not visual design.

When WordPress started talking about Gutenberg, I ignored it, because it figured it would just be another editor. I didn’t expect such a drastic change. I didn’t expect that I would have to stop and learn a new way of posting stuff. In essence, WordPress Gutenberg has broken the fundamental workflow of blogging: Open the page and start writing.

In the long run, It’s not going to be a huge deal for me. I deal with technical blogging stuff all the time, and I’ve worked with page builders before, so I’m sure I’ll get used to it. But I suspect some of the more curmudgeony bloggers out there (I’m looking at you, Greenfield!) are going to hate this change.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: Go back to the old editor with the Classic Editor plugin:

Note that it has already been installed by over 700,000 users. I’m one of them. I threw this post together in a few minutes in the old editor.

Update: If you only want to disable Gutenberg for some of the users on your blog, there’s the Disable Gutenberg plugin, which gives you detailed control over when and for whom Gutenberg is active.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How To Save Yourself From the New WordPress Editor

A couple of months ago, however, it started crashing. It would be okay for a few days but then it would start crashing over and over 5 or 6 times within a few hours, reporting a variety of reasons. Just in case it was a software problem, I tried repaving it — wiping out the hard drive and reinstalling Windows and everything else from scratch — but the crashing continued. If I knew more about computer hardware (and had supplies handy) I might have tried replacing parts until the crashing stopped, but that seemed like a lot of work for a computer that was kind of clunky and old fashioned. I decided I wanted a nice shiny new one.

As usual, I wanted something with a lot of performance. I’m not talking about a bleeding-edge gaming system — getting that last little bit of extra performance is way too costly — but I definitely wanted to find something speedier than a typical office computer. I started by visiting all my favorite custom gaming computer vendors — Origin, Maingear, CyberPower, Falcon, Digital Storm — and using their configuration systems to put together a whole bunch of different fantasy computers, trying out combinations of parts to see how the cost worked out for various options.

My search ended where it always does: With me realizing I could get exactly what I wanted and save hundreds of dollars by purchasing the parts separately and building the computer myself.  I’m not an expert at building PCs, but it’s not that hard these days. Tom’s Hardware has excellent instructions, a buying guide, and tons of component reviews. If you can wire up an entertainment system in your living room, you can build your own PC.

I can’t say that putting together a PC is a fool-proof operation, but it’s definitely fool tolerant: You might not be able to get it working, but short of major physical mishandling, it’s pretty hard to damage the parts. So you can just keep trying again and again until you get it right. And if that doesn’t work, just take all the parts to a storefront PC repair store with good reviews (not one of the big box computer stores) and tell them “I fucked up my build. Can you put it together for me?” It will cost you something, but it will still be cheaper than buying a high-end system pre-assembled.

I did decide to do one thing different this time: I wanted an overclocked PC. I had avoided overclocking in the past because it sounded like too much trouble. A CPU chip running faster than the manufacturer’s specified speed can be unstable, and wasn’t I trying to replace a computer that kept crashing?

The thing is, overclocking has become pretty mainstream. Both Intel and AMD sell CPU chips that have the clock controls unlocked, and several motherboard manufacturers sell boards that have the extra power management and specialized software you’ll need. The overclocking process is a bit complicated, and feeding a CPU too much power can destroy it, but as long as you’re reasonably careful, the worst thing that happens is that the CPU heats up more than usual. You can fix that by adding more cooling.

Oh, you can still do crazy, bleeding edge speed tricks. The latest one I heard of is “delidding,” which means carefully slicing the top off the CPU module to expose the circuitry inside and replacing the internal packing with material that conducts heat better. But for more mainstream overclocking, all you need is an unlocked CPU, a motherboard with overclocking support, and good cooler.

I finally decided to buy

• Intel’s top-of-the line 8th generation Core i7 processor. It only has 6 cores, but the processors with more cores are slower and I’ve generally found that peak core speed is more important for my applications than more cores. I rarely even peg all 4 cores in my current computer.
• I nice overclocking motherboard from MSI.
• 32 GB of DDR4 memory. Some of my applications are really memory hogs. I got 3200MHz RAM because people doing benchmarks were reporting that faster RAM didn’t make much of a difference for normal kinds of loads.
• A Samsung EVO M.2 solid state drive, because those memory hogging programs need to fill that memory as fast as possible.
• A 280mm liquid cooling system. It’s a completely sealed system, so there’s nothing to fill or replace. Basically, it works like a car radiator in miniature: There’s a pump attached to the CPU and it pumps coolant to a radiator mounted at the top of the case. Calling it 280mm just means that the radiator is attached to a pair of 140mm fans.
• A GeForce 1080 graphics card. My monitors are IPS displays for accurate color rendering for photography at HD resolutions, so I don’t need the much-more-expensive 1080Ti, which is for driving high-frame rate 4K gaming monitors. I could probably get away with a 1070, but the 1080 is only slightly more expensive.
• A 750 watt power supply. That’s more than it will ever use, but you don’t want to be straining your power supply.
• A Master Cooler MasterCase MC500P. At $127, it’s the most I’ve ever paid for a computer case, and it was definitely worth it. It has good cable routing and airflow, it comes with all the screws and hardware you’re likely to need, and it’s very flexible about how you mount components. It’s also just well made. All the removable parts reattach without having to fiddle with them. Plus it has handles on top to make it easy and safe to carry. It truly made the build much easier.

Once all the parts arrived, I started assembly. There were a lot of parts to connect:

• Clamp the CPU on the motherboard.
• Install the hard drive.
• Mount the motherboard in the case.
• Mount the power supply in the case.
• Install the memory.
• Run the motherboard power cable.
• Run the CPU power cable.
• Attach the front panel hard drive indicator light.
• Attach the power switch and power indicator light.
• Attach the reset switch.
• Attach the front panel USB.
• Attach the lower front fan.
• Attach the upper front fan (had to remove and rotate it to make it reach).
• Attach the built-in speaker.
• Install the radiator and fans.

At this point I decided to attach the pump to the CPU. This was the trickiest part because the base of the pump has a heat sink with fluid channels, and it is covered with a special heat-conducting paste that will be pressed between it and the CPU to create a good heat-conducting connection. If I got this wrong and I had to remove the pump from the CPU, it would mess up the paste and it couldn’t be used again. I only had one chance to get this right, or else I’d have to buy paste remover and more paste and clean everything off to try again.

Fortunately, everything went fine. I kept going.

• Run the pump power cable (via SATA-style cable).
• Attach the pump monitor cable.
• Attach the top front radiator fan cable.
• Attach the top rear radiator fan cable.
• Run the fan USB control cable.
• Remove the 3.5″ hard drive bay to improve airflow.
• Install the video card.

That was it. Everything was installed. I attached a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and then it was time to plug it in and turn it on. I it to show me the BIOS setup screen, but instead the screen remained blank. Uh-oh.

I had heard the fans spin up, and I could see lights on the motherboard, so obviously something was happening. In fact, the fans slowed down after a few seconds, which meant they were under motherboard control. So why wasn’t I getting video?

It turned out I had forgotten to run power cables to the video card. High-end gaming cards draw far too much power to run off the motherboard power bus, but I had forgotten to hook these up. So:

• Run video card power cables.

After that, it booted up just fine and showed my the BIOS config screen. I plugged in the thumb drive I had built and

• Upgraded the onboard BIOS software to the latest version.
• Installed Window 10 Pro.

Then I rebooted to Windows and installed all the rest of the software:

• Intel chipset drivers.
• RealTec audio drivers.
• Intel bluetooth driver.
• Intel network driver.
• Intel WiFi driver.
• MSI App manager.
• MSI Super charger (enables charging stuff on USB cables).
• Samsung Magician SSD management software.
• Corsair cooler control software.
• NVidia GeForce 1080 drivers and utilities.
• Windows updates.
• AIDA64 Extreme monitoring software.

With all the drivers installed and the operating system up to date, it was time to try some overclocking. First I wanted to see how the base CPU looked. So I fired up AIDA64 and ran the stress test. The CPU cores immediately heated up and the case fans all sped way up. And I noticed something odd: There was no air blowing out of the top of the case from the radiator. I held a piece of paper over it, and it got sucked down onto the fan grill.

Dammit. I had installed the fans upside down. The two front fans pull air in, and with the two top fans also pulling air in, the single rear exhaust port was probably not going to keep up. So I had to disconnect all the external cables, open up the case, remove the radiator, remove the fans and flip them, reattach the radiator, close things up, and try again. This time I got the air flowing the right way.

Now it was time to install the all software that makes my computer useful:

• Chocolatey install scripting software.
• Chrome browser.
• Firefox browser.
• Logitech unifying software.
• Microsoft Office 365.
• Epson workforce 845 printer drivers.
• Notepad++ text editor.
• 7zip file compression utility.
• Adobe Reader.
• Keyfinder.
• FileZilla FTP client.
• Greenshot screen capture software.
• Plantronics headset hub software.
• Slack messaging.
• BeyondCompare file comparison tool.
• Treesize.
• Microsoft Visual Studion 2017.
• Resharper.
• DataGrip.
• PuTTY.
• Java runtime.
• git source code control.
• Sourcetree GUI for git.
• R Studio.
• Python.
• PyCharm.
• Kindle reader.
• Logitech gaming tools.
• Steam.
• Google Earth.
• Ispy
• VLC
• Paperscan
• Brother P-Touch editor
• Photoshop
• Lightroom

That sounds like a lot to install, but I use a set of Choclatey config files to install about 2/3 of them automatically in one shot. It went pretty quickly.

So now I’m sitting here working on my brand new computer. It’s a little underwhelming. After all that work, it just doesn’t feel like a shiny new system. Probably because I’m doing all the same things with it as I did with my old computer. But with the clock running at 5 GHz, it does all the things faster.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Building My New PC

Normally, an embedded tweet pretty closely resembles the appearance of a tweet in Twitter. For example, tweeting the title of this post should look something like this:

But when I previewed the post, the embedded tweets looked more like this:

That layout, with the author’s name coming after the content, looks like the way the HTML is sent to the browser before it is styled. The tweet styling must be applied afterward, probably by some JavaScript, and for some reason, the script isn’t styling the tweet correctly. Weirdly, however, if you look at the same post on the main blog page, the tweets look like they’re supposed to. They also look like they’re supposed to if I switch the blog to one of the standard themes that comes with WordPress. All of this points to a problem with the theme I’m using.

It’s not that simple though, because I’m using the Headway theme framework. That’s a very cool tool which allows me to visually design custom themes. However, when I fired up the Headway Visual Editor, I saw that I was using a shared set of styling rules for the main page and the individual post pages, so they should be rendered the same. But clearly they’re not. This was beginning to smell like some kind of bug in how Headway renders single post pages.

Before going further down that road, I wanted to make sure I was running the most up-to-date version of the framework. It’s supposed to be updated automatically, but of the update failed, an old version of the theme framework might not work quite right on newer versions of WordPress. As it turns out, when I logged in to the Headway site to see if I was using the latest version, I got an unpleasant surprise: Headway’s most recent release of the theme framework was version 3.8.9…released in October, 2016.

Crap. It looks like Headway essentially went out of business a year and a half ago and tried to keep their customers from noticing. Rumor has it that Headway ran through all their money too fast and had to lay off almost everybody, leaving just enough of the company operational to allow them to keep collecting licensing fees through the website. This is sneaky, desperate, and underhanded.

(It’s a darned shame too, because Headway did so much right. Most WordPress page building tools are aimed at designers building small storefront sites, so they are focused on allowing designers to make each page unique, like an online brochure layout. Headway is different, because it works through the WordPress theme system. You don’t build pages, you build themes which can be applied to all your pages and blog posts at once. Yet you can also do page building by creating a unique theme variant for each page. And despite all that, it rendered pages very fast.)

So now I’ve been looking through the morass of WordPress theme frameworks — Genesis, Divi, Themify, Builder, PageLines, Ultimatum — the list goes on and on. It’s hard to tell, but some of them appear to have gone the way of Headway. Meanwhile, I’m trying stuff and experimenting.

So if you see wild theme changes here on Windypundit, now you know why.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Headway Themes, WTF?

Part of the reason for the reduced blogging is that I’ve been doing small projects around the house. We never really finished moving in, so I have a lot of catching up to do — unpacking boxes, moving furniture, putting things together. It uses up my spare time.

It also doesn’t help that my day job is changing. I’m taking on additional responsibilities, and I’m spending more time having to learn about some new technologies, which uses up more of my spare time. More importantly, it uses up my mental energy. Writing Windypundit is hard work. I have trouble finding the time to start new posts, and I have trouble keeping up the momentum it takes to finish a post.

(I have a bunch of partial posts from the last few weeks — taking The Federalist to task for attacking Elizabeth Nolan Brown, the dangers of weakening Section 230 protections, explaining why I’m skeptical of that study suggesting auto insurance pricing is racist, ranting about Jack Marshall’s ugly values, analysis of the Trump “tax plan,” a point that climate activists missed in Bret Stephens’s NYT piece, and a multi-part series on how insurance works. Some of those might still see daylight, but most are already too stale.)

There’s one other cause for my lack of blogging: The presidency of Donald Trump. Or rather, the difficulty I have in dealing coherently with the presidency of Donald Trump. I tend to blog about what might be called policy issues, and those aren’t much in the news these days.

That’s no surprise. My position has consistently been that Trump is a narcissistic sociopath. It’s not easy to talk about Trump’s policy preferences because he doesn’t have any beyond doing whatever is good for him. Heck, his “tax plan” consisted of a one page summary of provisions and some details given by his staff, and the provisions with the most details were the ones that would give Trump himself a big tax break.

I don’t know how to talk about policy ideas so vague and incomplete. Other pundits filled in the holes, but some of their assumptions were contradictory. Anything I wrote would be dependent on way too many assumptions to be useful.

The Republican healthcare plan was a lot more detailed — an actual bill before Congress — but even then it didn’t offer a solution to any of the major problems with Obamacare, nor did it deliver on Trump’s promises of much better healthcare plans. It just didn’t seem like serious policy, and that didn’t seem worth writing about, especially since non-serious policy could change when the wind blows.

In any case, both the tax plan and the healthcare plan were met with scathing responses from throughout the punditocracy. Much of the response was partisan, a little too much of it was crazy, and some of it I strongly disagreed with it. But all too often, by the time I caught up to the news cycle, everyone else had already said what I wanted to say, or close enough that I didn’t feel motivated to write.

That’s not to say there aren’t some real policy issues. Jeff Sessions all by himself is ramping up the war on drugs and shutting down criminal justice reform. I could certainly say things about that. But I’ve been saying things about that for a decade and a half, and everything I want to say right now boils down to “it’s very, very, very, very wrong to hurt people for committing consensual crimes.” That’s what I always say, and it doesn’t seem to be helping.

So right now it feels like everything I could write about anything going on is basically pointless.

I’m sure I’ll get over it. In part, I need to find better sources of news and information. I now realize that much of my daily skim was geared toward covering the liberal/leftist/Democratic establishment. I need to reorient my reading to find more interesting approaches to the sins of the conservative/right/Republican establishment. I’m not talking only about sites that attack the issues of the right. Sites that smugly defend them are just as useful for my purposes.

I also need to get away from the news cycle’s breathless coverage of every single Trump controversy. Potential scandals involving Russians, Comey, and Flynn may very well have an important, even devastating, effect on the Trump presidency, but they’re not what I want to blog about. I’m sure there are important policy changes going on — immigration is an obvious example — and I need to find out more about them.

Any suggestions?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Windypundit In the Age Of Trump

That brings me to a disturbing question: Since Chicago is “the windy city” and I no longer have any connection to Chicago…am I still the Windypundit? Is it time to change the name of the blog? Granted, Windypundit has never been about Chicago any more than Vodkapundit has been about vodka or Iowa Hawk Blog has been about birds of prey, but there was always a connection. Until now.

And that just has me thinking about the blog, which has been going on for a very long time now, and seems to be increasingly irrelevant. (For Christ’s sake, my last post advocated a type of “white genocide,” and nobody even bothered to call me a “cuck.”) Maybe it’s time to make some changes…

Should I change the name? “Windypundit” doesn’t exactly fill the reader with breathless anticipation of greatness.

Should I start a whole new blog? I tried that once before, when Rogier van Bakel, Rick Horowitz, and I tried to restart Rogier’s old blog in a new location (we even got Maggie McNeill in on it!), but after an initial burst of activity and buzz, it eventually ground to a halt.

Should I join another group blog, if anyone would have me? I tried doing that at When Falls the Coliseum, but I never got involved enough to post regularly. Somebody invited me to contribute to Being Libertarian, but I don’t know if that would be right for me.

So, as the year draws to a close and I contemplate the future of the blog, does anyone have suggestions? I’ve already thought of releasing all new posts as videos of bikini models reading them out loud, but any other suggestions would be given full consideration.

(And if you want to send me audition videos for the bikini thing…)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Whither Windypundit?

Except for an iPad and both our iPhones with LTE, along with the Kindle Fire and Lenovo ThinkPad we have tethered to them, of course, which should last us until we can use the WiFi I setup in the new home. Because we’re not savages.

But other than that, totally dark.

See you on the other side…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Going Dark

Overall I’ve been pretty happy with hosting at A Small Orange. The technology makes sense to me, and support staff have been responsive and helpful. But it is a low-cost service, so there have been a few glitches. The server goes down occasionally, dropping off the internet for a few minutes, and every once in a while something worse goes wrong, and it stops serving web pages until I notice it’s down and restart it, which can mean several hours of down time. I’ve been living with that, however, because I like everything else about A Small Orange and the price is right.

Then late on Christmas day the site went down. It took me a couple of hours to notice the problem.  (I get notifications from monitoring services, but who pays attention to that stuff on Christmas Day?) I tried logging in to restart the server, but I couldn’t get to the VPS management tools for my server. So I filed a support ticket.

It took unusually long for ASO support to get back to me, and all they could do is refer me to a network status report which explained that “a network issue was identified with some VPS servers” and they were working on it.

It’s now been 90 hours since my VPS went down, and they’ve issued over two dozen updates, including a second network status report and there’s no end in sight. Clearly something has gone terribly wrong. As near as I can tell, network problems with their servers at the TierPoint facility in Dallas caused a bunch of VPSs to shutdown in a way that makes them difficult to restart correctly, and continuing network problems are making things worse. All these problems have overwhelmed the support staff, and they are many hours behind in handling trouble tickets.

The folks at A Small Orange have been good to me over the years, and I felt bad for them. I have some experience fighting technical problems like that, and it’s not easy. But I wanted to have my websites up.

It’s not easy shopping for VPS services in a hurry, and they vary wildly in price depending on the level of service provided, but I found a reasonably priced plan at InMotion Hosting. It took them a couple of hours to get me set up with a VPS, and then I had to load my websites onto the server. I’d prefer to have done live transfers from the old server, but with the server down I had to fallback to backup copies from Christmas morning. I figure not much happened on Christmas, so I probably didn’t lose anything significant. After that, I just had to point all the DNS records to the new server and let the changes propagate.

All my sites should be visible to users now. It’s been less than a day, so I can’t tell if InMotion is going to work out yet. I’ll give it a month and see what happens before deciding if I should stay with them, go back to A Small Orange (especially if they offer nice apology freebies), or try some other service (suggestions welcome). This is about the sixth time I’ve changed hosting services, and I seem to be getting good at it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Small Orange, WTF?

The whole point of a blog like this is to share everything on the site with literally anyone who wants to see it. In fact, I’ve gone through rather a lot of trouble to make sure that happens.

That got me thinking about all the bits of technology that it takes to put a blog like this on the web. I decided to make a list, and it turns out there are a lot of pieces. To start with, there’s the main WordPress installation:

• WordPress — the blogging engine that powers it all.

The look and feel comes from the WordPress theme I use, which is made up of about four big pieces:

• Hybrid Core Framework — A PHP library for building WordPress themes.
• Hybrid Theme — An example theme for the Hybrid Core framework.
• Skeleton — A customizable child theme of the Hybrid theme.
• scssphp — A PHP implementation of SCSS/SASS.

I’ve customized Skeleton to produce the theme I use for Windypundit. I use the SCSS preprocessor to do some of the math to make the look and feel more tunable.

Naturally, Windypundit uses a number of WordPress plugins:

• Cookies for Comments — A simple anti-spam plugin that rejects some less intelligent spambots.
• Google XML Sitemaps — Adds a sitemap for Google.
• Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin — Another simple anti-spam plugin. This generates the “Confirm you are NOT a spammer” checkbox.
• NextGEN — An image gallery management tool. I don’t use all the gallery features.
• Search Regex — A potentially dangerous tool that allows me to search-and-replace regular expressions across all blog posts.
• W3 Total Cache — Caching software, so pages can be served quickly without as many hits to the database.
• WordPress HTTPS — Improves HTTPS support.
• WordPress SEO — Makes pages a little more search-engine friendly. I only use a fraction of the features.
• wp-jquery-lightbox — Displays photos bigger when you click on them. I use this instead of NextGEN’s viewer.
• WP Widget Cache — Caches the widgets on pages so they can be served without re-querying the database.

I also wrote two small custom plugins:

• Custom Dynamic Photo Resizer — A WordPress shortcode to generate resized photos for blog posts. If I want to change the size of all the photos in my layout, I just change the resizer implementation and all the images will be generated and served at the new size.
• Custom Shortcodes — A variety of custom WordPress shortcodes to replace features I had in custom tags on Movable Type. Hardly ever used anymore.

I also make use of a bunch of web-based services which are integrated via WordPress plugins:

• Akismet — A collective anti-spam service that detects and deletes common spam patterns.
• Google Analyticator — Adds Google Analytics on the site.
• Jetpack — WordPress’s all-in-one access point to various WordPress-served features.
• Social Login – A plugin that allows me to accept logins from Facebook and Twitter for people leaving comments. Makes use of the OneAll protocol translation service.
• Woopra — Integrates Woopra realtime analytics into the site.
• VaultPress — Backs up the blog VaultPress‘s servers.

All advertising content on the site comes from

• Amazon Affiliates program.

Windypundit is hosted on a smallish Virtual Private Server from the folks at A Small Orange. I use a VPS instead of shared hosting because I host a number of other websites and because I wanted to learn about running a website on a VPS.

The server is running a standard LAMP stack:

• Linux — The operating system. It’s the CentOS distro.
• Apache — The web server.
• MySQL — The relational database that holds the WordPress content.
• PHP — The scripting language that ties it all together. WordPress is written in PHP, along with all of its plugins.

A few other bits run on the server as well:

• nginx — Running as a reverse proxy for improved caching.
• cPanel/WHM — The web-based hosting management software.

As I said, it’s actually a virtual server, meaning that A Small Orange has carved out a couple of processor cores and some memory from a larger server. There’s also a SAN array for disk storage. All hosted sites are backed up nightly to Amazon S3 and then rolled over to Glacier.

The servers and disk arrays are located in (I think) TierPoint’s a 68,000 square foot data center in Dallas, Texas. The data center is SSAE 16 SOC 1 certified, with fully redundant HVAC and fully 2N redundant power, with six backup diesel generators fed from a 50,000 gallon fuel reserve. The facility is multi-homed and carrier neutral with connections to Level3, Abovenet, TimeWarner, Suddenlink, Cogent, Global Crossing, and IP Transit. I’m sure there are Fortune 500 companies hosted in the same data center.

Only the main HTML page of Windypundit comes from that server. All of the embedded static components — images, style sheets, Javascript — are served from cached copies in 31 data centers all over the world in the Cloudflare content distribution network so that pages load more quickly.

This is, beyond a doubt, an insane amount of technology for a humble little blog full of libertarian ranting and occasional cat pictures.

The thing is, none of this is particularly special. All of you who have WordPress blogs are using mostly the same technology. You might not have Cloudflare or some of the other layers of caching, and you’re using a different theme and a different selection of plugins, but the rest is basically the same. You might not be as interested in the technology as I am, but we’re all using WordPress, we’re all running on some variation of the LAMP stack, and we’re all hosted out of a ridiculously over-spec’d data center.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Windypundit Technical Review

And now I see that Radley Balko at the Washington Post has published an article on the Bronx Defenders’ troubles, and it includes a link to my post and an extended quote from it. That’s pretty cool — getting that kind of attention from a WaPo columnist. Strangely, however, the part of my post that Radley decided to use was my attempt to explore what the lyrics of Uncle Murda’s “Hands Up” really mean. Because, when you’re looking for insights into rap music, aren’t I the first person you think of?

Just call me MC Big Windz. And join me next week when I disclose yet another version of Big Sean’s Blessings, speculate whether Meek Mill’s second studio album can possibly repeat the rambunctious mayhem of his debut, and discuss rumors of an emerging 100th problem for Jay-Z.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Bit Of Excitement Around Here

My most active commenter was Allison Williams, or rather, the Indian outsourcing firm to which Allison Williams’ internet marketing agency gave her link building subcontract. The second and third most active commenters were Scott Greenfield and Jack Marshall, which probably annoys both of them. Matt Haiduk and nidefatt round out the top five. The rest of you didn’t make WordPress’s list, but I thank you all…or at least all of you who are real people. It would get lonely here without you.

Furthermore, here at Windpundit, 2014 was the year in which:

• I posted a goodbye to PDGirl’s cat Simon.
• I explained that libertarians aren’t anti-vax.
• I explained how cold -14°F is.
• I pointed out that there’s more than enough debt to blame Obama for some of it.
• I lamented that “Don’t talk to cops” isn’t very helpful advice.
• I explained why I hate to debate evolution.
• I challenged prosecutors to do something about the exclusionary rule.
• I explained some basic economic effects of Obamacare.
• I proposed a solution to handling multi-format legal briefs.
• I posted some photos of our Ragdoll cat Beezle growing up.
• I ridiculed Professor Thane Rosenbaum’s proposal for hate speech laws.
• I explained that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and then I explained why I thought that.
• I ranted about what law enforcement really means.
• I reviewed Toni Dwiggins’s Forensic Geology mystery series.
• I gave criminal lawyers a tummy rub.
• I rambled about a couple of things wrong with the criminal justice system.
• I explained why bioethicists bother me.
• I explained why fuel synthesis does not mean the end of big oil.
• I poked fun at the whiny little bitch who runs Peoria. Twice.
• I caught up with the SORNA challenge, which I blogged about before.
• I argued that allowing the election commissions to punish politicians for lying is a recipe for disaster.
• I proposed a revolutionary new way to execute criminals.
• I suggested that Kent Scheidegger needs to pay more attention to Gary Becker., and followed up with more discussion of crime and incentives.
• I argued against controversial graduation speakers.
• I argued that spree killers do not represent their community.
• I rambled on about the problem of presuming good faith.
• I wrote about the SWAT raid that burned a baby.
• I discussed the amount of trust to place in the confession of a killer.
• I complained about a silly meme about Obama’s handling of the economy.
• I reviewed Jesse Walker’s United States of Paranoia.
• I speculated whether buffer zones and free speech zones were affected by the same ruling.
• I said both Ken Lammers and the Pope were wrong about drugs.
• I explained how Obamacare politicized healthcare.
• I discovered that the gormless plonkers who run the internet in the U.K. are blocking my blog.
• I explained why Net Neutrality pisses me off.
• I explained why I’d like to buy a Geiger counter.
• I gave up on Sitemeter.
• I speculated about the real purpose of the Better Government Party.
• I met Maggie McNeill at Liberty On the Rocks.
• I lampooned how cops handle complaints.
• I explained why Obamacare insurance refunds aren’t as good as they sound.
• I joined the Bill Bratton pile-on for his idiotic definition of democracy.
• I ripped into the Bad Boss Tax.
• I poked fun at the idea of automated sentencing.
• I posted about the situation in Ferguson, the protests, and the weeks to follow.
• I discovered my blog comments had stopped working.
• I explained that helping women avoid sexual attacks is not victim-blaming.
• I imagined my readers nude.
• I criticized biglaw lawyers who don’t understand negotiation.
• I argued that technical violations of firearms laws are not the same as real crimes.
• I linked to a really cool Batman-themed mash-up music video.
• I explained why Apple was right to limit decryption of their phones, no matter what Orin Kerr thinks.
• I pointed out that the politics of global warming make people suspicious of it.
• I thought it was okay for the Secret Service to not kill people on the White House lawn.
• I complained that my favorite Terminator will not be back.
• I pointed out that Andrew Burstein has monstrously bad ideas about the Constitution.
• I explained why Greg Laden’s car-buying confusion is an argument for carbon taxes.
• I argued that eliminating plea bargaining is complicated.
• I went back to the Borderlands.
• I explained to a guy who calls himself an economist that low production costs are a good thing.
• I argued that the GamerGate threats are probably nothing to worry about.
• I started writing a series of posts about lethal force.
• I discussed the lack of competition in Internet Service Providers.
• I explained why the post-grand-jury protests in Ferguson upset me.
• I pointed out that Mother Jones‘s math on racism is really bad.
• I argued that too much “believing victims” has some bad side effects.
• I showed what’s in that photography bag I’ve been carrying around.
• I thought about the torture report.
• I argued about protesters and cop killers and responded to some criticism.
• I learned that Quicken makes some alarming changes to my financial records.

That was most of it. See you all in 2015!

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at 2014 in Review

Not that I get a lot of comments. Windypundit doesn’t have the readership it used to have, and I never really had an active commenter community. Lately, in fact, it seems I hardly get any comments at all, which has been kind of disappointing. I assumed people just weren’t finding my posts interesting enough to engage with.

Over the last couple of weeks, however, I’ve been writing about the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and traffic to my site has roughly doubled because of it. And still there were no comments, even though this was a highly controversial subject. That was suspicious. Could there be something wrong with comments on my blog? Would that explain why I haven’t received any comments in a while?

Yes, yes it would.

It turns out Jetpack comments work by replacing the entire comment entry section with something called an iframe, which is an HTML element for embedding a web page inside another web page, and so the comment form displayed at the bottom of my posts wasn’t generated by code running on my server, it was fetched from WordPress.com. And when the user types in a comment and submits it, the form is sent back to WordPress.com. I assume it’s then authenticated appropriately and submitted back to my server and displayed.

At least that was the theory. But when I launched an incognito browser window and used it to submit a test comment, for some reason the iframe filled with a cropped-down duplicate copy of the Windypundit web page, complete with animated banner, but all trapped in a box where the comments used to be. I don’t know where the comment went, but it never made it to my blog’s database.

So…maybe the lack of comments wasn’t due to my being boring after all. I wonder how long it’s been that way…

I assumed that problem was either that my theme design was missing some crucial element that makes Jetpack comments work, or that some other plugin was interfering with Jetpack, so I switched to the WordPress-provided Twenty Fourteen theme and I disabled every plugin except Jetpack. Essentially, I was running WordPress fresh out of the box. And still the problem didn’t go away. I don’t know, maybe it’s some weird Cloudflare thing.

I finally gave up. I put everything back the way it was and then disabled Jetpack comments, which seems to have fixed the problem.

I still wanted the social media connection, so I installed the Social Login plugin, which provides alternate authentication through lots of different social networks using the rather amazing protocol translation services provided by oneall. I almost immediately started getting spam comments, so I also dropped in the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin, which supposedly checks for humanity by requiring you to check a box. I’m not sure why that can’t be automated, but I’ll give it a try.

I need to test this, so if you’ve read this far, please help me out by leaving a comment. Just say hi. Let me know that my blog software is no longer turning readers away.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at WordPress Jetpack Comments — WTF?

You see, a couple of days ago I was fiddling with some darned thing here in WordPress — I can’t remember what it was anymore — and I wanted to take a look at how the page lays out to ordinary people. As a logged-in WordPress user, I get extra features like a command bar at the top and special links I can click to edit content, and I wanted to get a look at the site without any of that. I could just log out, but then I’d have to login again to tweak it some more, and that’s a pain.

So instead, I launched the Chrome browser in “incognito” mode, which runs the browser with no cookies of any kind, as if it had never been launched before, which means my blog will treat it like just another random first-time visitor.

And the darnedest thing happened. Some kind of full-page ad popped up and completely covered the contents of my blog? At the top it had the words “A Message From Our Sponsors” with a link in the upper right corner labeled “Click to continue to site” or something like that. It was just like one of those full page ads you sometimes get when you follow a link to a big media property like Forbes.

What the fuck?

Just to be clear, I don’t put ads like that on my blog. I have an Amazon banner on the right side, and another one at the bottom of every article, and that’s it. Whatever this was, I didn’t do it.

I flipped on developer mode in the browser and took a look at another page. I wanted to see where it was getting content from. This page didn’t show the ad, but when I looked at the Network tab, I was in for another shock. The first file was the main HTML page, and the next dozen or so were the usual bits and pieces from the wordpress folder, bits and pieces of CSS, Javascript, and a handful of images. An awful lot of the rest of the files were stuff I didn’t recognize.

There’s always some of that on a page. If you use widgets or Javascript code to link to Twitter or Facebook or Amazon or Gravatar, the tiny stub of code you use to do that pulls down more code and other assets that it needs to function. But this went beyond any of that. It was hitting a horrifying array of unfamiliar sites:

• specificclick.net
• vindicosuite.com
• yashi.com
• demdex.net
• nexac.com
• bluekai.com
• mookie1.com
• spotxchange.com
• turn.com
• adadvisor.net
• ib-ibi.com
• doubleclick.net
• scorecardresearch.com
• adnxs.com
• specificmedia.com
• rubiconproject.com
• invitemedia.com
• btrll.com
• collective-media.net
• tidaltv.com
• tubemogul.com
• exelator.com
• mathtag.com
• dotomi.com
• casalemedia.com
• pubmatic.com
• cpmaxads.com
• advertising.com
• criteo.com
• adsrvr.org
• veruta.com
• wtp101.com
• connexity.net
• openadserve.com
• insightexpressai.com
• doubleverify.com
• serving-sys.com
• betrad.com
• vizu.com
• 2mdn.com

As near as I can tell, every single one of those is in some way associated with web advertising. Someone was using my blog to get credit for distributing ad content. At the very least, they were probably littering my visitors’ browsers with tracking cookies.

I’m truly sorry about that. This is an embarrassing discovery, and I apologize.

On discovering this, I got a little panicked. My mind went to a bad place: It was possible I had been hacked via malware in a WordPress plugin. WordPress and all its plugins and themes are built on PHP and PHP is wide open: Every WordPress plugin, every theme, has complete access to all the files in a web server account. If any one of the plugins is malicious, it can infiltrate itself into a WordPress installation in ways that are hard to remove. It’s like a virus.

You should never install WordPress plugins or themes from an untrustworthy source. The plugins and themes that you can find from within WordPress via the Add New button have been somewhat vetted by the community and are probably safe, but with the exception of a few reputable vendors, you should never download and install a theme or plugin from another web site. One study on a small sample of random free WordPress themes found that 100% of them had some kind of hidden code to insert tracking cookies or place hidden links on the site. Every single one.

I had been careful about adding plugins, but maybe I had made a mistake, or maybe one of them had slipped past the guards on the WordPress repositories. I began disabling plugins, starting with the most recent ones, and refreshing the page to see if the invading websites were still there. Eventually I got down to just a handful of trusted plugins — Google, Amazon, stuff everyone installs — and the ads were still there.

The culprit turned out to be one of the oldest things I had ever put on my site: The Site Meter badge. I’ve had that thing on my website since before WordPress. I think I even had it before MovableType, back when I was hosted on Blogger. At the time, every blogger in the world used Site Meter to track their stats, and I was no exception.

Site Meter didn’t press their advantage, however, and they didn’t keep up with the times. Their simple counter and statistics are no match for a modern powerhouse like Google Analytics or Woopra. Apparently, at some point they just gave up trying to monetize stats and started just pushing out all kinds of advertising crap. Given how many advertising companies they’ve sold my site to, I assume they’re trying to squeeze out as many tiny fractions of a penny as they can.

(This was actually good news, since Site Meter was just a <script> tag I had embedded in the footer. It didn’t run any PHP code on my site, so it couldn’t have corrupted anything else. It all ran in the relatively safe sandbox of my visitors’ browser.)

I Googled around about this, and apparently everyone else noticed the problem a few years ago. I wasn’t paying attention, and I missed it. I guess that’s because I don’t really use Site Meter any more, and I would have abandoned it, but…it was the oldest counter I had on the site, and I was enjoying watching the numbers climb. It used to go up pretty fast, and I would have reached my first million several years ago, but my site statistics took a dive about 6 years back when I was busy taking care of my parents.

According to Site Meter, I still haven’t quite reached my first million visits. The counter currently sits at 999315.

And there it will stay.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Site Meter WTF?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at I Have Got to Start Writing Shorter Posts

On my busiest day, my most popular post was “Yet Another Tale of the Awful, Awful People at ICE”. I think this line captures the essence of the post:

The sad thing is that if she had freaked out and, say, gouged out one of his eyeballs with a pen so she could make her escape, some prosecutor would have tried to make it seem like she was the bad guy.

On the other hand, the post with the most views all year was the perennial winner, “Fucking Sprint!!!” which continues to receive comments 8 years later, as does my 4th most popular post, “Sallie Mae is a Nightmare”. The 2nd most popular post was Never Get Busted Again, Volume 1: Traffic Stops, my review of Barry Cooper’s DVD, the 3rd most popular was “Yet Another Tale of the Awful, Awful People at ICE” again, and the 5th was my advice piece, “I’m Sorry, But I Simply Can’t”.

Then there are the top search terms:

1. sw 500
2. fuck sprint
3. michelle malkin bikini
4. michelle malkin nude
5. sw500

“Fuck Sprint” is self explanatory — I’ve been at or near the top result for that for years — and the Michelle Malkin stuff is probably because of this, which has attracted some vitriolic comments from people who didn’t get the joke. I think the SW 500 stuff is probably because of this post by J-Dog.

In any case, here at Windypundit, 2013 was the year in which:

• I posed a mind-blowing legal hypothetical about zero tolerance in schools.
• I pointed out that Colin Flaherty is a lying racist douchebag.
• I explained that you don’t have to explain.
• I was reminded why I like my readers.
• I rambled on and on about something called rational addiction.
• I lashed out at Certificates of Need.
• And at US Attorney Carmen Ortiz.
• I explained why Obama’s immigration reform…isn’t.
• I had a few words to say about the State of the Union speech.
• I discovered that some people think the Park Doctrine is a good idea.
• I debunked some silly claims about an asteroid threat.
• I described how strip clubs are like flea markets.
• I thought sequestration might be a good idea…
• …but soon realized they screw you either way.
• I defended Rick Horowitz’s angry words.
• My wife and I did our best to take care of our cat Ripley…
• …but the end was closer than we knew.
• I wrote about 1-800-LAW-REP-4.
• I worried that former federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald might be right.
• I posted a video of our cute ragdoll kitten Beezle.
• I stopped doing April Fools Day posts.
• I posted a eulogy for Roger Ebert.
• I pointed out that libertarians aren’t nearly as heartless as government…
• …especially when it comes to homelessness in Las Vegas.
• I chronicled a bad week for liberty.
• I explained how not to rescue “slaves.”
• And how not to fight crime.
• I pondered why authors’s websites don’t list their books in a useful order.
• I deployed the “history’s greatest monster” meme against a true villain.
• I explored the unreal liberal argument for conscription…
• …and a few responses to comments.
• I finally got around to blogging about the previous year’s road trip.
• I posted a few pictures of Beezle growing up.
• I lamented the difficulty of finding good legal thrillers…
• I discovered the NSA was doing bad things…
• …and then I speculated about a discrepancy in the story…
• …and then I speculated about something worse the NSA could have done…
• …and then I found out that the truth was worse than I had imagined.
• I declined a prospective content partnership.
• I thought about the new rules for remaining silent.
• I said so long to Marcus Schantz.
• I decried the kings’s pass for cops.
• I explained why I had nothing to say about the Zimmerman trial…
• …and then found one of the dumbest things ever written about the Zimmerman trial…
• …and something less dumb but still annoying.
• I questioned the validity of the SORNA challenge.
• I offered a modest proposal to combat prosecutorial overcharging.
• I geeked out over DUI gas exchange…
• …and found a new PD blogger.
• I quoted Justin Carter.
• I pointed out that some aspects of DNA forensic science aren’t very scientific.
• I got depressed about the advance of despotism in American.
• I complained that the courts are behind the times in interpreting the Fourth Amendment for new technology.
• I explained my book review policy.
• I discovered that some judges think you don’t really have to stop for cops.
• I investigated a likely case of profitable punishment.
• I skewered some weird anti-bullying messages.
• I discussed what I learned from the post-9/11 world.
• I speculated homosexuals and harlots.
• I dropped a massive five-part review of Radley Balko’s Warrior Cop…
• …and said hello to Radley on his book tour.
• I gave Valve Software a bit of advice.
• I watched Breaking Bad end.
• I argued that you couldn’t judge the ObamaCare website by its first day…
• …but that it became a clear software disaster…
• …that was following some typical patterns…
• …but probably wasn’t as big as they say.
• I disputed a federal judge’s opinions on the war on drugs.
• I fended off a silly Facebook meme.
• I was glad I escaped jury duty.
• I skipped Ender’s Game.
• We all mourned the passing of “Ed.”
• I pointed out that TSA critics are not to blame for the attack on a TSA checkpoint.
• I argued that the magnitude of harm is not affected by the reason for the harm.
• I change my blogs Terms and Conditions.
• I pointed out an obvious logical flaw in a marketing technique.
• I discussed why non-lawyers talk about the law.
• I appreciated the ability to shop on Thanksgiving Day.
• I poked fun at a journalism handbook.
• I tried to understand some economic realities of poor Americans.
• I poked fun at a noob lawyer.
• I started a multi-part response to a piece complaining about requests for free work.
• I complained yet again about doctors who violate patient consent because the police ask.
• I explored the prevalence of journalism-by-reprinting-press-releases.
• I expressed my New Year’s wishes for Peter Schiff.
• I overdid the 10-books meme.

See you next year.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at 2013 In Review

I could have engaged a lawyer to write them for me, or I could have researched it on the web and tried to write my own, but those options seemed to be too expensive and too much work, respectively. So I took the easy route and stole my T’s & C’s from intellectual property lawyer and First Amendment Badass Marc J. Randazza.

Just change a few names and…done. I’m sure that’s good enough for my purposes. Probably the biggest change in content was to the blacklist.

It’s mostly boring legalese, but if you haven’t seen Randazza’s original, here are the Terms and Conditions For This Website…which you really should have read and assented to before getting this far anyway.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at New Terms and Conditions

Hey there Mark,

My name is Sladen West and I wanted to discuss the possibility of some sort of content partnership with you and windypundit.com. I do a lot of writing in the automotive space and thought my articles could be a great fit for your readers. I don’t expect any kind of payment for articles. I just want to get my name out there. Anything I write for windypundit.com will be original of course.

If you’d like, you can take a look at some articles I have just recently published here:

Why Women Are Probably Better Drivers
Gas Saving Myths Debunked
7 Tips To Ignore If You Want To Be A Better Driver

If you’re interested, I would love to contribute something like an article a month on topics such as driving safety, car maintenance, and various drivers tips and advice. Thanks so much for your time, Mark!

– Sladen West

My response:

Hi Sladen,

First of all, the second link is broken, or rather, it goes to the same place as the first. Actually, it looks like the two lines are combined into a single link.

Second, do you really think your articles would be a great fit for my readers? Because I don’t think you’ve actually read my blog.

I don’t really write much about cars. I mostly do rants about civil liberties and criminal law, usually from a libertarian perspective, which means that I want to legalize not only marijuana and gay marriage, but also prostitution and heroin. I also swear a lot, and I once wrote that Sheriff Joe Arpaio is like Hitler.

As for my readers, at least one of them is a former prostitute and madam, and several of them earn their living by defending accused murderers and child molesters. (And God only knows what drugs my readers use.) It’s not that they’d be against defensive driving…but that’s not really why they’re here.

Yours is one of the nicest and least slimy can-I-write-for-your-blog emails I have received, but I don’t think your topics are really a good fit here, and I don’t think you really want to be associated with the likes of us either.

It would probably be best for both of us if I just said “No, thank you.”

— Mark Draughn

For some reason, I just didn’t feel like ignoring this one. I hope that is sufficient explanation.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at In Which I Decline a Prospective Content Partnership

Even Eric, who has pulled off some legendary pranks, seems to be giving it up this year, although this could be part of some super-subtle meta-prank I just don’t get.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at No April Fools For Me

• The inevitable drug war deaths remained inevitable.
• I spoke up for sex workers, although, really, it was just a bunch of links.
• I became a friend of whores.
• I explained why criminal violence against the police is not the best response to criminal violence by the police.
• I showed what it looks like when police are afraid of the truth.
• I gave some questionable advice about thinking about reasonable doubt.
• I worried about the long reach of U.S. banking law.
• I discovered the dangers of searching for a DUI lawyer online.
• I complained about misuse of Godwin’s law.
• I commented on some tips for new bloggers.
• I explained why the NYPD fails at statistical quality control.
• I voted in a way that would piss off my dad.
• I addressed the hoodie issue.
• I took on Paul Krugman’s foolish take on “stand your ground.”
• I tried to estimate the Mega Millions breakeven amount.
• John Derbyshire explained black people.
• I agreed with Kip Hawley that the TSA is stupid…
• …and they’re spreading like a cancer.
• My friend Jennifer was in Playboy.
• I explained why bloggers bother with these issues.
• I reviewed Shifted by Colin D. Jones.
• Obama decided he was once again in favor of gay marriage.
• I started, but never finished, exploring the idea that it’s okay when everybody does it. Part 1, Part 2.
• The NATO summit came to Chicago and suppressed our freedom in order to save it.
• Columbia School of Law makes a good argument for a second wrongful execution.
• I answered an urgent legal question about ladies’ undergarments.
• I gave up on Movable Type.
• I reviewed Fragment by Warren Fahy.
• I complained about the TSA ruining everything.
• I explained that sometimes your camera matters.
• The individual mandate paved the way for retaliation.
• I worried a bit too much about the heatwave.
• I defended a Chris Rock tweet.
• I discussed what DNA does’t prove.
• Florida made it easier to commit crimes without knowing it.
• I explained why prosecutor blogs are less fun.
• New York State became slightly less dickish about charitable bail.
• I celebrated 10 years of blogging.
• I scolded the DEA for forgetting they’re supposed to stop crimes.
• Pinellas County, Florida was saved from a Scott Andringa judgeship.
• The surveillance state continued to grow.
• Toni Preckwingle damned a drug warrior to hell.
• I complained about the TSA even more.
• I had some photos taken.
• I offered my theory on why cops shoot puppies.
• I learned that Obama hates American car owners.
• I explained why a Romney Presidency wouldn’t hurt Big Bird.
• I noticed some Koch Derangement Syndrome at In These Times.
• I moved Windypundit to WordPress. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Finish.
• I drew some distinctions concerning Lance Armstrong and sports doping.
• I predicted the results of the election.
• I made fun of post-election up-down financial market reporting.
• Chicago’s police-can-do-no-wrong attitude came back to bite it.
• I pointed out that Mike Huckabee was talking nonsense.
• I tried a visual explanation of the difference between libertarian society and socialist society.

See you in the nNew Year!

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at 2012 in Review

Some of you may have noticed that Windypundit was off the air for a while. Yeah, well, it turns out the switchover didn’t go quite the way I planned.

About a week and a half ago, the hosting company I’ve been using for Windypundit sent out a message saying they would be moving some of my other domains to a new server in December. The message included this warning:

On the new servers PHP 5.3.x is going to be running, so please take the measures to ensure that you have your software up to date to avoid any conflict with the new PHP version, take in mind that we can’t keep PHP 5.2.x running in our servers since is already EOL.

Then last weekend they sent out another message about the server that I was using for Windypundit:

Emergency Server Migration – Server 34 – Do not ignore this email.

Server 34 is using a OS version that’s not longer supported by Cpanel, for that reason some package are not being updated and is causing troubles on the DNS and making the server fail. We are going to make an emergency migration tonight to a new server.

A little later, the Windypundit site failed, displaying a variety of PHP errors. My guess is that the emergency server migration put Windypundit on one of the new servers with the new version of PHP. As I’ve mentioned, I lost the ability to upgrade Movable Type long ago, and I guess the version I’ve been using isn’t compatible with the new version of PHP.

Despite all the nice things I’ve said about my hosting provider, I’d been having some problems in the last couple of weeks, and I had been exploring the possibility of switching to a new provider. Having the blog go down like this was the last straw. I’ve moved Windypundit and all my other sites to a hosting company called A Small Orange, about which I’ve heard good things. (Low-cost shared hosting is something of a crapshoot, so we’ll see.)

I’ve spend most of my spare time in the last week on a crash program to finish the port to WordPress. I had to make a few more changes to the conversion tool I wrote to handle some problems with implied paragraphs, and I had to make a bunch more changes to the CSS. I spent a lot of time just paging through Windypundit posts for the first four years and the last two years, one after another, looking for problems.

I discovered a few pages that are messed up. Many of them can be fixed with more CSS changes or by editing individual posts. I haven’t found any new systematic problems caused by the port process in the last few hundred posts I checked, and the site passes all of the automated tests I ran, so I decide it was time to put Windypundit back online.

I still have a lot of changes to make — enabling comments, configuring statistics, tweaking the theme — but I think I’m ready to go live. Here’s hoping it all works.

Update: I want to make sure comments are working, so it will help if a few of you will leave a comment.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Windypundit On WordPress

The one thing I still had to do was to re-create the blogroll in WordPress.

I suppose I could figure out a way to port it over like I did the posts, but I think creating it by hand is probably faster. Besides, I need to do some blogroll maintenance. I think I’m going to simplify the categories. I also need to update it to reflect a few changes in the neighborhood.

I’ll start with the new additions, which will appear in the blogroll after the switchover.

appellatesquawk

A hilarious blog about appellate law. No, really.

Cafe Hayek

An occasional stop of mine for random economics quotes and other bits in the Hayekian tradition.

Centives

Links to fantastic stories with economic angles. Worth a read even if you don’t think you’re interested in economics.

Accursed Farms

Ross Scott’s amazing Half-Life themed machinima.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

“Wilhelm Arturus” writing about multi-player online gaming.

Booker Rising

Shay Riley, black libertarian. No, really.

Charlie’s Diary

Science fiction author Charles Stross. Lots of thought-provoking stuff here.

That’s all the new people for now, but I’ve got some tidying up to do, and a few removals. Among other things, I’m going to make some of the descriptions a little more, er, descriptive.

Virgina Postrel

Virginia used to be the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and her editorials were a huge influence on my thinking. She’s one of the reasons I started blogging. She’s not terribly prolific these days, but always worth reading. She actually calls her blog “Dynamist Blog” so maybe I should use that name too.

StrategyPage

An interesting source of information about warfare and national defense, but not a read-every-article blog. It moves to the Resources section.

StoptheDrugWar.org

The blog on that site is actually called “The Speakeasy Blog” so I should probably change it.

The D’Alliance

Seems to be down. I’m striking it from the list.

Vigil for Lost Promise

This is Pete Guither’s site listing victims of the War on Drugs. It’s his response to a DEA advertising campaign. It used to be a separate site, but it’s now part of his main blog, and it looks like no one has been added to the list lately. I’m going to remove it from the list.

Not Guilty

That’s Mirriam Seddiq’s blog. She writes well about legal and social issues but not nearly enough. I didn’t tag her blog “A lawyer in search of a clue” because she’s stupid but because for a while she was always blogging about how she couldn’t figure out what to do with her life and career. Now that she seems to have settled in as both a solo lawyer and a mother, I should probably change it.

Marc Randazza

Randazza also gets a new tag. I believe his official title is now “First Amendment Badass.” And I should use the real name of his blog, which is Legal Satyricon.

Blonde Justice

Sigh. The Blonde One has been missing in action since March. But if Gothem can wait 7 years for Batman to return, I can wait a little longer for Blonde Justice.

South Carolina Criminal Defense Blog

This one’s apparently named “Trial Theory” now.

Google Blogoscoped

Philipp Lenssen has been off the air for over a year now, but he’s a friend of the blog and he helped me with some ideas in the early years, so he stays a little longer.

Steve Landsburg

Landesburg’s blog is actually called The Big Questions, and I should link to the blog not the main page.

Megan McArdle

Megan has moved to Asymmetrical Information at the Daily Beast, so I’ll link to her there.

That’s it. The blogroll is done.

And that’s the last major hurdle for porting the blog. Just a few more tweaks, and I’ll run the port process one more time and switch it over. Maybe over Thanksgiving.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Moving to WordPress – Part 3: Blogroll

Of course, I’ll have to have some place to move to. Which means I’ll have to design and set up another Wordpress blog. I managed to teach myself a bit about WordPress when I set up the Nobody’s Business group blog, and I liked what I saw of the technology. WordPress is easy to use and has a very active developer community, so I think it’s safe to assume it will be supported for a long time.

If you want to set up a WordPress blog, you have a choice of two broad solutions: You can let WordPress host your blog for you at wordpress.com, or you can download a free copy of the WordPress software from wordpress.org and install it on your own web host. I prefer the latter route because it gives me more flexibility. It does mean, however, that I need a place to host a blog.

Obviously, I already have hosting, but I decided to get a new hosting account so I could more easily set up the new website without interfering with the old one. And it’s just cleaner to start from scratch, so I can move over only the files I’m using and leave the junk behind. Windypundit had accumulated a lot of junk in its directory tree over the years.

The kind of hosting I need is a basic LAMP stack. That means Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySql database, and PHP programming language engine. This is far and away the most common hosting environment, and it will run WordPress and tons of other software I might want to install. I also want cPanel management tools so I can administer my account over the web without having to get a command line.

For now, I’ve decided to use a new shared hosting account from the provider I currently use, Downtown Host. I’ve had a few problems with stability over the years, but I see that as the natural flipside of their flexible configuration policies. (I.e. I’m paying the price in stability for flexible configurations of other websites on the same server.) The folks at Downtown Host have usually responded to service tickets fairly quickly, day or night, and they’ve been helpful when I had some minor special requests. I’ve tried using larger (and presumably more stable) hosting companies in the past, but they’ve been rigid and uncooperative.

I could probably get more flexibility with a virtual private server (VPS), but that’s more expensive. And more work. I’d have to install software updates regularly and clean up messes. There are tools to make that easier, but I’d have to learn what they are and how to use them. (And the tools change depending on which Linux distribution you install — CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora — and I haven’t got a clue how to choose a distro wisely.) Ultimately, that’s just not a learning curve I want to follow. I guess I could avoid all that with a fully managed VPS plan, but that’s even more expensive. Windypundit just isn’t big enough to need all that.

Since my account allows me to host as many sites as I want for one monthly fee, subject only to storage and bandwidth limits, I’ve been consolidating some of my other sites onto the new server, in what I’m calling the Windypundit Media Empire. As I write this, Windypundit is still on the old server, and it will stay there until I finish the port to WordPress. The old server also has a test WordPress installation that I’ve been using to develop the migration process I described earlier.

After choosing WordPress itself, probably the most important decision I had to make was which WordPress theme I was going to use. I don’t want to just use a pre-built theme because I want Windypundit to have a unique appearance. On the other hand, I really didn’t want to build a theme completely from scratch. It’s a lot of work, and I’m not familiar with how to do it for WordPress. So what I really needed was a highly customizable theme. Or even better, a theme framework.

All WordPress themes are built from an HTML page layout with snippets of embedded PHP code that call into WordPress to fill in content such as posts, comments, and widgets. There’s also some CSS to style the HTML and a bunch of assets such as header images and custom artwork.

As far as WordPress is concerned, a theme framework is just another theme, but to a blog owner it’s a kind of construction kit for building themes out of template page layouts, template CSS, and a library of PHP code that can be used to implement certain common features. Often these frameworks come with substantial user interface tools that makes it easier to design themes without a lot of code.

Many theme frameworks are commercial products developed by professional WordPress design companies. Probably the most well-known of these is Thesis by DIYthemes, which is used by a lot of professional web designers to quickly create blogs and websites without a lot of coding and with results that are, frankly, pretty damned good. Jamison Koehler’s law firm web site is one of the most attractive blogging sites I know, and it’s built on Thesis.

Another big-name framework is Genesis by StudioPress. Genesis is oriented more toward using WordPress as a Content Management System for commercial web sites than for blogging. Unlike Thesis, Genesis isn’t an out-of-the-box theme; it’s intended as a base from which designers will build usable child themes. For example, Rick Horowitz used a Genesis child theme when he built his lawfirm website.

There are lots of other commercial theme frameworks out there such as PageLines, Carrington, Woo, Elegant Themes, and such drag-and-drop wonders as Ultimatum and Headway. They differ in the amount of HTML and CSS you have to write, whether they have built-in SEO or use a plug-in, security, support for designer and developer workflow, and dozens of other criteria. It’s a fascinating software niche, and if I were a professional web designer I’d probably license a few of them for building websites for clients.

But I’m not a professional web designer, I’m an amateur blogger who is also a professional web programmer. The difference being that I work with HTML and CSS and program code all the time. I’m used to it, and I like tinkering with code. So I prefer a framework that makes theme programming easier rather than one that eliminates theme programming entirely.

When I built Nobody’s Business, I used the Thematic framework because it was a popular free framework. It worked fine and I have no regrets. However, when I started thinking about porting Windypundit, I investigated a whole bunch of frameworks, and this time I settled on Hybrid because it seemed to have better documentation, a more active user community, and more recent releases (although I see that the folks at Thematic have been busy lately).

Hybrid actually comes in three layers. First, there’s Hybrid Core, which is essentially a PHP library for implementing WordPress themes. It can’t be used as a theme, but if you want to build a theme from scratch, Hybrid Core should make it easier.

The second layer is the Hybrid theme, which is full WordPress parent theme built using Hybrid Core. It’s a relatively simple basic theme, but you can use WordPress’s support for child themes to create a more interesting theme that provides more interesting versions of parts of the Hybrid theme. Hybrid’s creator, Justin Tadlock, has also released a bunch of other themes built on the Hybrid framework, several of which also come with child themes.

Finally, there’s Skeleton, which is a child theme of the parent Hybrid theme. It has all the CSS selectors laid out for you to fill in. You can just grab a copy of it, rename it, and start customizing it for your site. Which is exactly what I did. Unimaginative as I am, I call the result WindySkeleton.

Of course, I couldn’t resist the urge to make a few small modifications. I’m not overly fond of maintaining raw CSS, so I added a PHP version of the SCSS preprocessor to the site, copied all the Hybrid CSS theme files and renamed them to end in “.scss”, and wrote a small PHP front end page to compile and render CSS from the SCSS files. This makes modifying Skeleton even easier.

As for the actual site design, I’m not very good at that part, so I like to keep it simple, sticking to a very traditional blog layout. And my approach to choosing colors is as simple minded as picking out a nice banner photo and reusing some of its colors in the site design. Thus, the current design uses a lot of blue because the banner photo of the Chicago skyline has a lot of blue sky.

Originally, I wanted the new design to have even more of an old-school journalism feel to it than my current design, but I managed to derail that plan when I got it into my head that I wanted to use a night photo in the banner. That ended up taking the design in a very different direction. When I make the switch, you won’t recognize the place.

I’m also in the process of teaching myself Javascript and jQuery, so I decided to add a little animated flourish when the page loads. At the moment it looks kind of cool, but I expect it will get tiring. It’s basically the modern web version of the <blink> tag that made Geocities into such a hellscape.

I’ve still got a bunch of details to attend to before I cut over to the new site. For example, I almost forgot that Movable Type keeps its feeds in different locations than everybody is used to with WordPress. This meant I had to add redirection rules to send feed readers seeking the old feeds to the new locations. I’ll probably still put up a final post on the old site that warns people that they’re subscribed to an old feed. The site will be down so they won’t be able to read it, but it will be the last thing in the dead feed.

In addition, I’ve still got to add a bunch of other sidebar items to the blog (recent posts, archives, search, etc), create a robots.txt file (maybe), and tweak the design a bit more. Then, once I switch over, I’ll have to re-run the verification programs one more time, turn on comments, and enable all the statistics tools. I plan to use the same ones I have here — Sitemeter (which I consider to have the official authoritative visitor count), Google Analytics (the most useful), and Woopra (the cool new thing) — along with WordPress jetpack, but I don’t want to turn them on until the site is actually live.

And somewhere along the way, I’ll have to re-create my blogroll. That will be the subject of my next post about the move to WordPress.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Moving to WordPress – Part 2: New Website

(Warning: Much technical computer geekery ahead.)

WordPress has a Movable Type import tool, but It doesn’t solve what I consider to be the most important problem: It doesn’t preserve permalinks. Over the years, many people have linked to posts on Windypundit — Google webmaster tools reports over 90,000 inbound links — and I want to make sure that as many as possible continue to work. Not only is it basic ettiquette not to break links, but having working links to my site is also important to maintaining what passes for my search engine rankings.

I searched for other tools and methods but I couldn’t find anything that would solve the permalinks problem without introducing other problems of some kind. Eventually, out of frustration and a desire to learn new tricks, I decided on a rather crazy course of action: I decided to port my blog to WordPress by writing my own program.

I chose to write it in C#, mostly because I’d just been hired for a job programming in C# and I figured writing the importer would be a good way to learn C#. Also, I already owned Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional and I’m comfortable with the development environment.

That was a year ago. I got in enough C# practice that I had no trouble when I started the job, but I kind of lost interest in writing the blog migration tool. Development slowed to a crawl.

A few weeks ago, however, I started getting a lot of spam comments that weren’t being caught by my anti-spam tools. Knowing that I’d have much better tools if I switched to WordPress, I decided it was in my best interest to get the job done.

The main tool I wrote is the BlogMigrator, which pulls all of my posts out of Movable Type and generates a WordPress extended RSS (WXR) file suitable for import into WordPress.

It starts by downloading all the posts from the current Windypundit website, which it does by connecting directly to the MySql database that Movable Type uses to store all my posts. It queries to get all the authors, categories, posts, and comments in the blog, including all pages (such as the About pages) and all draft posts loaded into an ADO.NET dataset, which it saves to a file. From then on, the migrator just loads blog posts from the file, avoiding the time consuming download from the server. If I want the latest stuff instead of my locally cached copy, I just delete the DataSet file and the BlogMigrator downloads a new one next time I run it.

Next the program builds an in-memory model of the Movable Type blog, including all authories, categories, blog entries, template maps, and comments. This is a fairly mechanical process. After that’s done, it iterates over all the blog entries and generates a report of the location and publishing status of every post. I use these reports (and others) as input to the iterative development process.

The next step is to traverse the Movable Type blog model and build a matching WordPress blog model. All of the basic concepts are the same, but there are a lot of little details that change, including the names of the data fields, and I try to follow the naming conventions of each blog technology as much as I can. (E.g. Movable Type author have single name field, WordPress authors have first and last names.) Among the steps of the conversion are splitting the author name into first and last names, generating unique IDs for each post, merging main and extended post text, converting the URL format for the post, and converting from local time to universal time.

The next pass looks into the actual content of each post and uses the HTML Agility Pack to analyze the HTML and catalog every element and all the class and style attributes. It also generates reports of which posts each of those items is used in. I’ve been using those reports to make iterative modifications to the program. For example, some posts have embedded HTML class junk that was introduced when blog authors cut-and-pasted from Microsoft Word. By finding these classes in the reports, I was able to modify the program to strip them out. I have a whole collection of whitelists, blacklists, and replacement tables.

In other cases, where the reports showed that a strange class or misspelled element was used in only a handful of posts, I’ve just gone back in to the blog on MovableType to fix the problem at the source, which is easier than adding code to fix the problem. Then I re-import the database and re-run the BlogMigrator to confirm the problem is fixed. (For problems fixed by the tool, there are before- and after-cleanup reports so I can verify the problem is gone.)

Another thing I had to handle was custom tags. MovableType allows you to create custom HTML-like tags for your blog by writing a little PHP and/or Perl code, and I had built a few of them over the years. I had to modify the HTML Agility Pack to recognize them as legitimate tags, and then I had the BlogMigrator replace them either by generating raw HTML or by re-writing them into custom WordPress shortcodes (which are a similar concept to MT’s custom tags). Fortunately, I was mostly able to implement the shortcodes by reusing the PHP code I had already written.

The BlogMigrator also catalogs all the links and images in each post, generating CSV files that I can view in Excel. Each link is identified as internal — back to Windypundit — or external depending on the hostname. Internal links are further classified by checking whether they point to a known Windypundit post URL or something else, such as an image or sound file.

I then have a separate AssetDownloader program that reads in these report files and downloads all the assets on the site and builds a directory structure for them. It filters out file types that are not static assets, such as links to .php files. I can upload all the files in that directory to the new website so the internal links work, although the program rewrites them with a new top-level subdirectory so they won’t collide with the new blog’s native assets. It also cleans up problems like replacing spaces in the URLs with underscores.

I then have a third program, the Probulator, that reads the link report, rewrites every link to point at the new blog, and tests the link to make sure it works. The first time, it found 61 broken internal links, due to basename shortening, badly formed URLs, embedded spaces, and so on. I went back to the fix (or remove) the links.

It also found a couple of dozen links that were broken because my program was using the date of publication of a post to generate the URL and Movable Type was using the date of creation (or vice versa, I can’t remember).

The Probulator also tries to download a copy of every blog post by using its original URL — except for the hostname, which it rewrites to refer to my test server. This serves as a test for broken links, and it also provides local copies for further analysis by two more programs.

The SanityChecker program examines each blog post for odd bits of HTML that might not format correctly. For example, all post content should be a list of a limited set of tags — <p>, <ul>, <ol>, <h5>, <h6> — or <blockquote>, which should contain a list of the same set of tags. The program reported anything that did not match that pattern. This uncovered a flaw in my implementation of one of the shortcode replacements for custom tags. It also found a bunch of posts which had been authored using mangled HTML. (God bless Joel Rosenberg’s memory, but he didn’t know a damned thing about HTML.) I had to go back to the Movable Type version of the blog to clean those up before importing.

The last program is the LinkVerifier, which finds all the links in every post and makes sure that all the internal ones still work. A few of the links are to blog-engine-specific resources, such as category archives and author about pages, that can’t be easily mapped. I’ll keep a list of those so I can go in and fix them later.

At this point, my process for a full import goes something like this:

• Delete the database cache file (if I’ve changed something on the Windypundit site and I want to re-download everything).
• Run the BlogMigrator.
• Run the AssetDownloader.
• Zip up the downloaded assets, upload them to the new blog host, and extract them into the proper directory.
• On the new blog host, restore a backup of the WordPress database that has all the configuration items set but doesn’t have any posts in it.
• Use the WordPress importer to upload the WXR file from the BlogMigrator that contains all the posts.
• Hit the blog homepage to verify that it’s working.
• Run the Probulator, check the reports for missing items.
• Run the SanityChecker, check the reports for problems.
• Run the LinkVerifier, check the reports for problems.
• Go fix some problems and try the process again.

I’ve pretty much been doing that in my spare time for the past couple of weeks, and I think I’m almost done. I’ll probably roll out the live site in the next few days.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Moving to WordPress – Part 1: Content

Hopefully all will get better when I move to WordPress.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Temporary Comment Deconveniencing

However, once I start actually using the new WordPress site, I’m stuck with it. Repeating the import would wipe out new posts and new comments. So before I commit to the new site, I’ve got to be pretty confident that it is mostly working right. Among other things, that means spot-checking posts to see if they look okay.

There are over 1900 posts, so I could use a little help with that.

Anyone out there interested in volunteering to peek at the new Windypundit site and examine a bunch of my posts to see if they’re formatted OK? I’m not talking about proofreading, just looking to see if the text looks normal, the images are present at the right size, and so on. If you’re willing, email me at the address in the sidebar on the right.

Thanks.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Anybody Willing To Do a Little Testing?

For this anniversary, I’m going to tell you a bit about my approach to blogging, and my experience in writing a blog. Think of this as “How to Blog Like Windypundit” in one easy lesson. Perhaps those of you new to blogging will find something of interest in the accounts of one guy who’s been a very minor figure in the blogosphere for 10 years.

This will be one of my longest posts and certainly the most self-indulgent. Which if you’re familiar with my work, is saying a lot. If you get bored, you can skip to the end, which has some music.

Going Public

When I started Windypundit in July of 2002, one of my first decisions was whether to write anonymously. There didn’t seem to be a need: I wasn’t planning to write about my work, and I didn’t think anyone I worked for would really care about my political opinions. And if it turned out some potential client or future employer did care…well, I’d be better off not working for anyone that uptight.

On the other hand, I wasn’t really “out” with all my friends and colleagues about my libertarian(ish) politics. It seems silly now, but back then I wasn’t sure if I really wanted everyone I knew to learn that I was in favor crazy ideas like free markets in human organs or legalizing street drugs. Maybe a little anonymity would do me good.

The problem is that true anonymity is a long hard road.

You have to be careful about posting photographs or videos. You can’t interview people you write about. You can’t have meet-ups with other bloggers unless you’re sure you can trust them. And unless you are extremely careful about what personal details you reveal (Blonde Justice is a good example of the level of paranoia required), there will eventually be enough information about you in your blog that people who know you (and eventually even total strangers) will be able to assemble the mosaic and uncover your identity.

Then once you’ve posted stuff you don’t want traced back to you, you can’t undo it. Even if you delete it, the internet remembers everything, and other people will always know what you wrote. If you ever reveal your identity, every last thing you ever wrote will come crashing down on top of you.

So unless your situation is strictly temporary — such as a job you’re planning to quit — it makes sense to stay anonymous only if you commit yourself to never, ever changing your mind. If you allow for the slightest chance that you will ever go public, then the knowledge of that possibility will always be there to inhibit your posting. And if you’re not going to take full advantage of the anonymity, you might as well just blog in your own name.

Which is what I did. And as it turns out, nobody in my real life cares what I think anyway.

Windypundit

I started blogging back when Glenn Reynolds was leading the blogging revolution over at Instapundit and, like a lot of other people, I decided to call my blog something that ended in -pundit. I can’t remember most of the other names I considered, but for a while I seriously considered calling myself Five Year Pundit, based on my observation that through much of my life, whenever I reflected on my past beliefs, everything I thought up until five years before seemed kind of stupid. The gimmick would have been that I was claiming I was right only for the next five years. There’s still a remnant of that name in my URL at Sitemeter.

I eventually settled on Windypundit, since I live in the Chicago, the Windy City. I mostly took it because it had a nice ring to it, and nobody else was using it. I was worried that it implied I was a Chicago-focused blog, which I knew wasn’t going to be the case because my interests were broader than that, so I used the tagline, “Commentary about government, economics, and science….with a Midwestern twang.” Eventually, I realized that no one cared about the blog description. They could figure out what it was about by reading it.

Accuracy

In the early days of blogging, one of the big complaints was that bloggers weren’t very accurate. Compared to the professional news media, a lot of what they wrote was rumor, nonsense, and wild blather. I didn’t see this as a problem.

When traditional reporters write a story, they have to sift through rumors and follow up on leads. They do research. They talk to experts and decide which ones have opinions worth considering. They pick through an enormous amount of information, and try to extract a story that is coherent, accurate, and important. Then they publish the story, and readers react and discuss it.

Bloggers go through the same process, but they do it collectively, contingently, and in the open, and the reactions and discussions of readers are just feedback to the process. Blogging is not a news report, it’s a conversation, and it’s foolish to hold it to the same standards as traditional journalism as long as participants understand the difference.

As long as I understood this and made sure my readers understood it, I felt I could blog about important subjects without worrying that I would substantially mislead anyone. I think most of my readers get it, but sometimes I feel the need to make my lack of expertise explicit. To my surprise, this confuses some readers, who are surprised that I would write about something after admitting I don’t know much about it. I figure it’s better than not admitting I don’t know much about it.

Influences

There are several writers whose work has been a touchstone for writing Windypundit.

Isaac Asimov

When I was a kid, I loved reading collections of Isaac Asimov’s science articles. I think I learned a lot of basic physics that way, along with a bit of chemistry and biology. He had a habit of starting each article with a brief personal story which he then tied into the main subject. People made fun of him for that, calling it a sign of ego, but I liked it, because it made him seem friendlier. I don’t ape Asimov’s style by beginning each post with a personal anecdote, but I often start posts with some warm-up material, such as a link to someone else’s post, that I can tie into my main subject. And like Asimov, I really enjoy explaining things.

Roger Ebert

I remember reading a response Roger Ebert had written to someone who criticized him for being “biased” in his review. He said that he didn’t know how to write a non-biased review. He always wrote from his own point of view. This dovetailed well with my experiences reading his reviews: Regardless of whether or not Ebert gave a movie a good review, I could usually figure out from his review if I was going to like the movie.

It was kind of like vector math. Roger may not have been unbiased, but he was always himself, which meant he was a fixed point in his reviews. I knew how my tastes in movies differed from his, so when I read his review, I could subtract the difference between us to get an idea how I’d feel about the movie.

This is why I think that opinion journalism is so much better than “unbiased” reporting. All reporters have biases, it’s just that opinion journalists don’t try to hide them from you, so you know where they stand and you can use your knowledge of their biases to evaluate what they’re saying.

In other words, be yourself and don’t put on a facade of objectivity for your audience. It’s not only more fun for you, it’s more useful to your audience.

Virginia Postrel

I first encountered Virginia Postrel when she was the editor in chief of Reason magazine. Her writing has a way of taking seemingly trivial issues and finding important lessons. Here are some examples:

• Why breast implants are an important political issue.
• Why you should respect the nail salon industry.

I wanted to be able to write posts like those. I still do.

Steve Landsburg

Steve Landsburg is the author of the Armchair Economist, and I draw a lot of my thinking and writing about economics from his style in that book, although he probably wouldn’t recognize the mess I’ve made of it all. He has an abrupt and succinct way of stating things that I occasionally work into my own writing.

Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Joss Whedon

Whenever I try to be funny, I usually have in mind the ironic style of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Joss Whedon’s comedic scripts. I’m not actually that funny, but that’s the kind of humor I like.

Process

The impetus for most of my posts is something I read on the web, usually a breaking news story or a recent post at another blog. Something will strike me as unusually smart/stupid/outrageous and I’ll want to say something about it.

Every once in a while, that turns out to be easy, and I’ll just write a post straight out with only light revision. But that’s pretty rare. Most of the time, I do a lot of rewriting. It’s not just a case of writing the basic post in one pass, and then cleaning it up in the next. I don’t have it that easy. I rewrite a lot. Ridiculously a lot.

I’ll go over a post again and again, changing words and rewriting sentences. Sometimes I write the same paragraph over and over until I have three or four copies in the post and then pick and choose the best sentences to assemble a frankenparagraph, which I then proceed to rewrite into something more coherent. Sometimes I even do this with entire posts, creating two versions with different organizations. (This post, for example.)

I move sections around. I spend an hour writing a section, then I come back an hour later and decide to delete that section, except I really just move it temporarily to the end of the post, where I can recover the good bits if I find a place for them. I know a finished post should only have text that serves a purpose, and that I shouldn’t keep anything in the post solely because I spent a lot of time writing it. But then again, if everything has to serve a purpose, why blog at all?

I don’t usually have time to write the whole post all at once, but I’ll keep coming back to it, writing and revising again and again until I have something I want to publish. On a good day, this happens fairly quickly. Sometimes, though, I have such a hard time writing the post that it stretches out over several days.

Depending on the subject, that can be long enough for it to go stale. When that happens, I just leave it sitting there in draft form. Sooner or later something will happen to make it timely again, and with a bit of rewriting I’ll be able to publish it. It might take a few attempts, though: My speculative gayvolution post went through three or four bursts of rewriting every time a gay science story hit the news, until I finally had something I felt okay about.

In case it’s not clear, writing Windypundit is really hard.

Audience

In some sense, I write for myself. I decided early on to write about the things that interest me in a style that I’d enjoy reading. This is an act of faith. I’m assuming that I am not a special snowflake: If I’m interested in something, there’s probably someone else out there who’s interested in it too.

I know a few friends who read my blog. My wife is one of them, and I’m always mentally anticipating her reaction. My parents never got on the web, but they had friends who would sometimes bring them printed copies of my work, which probably prevented me from writing about a thing or two.

Then there are the other bloggers, some of whom know way more than I do about what I’m writing about. When I write about criminal justice issues, for example, I sometimes get comments from criminal lawyers or links from their blogs. This can be intimidating. There’s nothing quite like bloviating about the benefit-cost analysis of the death penalty only to have a lawyer who does capital defense write a response. (I started to write my own response to that, but it’s one of those posts that’s been sitting in draft for years.)

Playing Tricks

One thing that has never worked out well for me is playing tricks on my readers. I’ve done it a few times, and it always seems like a mistake later. This year I participated in Eric Turkewitz’s April Fools prank, and the only people who I fooled were my trusting readers. I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a good idea.

Marketing the Blog

Notice that this section is about marketing your blog. It is not about using a blog to market your business. The difference is that if you use your blog for marketing, you’re trying to attract readers so you can convert them to customers. If you’re a pure blogger like me, attracting readers is an end unto itself.

SEO

There area a couple of different levels of Search Engine Optimization, but the one that matters most is this: Google can’t index websites it doesn’t understand. If a blog has badly-formed HTML, search engines may have trouble finding the text of the posts on the page. And just as certain visual arrangements make it easier for people to read a post, there are certain technical features of a blog page that make it easier for Google to find the meaningful parts.

Understand that this is not some sort of super-web-guru magic trick that you have to hire an expert for. It’s the internet equivalent of using a typewriter instead of a crayon, and it’s not that hard to do. I know about these things because I usually build my own page templates. But if you use one of the major blogging platforms — WordPress, Blogger, Typepad — they’ll take care of most of this for you.

Content is King

I’ve always believed that the real key to bringing traffic to your blog is to have good content. Not only does your content attract readers, but it’s also a pretty effective SEO strategy, which brings in even more readers.

That works because Google famously scores websites according to the number and quality of inbound links from other sites. Some SEO companies will claim to get you inbound links for a fee (assuming they can outsmart Google) but you can do it yourself by posting something that interests other people enough for them to link to it.

For the most part, this means your best marketing move is to write really good blog posts that other people will like. I find this reassuring. The best way to get a lot of traffic is to write a lot of good stuff.

Originality

It’s a basic economic principle that your offerings will be most valuable to others if they are unusual. Thus I’m not going to draw in a lot of readers merely by having an opinion — they can find opinions anywhere. I have to bring something more to the table. I have to bring something original.

Fortunately, I get a certain amount of originality just by being me. This blog is an expression of my interests, my style, my way of thinking, and my personality. That’s an unusual enough combination that apparently some of you can’t get it anywhere else, so you keep coming here.

But it also helps to have something really original. It doesn’t have to be spectacular, just something that no one else has. Some of my most-linked posts have included original photography, reviews of new software or new books, or even just accounts of personal experiences.

Marketing to Other Bloggers

The closest I come to overt marketing is leaving comments at someone else’s blog. If I say something interesting in my comment, maybe someone will follow the signature link back to my blog and find something they like. For the most part, I comment on other blogs to contribute to the conversation, but I realize there’s a marketing effect.

I almost never put a link to my blog in the comment text. There’s nothing really wrong with leaving an “I blogged about this too here” comment on somebody else’s post, but I’d feel silly doing it. The one exception is that I sometimes put links in the comments when I have something original to contribute to the discussion, such as original photographs of the subject under discussion.

On the other hand, I really don’t mind when people leave comments like that on one of my posts, or send me an email about something they’ve written. I will say this, though: If you want me to link to your blog, don’t tell me about your blog; tell me about a specific post that you think will interest me or my readers.

Social Media

Yes, you can use social media to market your blog. These days it’s probably not a bad idea to tweet and post Facebook updates whenever you put up a new post on your blog. Not everybody is using a feed reader.

Dealing With Other People

Blogging is a conversation, which means I have to deal with other people.

Blogroll

Don’t bother asking for a link exchange, I just don’t do them. My blogrolling policy is that I’ll add you to my blogroll if I read you regularly, or if I think my readers might find your blog interesting. Although I appreciate your link to me, it doesn’t affect the foregoing criteria, so it won’t make me link to you.

A corollary of this is that the appearance of someone in my blogroll is not a show of support. Agreeing with me is not a requirement for listing. If I read someone’s blog because I hate everything they say, that still makes them interesting, and they’ll still get a link.

This is tempered by the fact that I don’t do a very good job of maintaining my blogroll. If you think you belong there, drop me an email. I probably meant to add you.

When it comes to removing people from the blogroll, I’ve seen a few other bloggers do noisy delistings when someone pisses them off, announcing their decision with great fanfare, and Enumerating The Sins Of The Removed. That seems silly.

In any case, since I freely list ideological opponents, that’s not going to happen here. I’m only going to take you off the blogroll if you stop being interesting to me or anyone else. And given my poor blogroll maintenance skills, that pretty much means I’ll keep you in the blogroll until your blog goes dead. And then six months after that.

Comment Policy

I don’t have much of a comment policy. Agree or disagree, if you’ve got something to say, then come on and say it. The only stuff I delete is spam, threats, and as it turns out, Nazi trolls. And yes, if you know of something relevant, of course you can post a link.

When I first started getting comments, I tended not to reply to them unless I had something specific to say. If my only response would be to reiterate the main point of the post, that seemed too much like trying to get the last word.

After a while, though, I realized that people who leave comments would probably appreciate knowing the blog author is paying attention, so now I try to reply to most of the comments on current posts. I appreciate your taking the time to say something, and I want you to know it. If I have enough to say, I may even use your comment to launch another post.

Picking On Other People

As a blogger, I spend a lot of words criticizing what other people are saying. I point out why they’re stupid or wrong or dangerous. In other words, I’m not always nice to people.

However, I try to choose the targets of my scorn carefully. I don’t like picking on people smaller than me. I’m not going to write a post about something I read in a letters-to-the editor column (I’ll make an exception if the writer is well known, or represents a government agency), or something someone wrote in a comment somewhere. I prefer to pick on major bloggers, professional pundits, government functionaries, politicians, and self-important blowhards.

In a sense I follow the old newspaper adage about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

Other People Picking On Me

Come at me, bro.

Collegiality

I’m a product of the early days of the blogosphere, so I can’t quite escape the feeling that as bloggers, we’re all in this together. Therefore I try to maintain an atmosphere of what I think of as blogger collegiality. This is not the same as being nice. If I disagree with another blogger, I say so pretty clearly. And if I think their ideas are horrifying, I say that pretty clearly too, often with swearing. But I try not to let my posts turn into a personal attack on the bloggers involved, even if they really have it coming.

(Note that this only applies to bloggers, pundits, and other species of journalists. That’s because for the most part, they’re just saying horrifying things. People who actually do horrifying things — or want to be elected to do horrifying things — don’t get the same courtesy.)

When referring to other bloggers in my posts, I generally try to keep things on a post-by-post basis. For example, I disagree with Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms over a lot of things, particularly his positions on immigration and the drug war, as well as his willingness to discount the importance of human choice, but if I read something of his that I agree with, fairness requies that I consider blogging about that too.

Lessons Learned Along the Way

This is the advice section. Bear with me, we’re past the halfway point.

Buy a domain

I originally hosted Windypundit on Blogger like everybody else. As soon as I had a few posts up, I bought the domain name “windypundit.com” and got a cheap hosting service. I used a feature of Blogger that allowed you to edit content on the Blogger site but have it published via FTP on your own site. Eventually I converted to the new Movable Type blogging engine which ran directly on the host.

Buying my own domain name was the best technical decision I ever made about this blog. It’s my number one piece of advice for new bloggers. Don’t use a subdomain, and don’t get the name as part of your hosting package. Buy the domain directly from a registrar and set it up yourself. It requires a little more technical skill, but it gives you complete control. I’ve been through four or five hosting services, and I’ve never had trouble leaving one behind because I’ve always owned the Windypundit name, and I could always take it with me.

Bad News For High-School Students

Your high school teachers taught you that it’s very important to start every paragraph with a topic sentence that states the main idea of the paragraph. And when writing for school, especially when providing writing examples for tests, that’s probably for the best. But you should know that out in the real world, nobody writes that way. There may be sentences in a paragraph that serve the purpose of a topic sentence, but a paragraph is just as likely to be a collection of loosely-related thoughts. Sometimes writers start a new paragraph just to break up a large block of text to make it easier for readers to scan the page.

Keep the Structure Light

There’s a famous piece of speechmaking advice which goes something like “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, and then tell ’em what you’ve told ’em.” That’s not really good advice. I’ve seen too many speeches where the presenter begins with an overview that takes 20% of the allotted time and never gets to the “Tell ’em what you’ve told ’em” part because the clock runs out.

In a blog, you should keep the “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em” part really short. It’s only there so readers can decide whether it’s worth their time to read the rest of the post. For example, from the first sentence of this post, you know it was going to be an anniversary post.

If You Haven’t Blogged Anything in a While…

Don’t post an apology, not even if you promise to post something else real soon. Nobody wants to read that, and it’s a disappointment to anyone who came to read it because their feed reader said you posted something new (and it can make you look silly if you never post again). The way to end a dry spell is to post something people will want to read.

Developing A Style

Good professional writers understand their craft well enough to bend and shape their prose at will to achieve the style they want. I’m not that good, so in creating the style of Windypundit, I follow the best advice on style I ever heard: Just keep writing and your style will emerge.

Strunk & White

Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is probably the single most influential book on writing ever published. It’s an eccentric little work, full of rigid little rules. You should know these rules. You don’t have to obey them to be a good writer — and for certain types of writing you must disobey them — but when you break the rules, you should know which ones and why.

The style reminders I’ve found most helpful are “Be clear” and “Omit needless words.” My regular readers may be surprised to hear that, but trust me, it would be much worse if I didn’t spend time making my sentences shorter. If you can say the same thing with fewer words, or fewer paragraphs, it’s almost always an improvement.

(The word I most need to kill is “just”. It always sounds good when I’m writing it, but when come around and read it during revisions, it always turns out not to be doing anything useful.)

Some of the rules just don’t apply to what I’m doing. If I followed style reminders 1 and 17 — “Place yourself in the background” and “Do not inject opinion” — it would reduce all of Windypundit to a few random sentences on a single side of paper.

Quote Everything You Need

When you want to comment on another blogger’s post — or anything else on the web really — it’s not enough just to link to it. The web is filled with transient ephemera, and a page you link to today could be gone tomorrow. Make sure you quote enough of it that your post still makes sense when your readers can’t get to it anymore.

Stupid Writing Tricks

Proofreading

I’m a terrible proofreader. I get caught up in the subject of the text and stop paying attention to the text itself. On top of that, after so many years of reading stuff on the Web — after seeing so many grammar errors, so much misplaced punctuation, all that bad spelling — I just skim right over it without noticing.

This applies to my own writing as well. I more-or-less know how English text is supposed to be written, but once I make a mistake, I have a hard time spotting it. My mind just skips right over it, making the correction without my being aware of what’s really on the page. Sometimes I’ll be looking at a sentence, and I’ll get this feeling of vague unease. After three or four passes, I might realize I was seeing a typo.

Split Infinitives

In Latin, so I’ve heard, the infinitive conjugation of a verb is usually a different form of the word, in much the same way that the English past tense conjugation of “break” is “broke,” so Latin writers can’t split an infinitive by putting another word in the middle. In English, the infinitive conjugation of a verb is simply the main word with “to” in front of it: The infinitive of “walk” is “to walk.” The infinitive of “break” is “to break,” and so on. This means we can put additional modifying words in the middle of the infinitive conjugation, as in “to quietly submit” or “to loudly object.”

For years, grammar police have objected to such split infinitives, presumably because English is derived from Latin, where such constructs were impossible. That seems silly to me, and I see no reason not to use split infinitives whenever I feel like it. As proof that split infinitives aren’t a bad thing, I offer for your consideration the most famous split infinitive in all of English writing: “To boldly go…”

Like/As

The rules say you shouldn’t use “like” as a conjunction, so it’s technically wrong to write a sentence such as “They treated me like I was a celebrity.” It would be more correct to write “They treated me as if I was a celebrity.”

After decades of hearing people use “like” instead of “as,” I find that “as” sounds stilted and mannered, and “like” sounds more natural, so I use it a lot.

Serial Commas

I always use the serial comma, so I prefer “bell, book, and candle” to “bell, book and candle”. I won’t hate you if you prefer to do without it.

Quotation Marks

The general rule with quotation marks and other punctuation is that you should always put the final punctuation mark inside the quotation:

He yelled “Look out!”

“Be quiet,” she whispered.

This causes a problem for me. I’m a computer programmer by training and trade, and in computer programs the punctuation is very important. In particular, quotation marks usually set aside a literal string from the rest of the program, and you can’t casually move something inside the quotes that doesn’t really belong there. This is very important, and if you get this sort of thing wrong, your software won’t work.

I can break the rules of programming punctuation when I’m writing about someone talking, but I have a very hard time when quoting something written, especially if it is about computers. For example, my inner programmer is screaming at me to correct this:

Save the spreadsheet in a file named “Spending.”

That period does NOT belong in the filename. I would have to rewrite it this way:

Save the spreadsheet in a file named “Spending”.

The other way just looks so wrong.

Beyond my Control

I know the difference between “its” and “it’s”, between “principle” and “principal”, between “capitol” and “capital,” yet I still catch myself misusing them all the time. My brain knows the difference, but my fingers type the wrong thing anyway.

Too Many Connectives

Oh,… I mean,… Actually,… Of course,… Really,… However,… Make no mistake,… Don’t get me wrong,… On the other hand,… In some sense,… For the most part,…

As I’m writing, it feels natural to drop those little connectives between sentences and paragraphs, because it seems more like natural speech. But when I read it back, I realize I overdo it. I am forever editing these phrases out of my writing, and I still leave too many in.

Conclusion

(I’ll bet you thought I’d never get here.)

The Future of Windypundit

Unlike certain other bloggers who quit on their anniversary and got tons of accolades in the comments, I’m planning to stick around. Your accolades in the comments are welcome nonetheless.

My big project right now is mostly technical, in that I’m planning to get off Movable Type and switch to WordPress. It’s a big job, because I want to move over all the posts without breaking links. I’ll also need to create a whole new custom WordPress theme, probably using Hybrid as a base.

In terms of content, I’d like to start including more photography again. I’ve been holding off on that because of technical issues, but once I’m on WordPress, publishing photos should go a lot more smoothly.

I’d also like to get back into doing some real journalism from time to time, reporting on local events or interviewing people. That takes a lot of time, so we’ll see how it goes.

Also, there will be more catblogging.

Thank You

Without readers, I would just be a another madman ranting on the internet, and I would have given up on blogging long ago. With you, at least I know someone is listening. Thank you for encouraging my behavior.

No, wait, we’ve come a long, long way together, and “Thank you” is not enough…

Update: Patrick at Popehat gave me a nice shout-out, and Mark Bennett at Defending People told a story about me that I didn’t know the ending to.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ten Years At the Keyboard

Sigh. Maintaining the blogroll on this account is such a pain. I keep the list of blogs in an XML file, and I have an XSLT file that transforms it into HTML which I paste into the template for the blogroll. I used to use an XML editor for that, but now I keep it in a Microsoft Visual Studio project and generate the code by running the XSLT debugger command to generate the HTML. That’s a lot of work each time I want to update the blogroll.

It wasn’t supposed to be that hard. My plan was to write an extension to the Movable Type blogging engine that would read the XML and use the XSLT to generate the HTML for the blogroll. All I’d have to do was add an entry to the XML file and it would automatically pop up on the website.

I put that plan on hold when Six Apart announced they’d be releasing version 5 of Movable Type. I figured I’d wait for it to come out before I wrote the extension so I wouldn’t have to update it for the new version. When MT5 was released, however, I discovered that the upgrade process wasn’t working for my blog. If I wanted Windypundit to work on Movable Type 5, I’d have to rebuild it from scratch and import all the posts and comments. I made big plans to do that, but the more I looked into it, the more difficult it looked.

And then last spring Rogier, Rick, and I decided to launch the Nobody’s Business blog, which uses the WordPress blogging engine, not Movable Type, and I liked it a lot. It’s easier to use and just as powerful as Movable Type, and the WordPress development community is much more vibrant than Movable Type. There was new stuff coming out all the time.

WordPress also has a major architectural advantage over Movable Type: It’s written in PHP, not Perl. Actually, the Movable Type authoring interface is written in Perl, but the publishing side is written in both Perl and PHP, depending on whether you want static or dynamic publishing. And even though I used the PHP dynamic publishing system, parts of the site are still generated with Perl — previews and search results, I think — so every time I wrote an extension, I had to write it in both languages.

It’s time for me to unravel this mess. Some time in the next couple of months (I hope) I’ll be porting Windypundit to Wordress. That’s a lot easier said than done, about which I will probably say more in a future post.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at I’m Done With Movable Type

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. 

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Blogroll Maintenance

• 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!

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at 2011 in Review

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

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Note To Potential Employers Who Stumble Across This Blog