The nails didn't hurt nearly as much as I'd expected going in, but the pain bombshell blossomed as they dropped the post into the hole and levered us upright.
My brother's head was wobbling a bit on our shared shoulder as I glanced over, but he felt my eyes on him and snapped back into his customary 200-watt anchorman idiot grin and winked. "It's not like we didn't expect this, eh?" I couldn't argue. We'd had a pretty good run.
Raising his face to the sky, still grinning, he bellowed "Father! Why has thou forsaken us, dude?" My conjoined brother, the son of god. Smart-ass to the last.
The nails didn't hurt nearly as much as I'd expected going in, but the pain bombshell blossomed as they dropped the post into the hole and levered us upright.
My brother's head was wobbling a bit on our shared shoulder as I glanced over, but he felt my eyes on him and snapped back into his customary 200-watt anchorman idiot grin and winked. "It's not like we didn't expect this, eh?" I couldn't argue. We'd had a pretty good run.
Raising his face to the sky, still grinning, he bellowed "Father! Why has thou forsaken us, dude?" My conjoined brother, the son of god. Smart-ass to the last.
I've been downloading and cycloptically watching the new series Californication because a) I quite like David Duchovny b) he plays a hard-drinking writer c) the pilot episode was so chickablock with prettily wobbling breastflesh that, well, how could I say no?
Since then, sadly, the per-episode count of nipples'n'bottoms has dropped precipitously, perhaps because Australian grannies spit the proverbial dummy, and they want to play nice. Or it was just a cynical attention-grab ploy. So it goes. The series hasn't lived up to the promise of the pilot, but it's something to play up in the corner of my monitor while I'm metafiltering or fiddling with design stuff. Lets me vicariously be that guy that I'd already tired of actually being by the time I was 30, but who I still miss, sometimes, a bit.
Anyway, all that's preliminary to a plot thread from a couple of episodes ago that left me scratching my head a little, wondering if either I was out of touch with what's actually happening to the language in America, or if the writers are.
See, Duchovny, playing boozehound and improbably-lucky-with-the-ladies author Hank Moody, is impelled into spasms of disgust and despair at the decline of Culture (the backstory being that he is blocked, thus drunk, and whoring himself out to a corporate blog for cash) when one of his recent conquests actually says 'LOL' out loud. In, if I recall correctly, barefaced unironic response to some bon mot he comes out with in the sack.
Do people actually say LOL now? Out loud? (And by people, I mean, you know, adults.) Do kids even do it? Am I that old?
See, the thing is, I'm almost willing to believe it, because listening to the quite entertaining Totally Rad Show podcast the other day, Alex, whose giddy wordplay I usually enjoy, came out with '[Name of somebody] FTW!'
FTW means 'for the win', for those of you even crustier and more clued-out than I.
But he didn't actually say 'for the win!', he said 'FTW!' 'For the win' has three syllables, even after a dozen beers. 'FTW' has five. The combination of vowels and consonants are bumpier and harder to say. It just doesn't make any goddamn sense.
WHAT DID YOU SAY MY CATS ARE NOT FREEBALLING GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN YOU KIDS WHO TOOK MY MEDICINE OH MY ACHING BUNIONS
I don't know. I guess I'll just go and have a nice glass of Metamucil or something.
[Update: I'd just like to say that after watching the first season that that Californication show is pretty much crap, with only sporadic flashes of brilliance. I've got to guess it's either written by committee or by dartboard, because it veers from well-written to laughably bad, seemingly at random. Too bad.]
I've been downloading and cycloptically watching the new series Californication because a) I quite like David Duchovny b) he plays a hard-drinking writer c) the pilot episode was so chickablock with prettily wobbling breastflesh that, well, how could I say no?
Since then, sadly, the per-episode count of nipples'n'bottoms has dropped precipitously, perhaps because Australian grannies spit the proverbial dummy, and they want to play nice. Or it was just a cynical attention-grab ploy. So it goes. The series hasn't lived up to the promise of the pilot, but it's something to play up in the corner of my monitor while I'm metafiltering or fiddling with design stuff. Lets me vicariously be that guy that I'd already tired of actually being by the time I was 30, but who I still miss, sometimes, a bit.
Anyway, all that's preliminary to a plot thread from a couple of episodes ago that left me scratching my head a little, wondering if either I was out of touch with what's actually happening to the language in America, or if the writers are.
See, Duchovny, playing boozehound and improbably-lucky-with-the-ladies author Hank Moody, is impelled into spasms of disgust and despair at the decline of Culture (the backstory being that he is blocked, thus drunk, and whoring himself out to a corporate blog for cash) when one of his recent conquests actually says 'LOL' out loud. In, if I recall correctly, barefaced unironic response to some bon mot he comes out with in the sack.
Do people actually say LOL now? Out loud? (And by people, I mean, you know, adults.) Do kids even do it? Am I that old?
See, the thing is, I'm almost willing to believe it, because listening to the quite entertaining Totally Rad Show podcast the other day, Alex, whose giddy wordplay I usually enjoy, came out with '[Name of somebody] FTW!'
FTW means 'for the win', for those of you even crustier and more clued-out than I.
But he didn't actually say 'for the win!', he said 'FTW!' 'For the win' has three syllables, even after a dozen beers. 'FTW' has five. The combination of vowels and consonants are bumpier and harder to say. It just doesn't make any goddamn sense.
WHAT DID YOU SAY MY CATS ARE NOT FREEBALLING GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN YOU KIDS WHO TOOK MY MEDICINE OH MY ACHING BUNIONS
I don't know. I guess I'll just go and have a nice glass of Metamucil or something.
[Update: I'd just like to say that after watching the first season that that Californication show is pretty much crap, with only sporadic flashes of brilliance. I've got to guess it's either written by committee or by dartboard, because it veers from well-written to laughably bad, seemingly at random. Too bad.]
They beat him hard hauling him out of St Paul's after he crapped in front of the High Altar, but he barely felt it through the hockey pads and the exhilaration. Light rain was falling in London, and it cooled his face as they kicked him to the curb. One of them spit on him as they walked away, dusting their hands. He was alive and unhurt and shaking as the adrenalin ebbed.
The first skirmish had ended in success. His war on god was underway.
[Sometimes entire paragraphs just appear in my brain, right before I fall asleep. It happens a lot. I'm going to try and start remembering them. So, this.]
They beat him hard hauling him out of St Paul's after he crapped in front of the High Altar, but he barely felt it through the hockey pads and the exhilaration. Light rain was falling in London, and it cooled his face as they kicked him to the curb. One of them spit on him as they walked away, dusting their hands. He was alive and unhurt and shaking as the adrenalin ebbed.
The first skirmish had ended in success. His war on god was underway.
[Sometimes entire paragraphs just appear in my brain, right before I fall asleep. It happens a lot. I'm going to try and start remembering them. So, this.]
When I was a teenager, I thought a lot about the end of the world. In particular, the rain of nukes that always seemed just around the corner. I was fascinated and terrified. I suppose that's not an unusual thing for kids that age, and might even have been the usual for m-m-m-my generation.
I grew up in the 70s, came of age in the early 80s. I was convinced that nuclear war was near-inevitable. I had no doubt that doddering dimwitted Ronald Reagan (read 'his handlers') and whichever doddering Soviet supremo was currently being propped up and jerkily animated with electric current (read 'his handlers') were going to blow the crap out the world. I dreamed about it. I can remember a grand total of one wet dream from my pubescent years; I can remember literally dozens of atomic holocaust dreams.
I remember Helen Caldicott and her Canadian-made If You Love This Planet. They showed it to us in high school. I remember the TV movies Threads and The Day After. Two and half decades after seeing Threads, I still remember the camera lingering on the puddle of urine at the woman's feet as the mushroom clouds rose. I watched The Road Warrior when it was first released. I remember reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. I sucked up all the '50s bomb-shelter paranoiac sci-fi juvenilia I could get my mother to buy for me at the bookstores on our shopping trips to the nearest city. I read what little I could find about the growth of the Cold War arsenals. It was... a hobby of mine.
Not that I was the archetypal Weird Kid or anything, muttering head-down through greasy locks about the 'end of the world'. I had normal hobbies, too: comics and computers, swimming and biking, booze and friends' fast cars. Girls. I showered regularly. But I did dream a lot about the end of the world.
And they weren't all nightmares by any means. See, I grew up in a tiny town more than 1000 kilometers north of Vancouver. I was completely confident that when the bombs fell, we'd be safe and secure. When I was in Grade 5, my gifted-group teacher had had a meteorologist boyfriend who'd lent me (and the other smart kid they'd cut from the herd to study what and how we liked) his weather maps. I'd learned about the prevailing wind currents of north-central British Columbia. We'd be all good when the balloon went up. The nearest mushroom cloud might sprout and rain its deadly ash 500km away, at worst, accidental mistargetings notwithstanding, and leave us basically unscathed
We had moose and squirrel salmon, we had farms and ranches, we had endless forest. Fruit might get a little scarce, but hell, I didn't much like fruit anyway. My house had a deep well, and the lakes and rivers were sweet and clear. Nuclear winter? No worries. We lived through -45°C spells every damn year. We'd get by. Let the mad bastards down south kill each other off en masse. We'd be the inheritors of the earth, us hardy northern canucks, ululating our diesel-powered ways down out of the arboreal wastes, antlers strapped to the hoods of our Barracudas and pickup trucks, to rebuild things in our own Royal Reserve-powered image. Proud Canadians. There'd finally be some kind of payoff for living 40 miles up the asshole of the earth for so many years.
Armageddon didn't seem like such a bad thing. Not the best result in a lot of ways, sure, but Ouroboros the world-turd was spinning at the bottom of the bowl, anyway. Time for cleansing holy nuclear fire! It'd be a shame, all those innocent people getting torched, but we kept reading how overpopulation was going to kill the planet even if the nukes didn't.
So talk these days of a coming economic armageddon with Ground Zero in America's bubble have actually put me in a nostalgic mood. Headlines like China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar sales take me right back to 1982. Media tidbits like Jim Cramer's recent howling monkey-boy histrionic meltdown -- 'It's Armageddon out there!" have fascinated me in the kind of way that (metaphorical) nuke-porn did back in the day.
It's far from certain, of course, that the blow up is going to happen, or even that things will fall apart. But I've been watching the whole thing for years now, after decades of conditioned ignorance about economics, and the New Great Depression feels as likely to me as nuclear tennis did back in the early '80s.
Then again, that didn't end up happening, did it? There's some comfort in that, I guess.
A comment from the perspicacious Malor in a recent Metafilter thread (among many others about the subprime mortgage mess, the yen carry trade, the liquidity dry-up, and all the rest) lays out genesis of the worst case scenario pretty well, I think. Is it a Minsky Moment? Yeah, probably.
Malor said:
We should have gone into a horrific recession after the stock market bubble popped in 2000. The size of that bubble was far bigger than the one in 1929, so the consequences should have been even more severe... something on the order of severity of the Great Depression, although I think a 1970s-style stagflation writ large was the likeliest outcome.What happened instead is that the Fed panicked and hit the liquidity button, flooding the system with incredibly cheap money. New money chases inflation, and causes more of it, so it went into housing, and then people started leveraging themselves up into massive debt to buy more of it.
Bubbles have been called the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear weapon; the only way to avoid the fallout is by not having one in the first place. The stock market bubble was a huge deal, though probably survivable.
But the Fed, which set off the original bubble with easy money, tried to fix the fallout with more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place. To stop the fallout from one atomic bomb, they set off two fusion weapons instead.... and we didn't even dodge the fallout from the first bomb, we just delayed it. The explosion of the other two bombs just sent the fallout into orbit, but it's still up there, and we're still gonna eat every rad.
At the very least, we're going to have a full generation of very hard times, tougher than anything in living memory. I think we will be exceptionally fortunate if the United States continues to exist as the same legal entity.
In terms of likely outcome, my operating theory is that we'll go into a short-term deflationary crunch, but the Fed will open the floodgates and send us into an inflationary death spiral. Not just nasty horrible stagflation for two decades like we would have had from the Y2K pop, but an actual hyperinflationary death spiral for the dollar.
With fiat currency, I just don't think a true deflationary collapse is possible... although with the unbelievably massive leverage in the derivative positions, I suppose it could happen. Money could be destroyed from debt default faster than the Fed can lend new dollars into circulation.
There's one name you should remember in the coming crisis: Greenspan. This is all his doing. His refusal to ever allow a recession, ever, led us directly into this mess. He never met a problem he couldn't cover up with liquid paper.
I think Malor might be overstating the case when he talks about a generation of hard times. On the other hand, if China pulls the economic trigger, he might be understating it.
Anyway, the winds taste the same to me because as the tension builds I'm once again far from the places where the corpses will litter the ground if and when the hammer falls. Two and half decades ago I was in the far north of Canada, confident that we'd be able to sustain ourselves while the rest of the world went to hell. Now I'm in Korea, and if economic armageddon happens, once again I'm not directly in the line of fire. Once again, if it all goes to hell, I'll feel sorry for all the people (even the stupid ones who went for their two year no-money-down teaser-rate no-declare ARM mortgages for a McMansion they knew they couldn't afford) who lose it all. The rich will make it through, as they always do, this time with Bushy legislation and offshore accounts rather than hardened bunkers and hidey holes.
Well, I like to say I'll feel sorry about the end of days. I said to myself when I was 17 that I'd be sorry about all those crispy corpses down in CanadAmerica South. But not entirely sincere the sentiment, I have to admit, then or now. The truth is, of course, in some ways, on some days: I think I'd feel like pumping my fist, taking a deep breath, and shouting 'That's what you get for shortsighted greed and systematic stupidity, you bastards!' Or more succinctly, 'cause my wind is not what it once was, 'Suck it, dummies!'
I'm a bad man that way. Or part of me is and was, at least.
Bad things are going to happen to the Korean economy, certainly, if and when America's economy goes tits-up and takes the rest of the world with it. But if I lived in North America, if I was mortgaged to the hilt, if I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I'd be a lot more worried about it than I am here in Korea with my life savings in won and no debt.
Maybe we ought to buy some gold, though.
So I am back where I was when I was young -- a cleansing fire might just be what's needed to clean out the corruption and cauterize the wounds. Part of me almost looks forward to it. I'm not sure if I really believe that, or if it's just the romantic teen I was surfacing again for a last misanthropic gasp before he goes down into that dark cold water for the last time.
Either way: armageddon schadenfreude. It's not just a good name for a postmodern superhero.
[Update: more background material and some excellent explanations of the IMPENDING DOOOOOOOM in this MeFi thread.]
When I was a teenager, I thought a lot about the end of the world. In particular, the rain of nukes that always seemed just around the corner. I was fascinated and terrified. I suppose that's not an unusual thing for kids that age, and might even have been the usual for m-m-m-my generation.
I grew up in the 70s, came of age in the early 80s. I was convinced that nuclear war was near-inevitable. I had no doubt that doddering dimwitted Ronald Reagan (read 'his handlers') and whichever doddering Soviet supremo was currently being propped up and jerkily animated with electric current (read 'his handlers') were going to blow the crap out the world. I dreamed about it. I can remember a grand total of one wet dream from my pubescent years; I can remember literally dozens of atomic holocaust dreams.
I remember Helen Caldicott and her Canadian-made If You Love This Planet. They showed it to us in high school. I remember the TV movies Threads and The Day After. Two and half decades after seeing Threads, I still remember the camera lingering on the puddle of urine at the woman's feet as the mushroom clouds rose. I watched The Road Warrior when it was first released. I remember reading A Canticle for Leibowitz. I sucked up all the '50s bomb-shelter paranoiac sci-fi juvenilia I could get my mother to buy for me at the bookstores on our shopping trips to the nearest city. I read what little I could find about the growth of the Cold War arsenals. It was... a hobby of mine.
Not that I was the archetypal Weird Kid or anything, muttering head-down through greasy locks about the 'end of the world'. I had normal hobbies, too: comics and computers, swimming and biking, booze and friends' fast cars. Girls. I showered regularly. But I did dream a lot about the end of the world.
And they weren't all nightmares by any means. See, I grew up in a tiny town more than 1000 kilometers north of Vancouver. I was completely confident that when the bombs fell, we'd be safe and secure. When I was in Grade 5, my gifted-group teacher had had a meteorologist boyfriend who'd lent me (and the other smart kid they'd cut from the herd to study what and how we liked) his weather maps. I'd learned about the prevailing wind currents of north-central British Columbia. We'd be all good when the balloon went up. The nearest mushroom cloud might sprout and rain its deadly ash 500km away, at worst, accidental mistargetings notwithstanding, and leave us basically unscathed
We had moose and squirrel salmon, we had farms and ranches, we had endless forest. Fruit might get a little scarce, but hell, I didn't much like fruit anyway. My house had a deep well, and the lakes and rivers were sweet and clear. Nuclear winter? No worries. We lived through -45°C spells every damn year. We'd get by. Let the mad bastards down south kill each other off en masse. We'd be the inheritors of the earth, us hardy northern canucks, ululating our diesel-powered ways down out of the arboreal wastes, antlers strapped to the hoods of our Barracudas and pickup trucks, to rebuild things in our own Royal Reserve-powered image. Proud Canadians. There'd finally be some kind of payoff for living 40 miles up the asshole of the earth for so many years.
Armageddon didn't seem like such a bad thing. Not the best result in a lot of ways, sure, but Ouroboros the world-turd was spinning at the bottom of the bowl, anyway. Time for cleansing holy nuclear fire! It'd be a shame, all those innocent people getting torched, but we kept reading how overpopulation was going to kill the planet even if the nukes didn't.
So talk these days of a coming economic armageddon with Ground Zero in America's bubble have actually put me in a nostalgic mood. Headlines like China threatens 'nuclear option' of dollar sales take me right back to 1982. Media tidbits like Jim Cramer's recent howling monkey-boy histrionic meltdown -- 'It's Armageddon out there!" have fascinated me in the kind of way that (metaphorical) nuke-porn did back in the day.
It's far from certain, of course, that the blow up is going to happen, or even that things will fall apart. But I've been watching the whole thing for years now, after decades of conditioned ignorance about economics, and the New Great Depression feels as likely to me as nuclear tennis did back in the early '80s.
Then again, that didn't end up happening, did it? There's some comfort in that, I guess.
A comment from the perspicacious Malor in a recent Metafilter thread (among many others about the subprime mortgage mess, the yen carry trade, the liquidity dry-up, and all the rest) lays out genesis of the worst case scenario pretty well, I think. Is it a Minsky Moment? Yeah, probably.
Malor said:
We should have gone into a horrific recession after the stock market bubble popped in 2000. The size of that bubble was far bigger than the one in 1929, so the consequences should have been even more severe... something on the order of severity of the Great Depression, although I think a 1970s-style stagflation writ large was the likeliest outcome.What happened instead is that the Fed panicked and hit the liquidity button, flooding the system with incredibly cheap money. New money chases inflation, and causes more of it, so it went into housing, and then people started leveraging themselves up into massive debt to buy more of it.
Bubbles have been called the fiscal equivalent of a nuclear weapon; the only way to avoid the fallout is by not having one in the first place. The stock market bubble was a huge deal, though probably survivable.
But the Fed, which set off the original bubble with easy money, tried to fix the fallout with more of the same medicine that got us sick in the first place. To stop the fallout from one atomic bomb, they set off two fusion weapons instead.... and we didn't even dodge the fallout from the first bomb, we just delayed it. The explosion of the other two bombs just sent the fallout into orbit, but it's still up there, and we're still gonna eat every rad.
At the very least, we're going to have a full generation of very hard times, tougher than anything in living memory. I think we will be exceptionally fortunate if the United States continues to exist as the same legal entity.
In terms of likely outcome, my operating theory is that we'll go into a short-term deflationary crunch, but the Fed will open the floodgates and send us into an inflationary death spiral. Not just nasty horrible stagflation for two decades like we would have had from the Y2K pop, but an actual hyperinflationary death spiral for the dollar.
With fiat currency, I just don't think a true deflationary collapse is possible... although with the unbelievably massive leverage in the derivative positions, I suppose it could happen. Money could be destroyed from debt default faster than the Fed can lend new dollars into circulation.
There's one name you should remember in the coming crisis: Greenspan. This is all his doing. His refusal to ever allow a recession, ever, led us directly into this mess. He never met a problem he couldn't cover up with liquid paper.
I think Malor might be overstating the case when he talks about a generation of hard times. On the other hand, if China pulls the economic trigger, he might be understating it.
Anyway, the winds taste the same to me because as the tension builds I'm once again far from the places where the corpses will litter the ground if and when the hammer falls. Two and half decades ago I was in the far north of Canada, confident that we'd be able to sustain ourselves while the rest of the world went to hell. Now I'm in Korea, and if economic armageddon happens, once again I'm not directly in the line of fire. Once again, if it all goes to hell, I'll feel sorry for all the people (even the stupid ones who went for their two year no-money-down teaser-rate no-declare ARM mortgages for a McMansion they knew they couldn't afford) who lose it all. The rich will make it through, as they always do, this time with Bushy legislation and offshore accounts rather than hardened bunkers and hidey holes.
Well, I like to say I'll feel sorry about the end of days. I said to myself when I was 17 that I'd be sorry about all those crispy corpses down in CanadAmerica South. But not entirely sincere the sentiment, I have to admit, then or now. The truth is, of course, in some ways, on some days: I think I'd feel like pumping my fist, taking a deep breath, and shouting 'That's what you get for shortsighted greed and systematic stupidity, you bastards!' Or more succinctly, 'cause my wind is not what it once was, 'Suck it, dummies!'
I'm a bad man that way. Or part of me is and was, at least.
Bad things are going to happen to the Korean economy, certainly, if and when America's economy goes tits-up and takes the rest of the world with it. But if I lived in North America, if I was mortgaged to the hilt, if I was living from paycheck to paycheck, I'd be a lot more worried about it than I am here in Korea with my life savings in won and no debt.
Maybe we ought to buy some gold, though.
So I am back where I was when I was young -- a cleansing fire might just be what's needed to clean out the corruption and cauterize the wounds. Part of me almost looks forward to it. I'm not sure if I really believe that, or if it's just the romantic teen I was surfacing again for a last misanthropic gasp before he goes down into that dark cold water for the last time.
Either way: armageddon schadenfreude. It's not just a good name for a postmodern superhero.
[Update: more background material and some excellent explanations of the IMPENDING DOOOOOOOM in this MeFi thread.]
Well, I've rolled out the new design to the front page (as you can see if you're not reading this in a feedreader). I'm pretty happy with it -- it's still a bit crufty, but I get excited about this stuff, and always end up jumpin the gun.
The main idea was to surface as much of the old content as possible to the front page, since I've been writing so infrequently lately -- there's some pretty good stuff back there, littered through the chaff. It's evolutionary rather than a complete reboot, and it's still boring, easy old blue and grey, and OMG WEB 2.0 GRADIENTS LOL, but it'll doooooo.
Archive pages
are still sporting the old (and kind of broken) styles, but I'm hard at work eventually going to end up updating those too, and eventually some variation on the front page styling will migrate throughout the site.
The new Movable Type 4 templating, with its includes including includes which in turn include other stuff has pretty much broken my brain -- I'm not sure what they've done is entirely sensible from a usability point of view. Certainly it makes sense from the coder perspective -- best practices, all that modularization and refactoring -- but it's a freaking nightmare to develop your own templates. Still, though, just ripping the guts out of my old templates and wrapping the new design around them just worked, so that's good.
Anyway, I hope you like the new design. It looks right in all the browsers I've tested on WIndows -- IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari -- but if you find any glaring problems, please drop a comment and let me know!
Update: I just noticed that the 6th Anniversary of the site (well, it was on Blogger for the first year or so, but still) was 10 days ago. Holy crap! That's about 11 minutes in Chicken Years!
Well, I've rolled out the new design to the front page (as you can see if you're not reading this in a feedreader). I'm pretty happy with it -- it's still a bit crufty, but I get excited about this stuff, and always end up jumpin the gun.
The main idea was to surface as much of the old content as possible to the front page, since I've been writing so infrequently lately -- there's some pretty good stuff back there, littered through the chaff. It's evolutionary rather than a complete reboot, and it's still boring, easy old blue and grey, and OMG WEB 2.0 GRADIENTS LOL, but it'll doooooo.
Archive pages are still sporting the old (and kind of broken) styles, but I'm hard at work eventually going to end up updating those too, and eventually some variation on the front page styling will migrate throughout the site.
The new Movable Type 4 templating, with its includes including includes which in turn include other stuff has pretty much broken my brain -- I'm not sure what they've done is entirely sensible from a usability point of view. Certainly it makes sense from the coder perspective -- best practices, all that modularization and refactoring -- but it's a freaking nightmare to develop your own templates. Still, though, just ripping the guts out of my old templates and wrapping the new design around them just worked, so that's good.
Anyway, I hope you like the new design. It looks right in all the browsers I've tested on WIndows -- IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari -- but if you find any glaring problems, please drop a comment and let me know!
Update: I just noticed that the 6th Anniversary of the site (well, it was on Blogger for the first year or so, but still) was 10 days ago. Holy crap! That's about 11 minutes in Chicken Years!
Well, I've upgraded to MT4, and it was relatively painless, once I paid attention to what I was doing. I've somehow lost a lot of styling from my arcane crufty old mix of inter-connected stylesheets, all scotch-taped and chewing-gummed together, but everything's more or less there, so I'll mark it down as a qualified success. Functional, if not precisely the way I want it to look.
A semi-major style reset is coming soonish, so I'm not going to spend too much time cleaning things up. As wee Derek's dad used to say in his amusingly authentic Scots brogue: it'll dooooo, lad.
Well, I've upgraded to MT4, and it was relatively painless, once I paid attention to what I was doing. I've somehow lost a lot of styling from my arcane crufty old mix of inter-connected stylesheets, all scotch-taped and chewing-gummed together, but everything's more or less there, so I'll mark it down as a qualified success. Functional, if not precisely the way I want it to look.
A semi-major style reset is coming soonish, so I'm not going to spend too much time cleaning things up. As wee Derek's dad used to say in his amusingly authentic Scots brogue: it'll dooooo, lad.
I'm working on a design update for the old 'bottle, and I'm going to do it on Movable Type 4, which is now on Release Candidate 4 as I write this, and looking good.
I've decided to use XAMPP, an easy-to-install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl, which just works, basically, on Windows, no tweaking necessary (I'm still on XP2 SP2, despite being an early adopter of all Microsoft's previous OS's, which is a whole different story.) 
By exporting the data from this site using the old MT 3.3 export tool, importing it to a local copy of MT running on my machine here at home, I can develop and tweak everything a lot more quickly, and there's no risk of borking the actual site while I work out the kinks with the new design and the new template structure in MT4, which I'm excited (yes, I'm a geek) to fiddle with.
There are a couple of tutorials out there for getting MT working locally, but none of them actually worked for me by following their instructions, so after hours of fiddling, now that I've got it working, I thought I'd share The Secrets. Well secret if the ways of webservers are as arcane to you as they are to me.
The first few steps are easy.
1) Download XAMPP and install it. I installed it to c:\xampp\ to avoid funkiness with long filenames with spaces in them. [Update: word on the streets is that MT will crap itself if you try use to use a path with spaces in it, so c:\Program Files\ is probably a bad idea. Best to stick to c:\xampp\, unless, like me, you're a little compulsive about a clean root directory.]
Choose "No" (you can change this later) when asked to install as a service and "No" when asked to start the Control Panel.
2) Download the PERL 5.8.8-2.2.4 Add-on and install it. (This was the step that was missing from all the other tutorials I saw, and cost me hours of hair-pulling).
Double click the desktop icon and hit the appropriate buttons to start Apache and MySQL. Go to http://localhost in your favorite browser to see if everything's working. It should be fine. If you see the friendly orange XAMPP home page, you've got a working local web server.
2) Download the latest release of Movable Type and unzip it somewhere temporary.
3) Make a folder called 'mt' (no quotes) in your c:\xampp\cgi-bin\ folder (if you installed to the same location as I did (I'll assume henceforward that you did)).
4) Copy all of the Movable Type files (except the folder called 'mt-static') to that new location (ie c:\xampp\cgi-bin\mt\). Copy the 'mt-static' folder to c:\xampp\htdocs\ instead.
5) Edit the mt-config-original.cgi with Notepad or your favorite text editor. Mine looks like this:
CGIPath http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt/
StaticWebPath http://localhost/mt-static
##### MYSQL #####
ObjectDriver DBI::mysql
Database mt
DBUser root
DBPassword
DBHost localhost
I've deleted the alternate database lines after what you see here. You can do the same, or comment out the lines with '#'. Save the file as mt-config.cgi (omitting the 'original' part).
6) Edit all of the rest of the .cgi files (other than the one you just edited) that are sitting in your c:\xampp\cgi-bin\mt\ folder. These are mt.cgi, mt-add-notify.cgi, mt-atom.cgi, mt-check.cgi and so on.
The first lines of each file will read
#!/usr/bin/perl -w. Change them to (again, if you're using the same install path as me)
#!C:/xampp/perl/bin/perl -win each case and save the files.
7) Go to http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt-check.cgi in your browser. If all is well, it'll run some tests, and come back to tell you all is well to proceed.
8) Go to http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt.cgi and fill in the forms with a username and password and so on. Note: if the forms are unstyled, you'll need to check that your path in mt-config.cgi is pointing correctly to your mt-static folder.
9) A few seconds later, you should be up and running in MT4 on your local machine. Yay!
I'm working on a design update for the old 'bottle, and I'm going to do it on Movable Type 4, which is now on Release Candidate 4 as I write this, and looking good.
I've decided to use XAMPP, an easy-to-install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl, which just works, basically, on Windows, no tweaking necessary (I'm still on XP2 SP2, despite being an early adopter of all Microsoft's previous OS's, which is a whole different story.) By exporting the data from this site using the old MT 3.3 export tool, importing it to a local copy of MT running on my machine here at home, I can develop and tweak everything a lot more quickly, and there's no risk of borking the actual site while I work out the kinks with the new design and the new template structure in MT4, which I'm excited (yes, I'm a geek) to fiddle with.
There are a couple of tutorials out there for getting MT working locally, but none of them actually worked for me by following their instructions, so after hours of fiddling, now that I've got it working, I thought I'd share The Secrets. Well secret if the ways of webservers are as arcane to you as they are to me.
The first few steps are easy.
1) Download XAMPP and install it. I installed it to c:\xampp\ to avoid funkiness with long filenames with spaces in them. [Update: word on the streets is that MT will crap itself if you try use to use a path with spaces in it, so c:\Program Files\ is probably a bad idea. Best to stick to c:\xampp\, unless, like me, you're a little compulsive about a clean root directory.]
Choose "No" (you can change this later) when asked to install as a service and "No" when asked to start the Control Panel.
2) Download the PERL 5.8.8-2.2.4 Add-on and install it. (This was the step that was missing from all the other tutorials I saw, and cost me hours of hair-pulling).
Double click the desktop icon and hit the appropriate buttons to start Apache and MySQL. Go to http://localhost in your favorite browser to see if everything's working. It should be fine. If you see the friendly orange XAMPP home page, you've got a working local web server.
2) Download the latest release of Movable Type and unzip it somewhere temporary.
3) Make a folder called 'mt' (no quotes) in your c:\xampp\cgi-bin\ folder (if you installed to the same location as I did (I'll assume henceforward that you did)).
4) Copy all of the Movable Type files (except the folder called 'mt-static') to that new location (ie c:\xampp\cgi-bin\mt\). Copy the 'mt-static' folder to c:\xampp\htdocs\ instead.
5) Edit the mt-config-original.cgi with Notepad or your favorite text editor. Mine looks like this:
CGIPath http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt/
StaticWebPath http://localhost/mt-static
##### MYSQL #####
ObjectDriver DBI::mysql
Database mt
DBUser root
DBPassword
DBHost localhost
I've deleted the alternate database lines after what you see here. You can do the same, or comment out the lines with '#'. Save the file as mt-config.cgi (omitting the 'original' part).
6) Edit all of the rest of the .cgi files (other than the one you just edited) that are sitting in your c:\xampp\cgi-bin\mt\ folder. These are mt.cgi, mt-add-notify.cgi, mt-atom.cgi, mt-check.cgi and so on.
The first lines of each file will read
#!/usr/bin/perl -w. Change them to (again, if you're using the same install path as me)
#!C:/xampp/perl/bin/perl -win each case and save the files.
7) Go to http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt-check.cgi in your browser. If all is well, it'll run some tests, and come back to tell you all is well to proceed.
8) Go to http://localhost/cgi-bin/mt.cgi and fill in the forms with a username and password and so on. Note: if the forms are unstyled, you'll need to check that your path in mt-config.cgi is pointing correctly to your mt-static folder.
9) A few seconds later, you should be up and running in MT4 on your local machine. Yay!
Not much to say at any length lately, but I've been posting snippets and amusing pictures and links and stuff to the Glorious Wonderchicken Aggregator Thingy at a rate of knots, so be sure to check that if you're hungry for the same stuff you get every-damn-where-else these days!
Also, if anyone still wants an invite to Pownce, drop a comment on this post. I think I've got 8 or 10 still to give away. I haven't quite figured out what to use it for yet, but your mileage, as they say, might vary. Sure is neat-lookin', at least.
Share and enjoy.
Not much to say at any length lately, but I've been posting snippets and amusing pictures and links and stuff to the Glorious Wonderchicken Aggregator Thingy at a rate of knots, so be sure to check that if you're hungry for the same stuff you get every-damn-where-else these days!
Also, if anyone still wants an invite to Pownce, drop a comment on this post. I think I've got 8 or 10 still to give away. I haven't quite figured out what to use it for yet, but your mileage, as they say, might vary. Sure is neat-lookin', at least.
Share and enjoy.
The exploratory committee has come back with a dog-choker of a bar bill, the Portobello market magic 8-ball has come up with a big och-aye, the goat entrails are vermiformally encouraging, and the Voices of The Peoples have been heard.
VOTE WONDERCHICKEN! (You know, eventually.)
I am a donut.
But I swear by the Vengeful Bearded Deity of The Midwest, I will emerge from the media birth canal triumphant, only mildly crumpled and sweaty, and wiping god-goo from my forehead, stride manfully forward into the cleansing light of the television cameras.
The exploratory committee has come back with a dog-choker of a bar bill, the Portobello market magic 8-ball has come up with a big och-aye, the goat entrails are vermiformally encouraging, and the Voices of The Peoples have been heard.
VOTE WONDERCHICKEN! (You know, eventually.)
I am a donut.
But I swear by the Vengeful Bearded Deity of The Midwest, I will emerge from the media birth canal triumphant, only mildly crumpled and sweaty, and wiping god-goo from my forehead, stride manfully forward into the cleansing light of the television cameras.
I'm really pleased to see Sixapart's new direction with Movable Type. I haven't really seen that much talk about it around the blogs (which I only keep half an eye on these days, mostly because I'm busy on my own projects and building sites for other people), and I guess that's an indication of how far the app has fallen in mindshare over the past few years out amongst the blogs.
Of course, there've been changes in the weblogging demographics, too, changes that Sixapart decided to chase with Typepad, the Livejournal aquisition, and Vox, possibly to the detriment of MT. The great majority of weblogs these days, I think it would be uncontroversial to say, are run by people who aren't particularly web-savvy, who don't care about the technology substrate, who don't write code and don't want to, and who are (and this continues to surprise me, because middling as my skills are, I'm in love with design) effectively blind to design. They're writing their hearts out, or posting pictures of their kitties, or socializing, or trying to build readership and get famous, or just make a buck.
This is in contrast to the first wave of webloggers, who started playing with this stuff from, say, '98 to around 2001. The tail end of that wave was when I hopped on. Back then, a lot of people were rolling their own content management systems, or (most of them) using Blogger or MT, basically. The relative complexity of MT was no great barrier to a lot of these folks, many of whom were techno-capable (or at least design-oriented) already. That's changed.
Which is all as it should be, to some extent, perhaps. Since back near the beginnings of the Blog Era, I've argued that it's all about the words. I'm starting to think that that's less true that I once thought, and wasn't even as true as I thought it was back when I thought it.
Use your words, stav.
So tools like Blogger continue to present a low barrier to entry, joined by LJ and Typepad and Vox and the very cool Tumblr and hosted Wordpress and all the rest, and down in the moshpit, social stuff like MySpace and Facebook. Wordpress appears, at least from where I stand, to have emerged triumphant in the host-your-own space, judging only from the enormous number of plugins and themes and tools available out there for it, and the number of high-profile old and new-school personal-website-maintainers that have adopted it.
I've tried to like it, but I can't get my head around the way it cobbles together pages, and I keep coming back to MT.
But I've felt in the past few years of the MT Diaspora that I was one of the lonely few, those last couple of people at the party who just won't go the hell home. I spent a great deal of time learning MT's ins and outs, learning to love the power of it, and getting pretty handy with it, if I do say so myself. Every time I thought about a new web project (most of which haven't seen the light of day, of course) that needed some form of structured content, I could always work out a way that MT would handle it. I still love the app, but I started to feel the way that people who never could make the jump from Wordperfect felt way back when, maybe, when it started to become less a de facto standard than a quirky outlier.
I watched Sixapart make all manner of bad and incomprehensible decisions (from the outsider's perspective, of course). It's unclear whether the mis-step and ensuing kerfuffle of the new and poorly thought-out licensing policy they introduced a couple of years back was the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, but things started to seem to go sideways for MT around that time. And even though it turned out that a lot of the pushback and outrage amongst bloggers came as a result of poor corporate communication about the decision rather than the actual licensing changes, it was too late. The water was muddied. Successive revamps of the Movable Type section of the Sixapart site seemed like it was deliberately designed to show off the content-management aspects of MT in the worst possible light, and had to be offputting to anyone thinking of trying the application for the first time. Things became harder to find, the plugin directory was one-dimensionally hard-categorized, tag code examples (if you could find them) dried up and began disappearing entirely, it all seemed complicated and confusing, when the site that showcased the tool should have been showing it off in the best light.
Despite Anil Dash showing up everywhere MT was mentioned, it seemed, sometimes, and being consistently helpful and reasonable (Hi, Anil!), it has seemed for a couple of years that he was the only person left who actually gave a damn about the old-school MT community. I'm sure that impression was far from the truth of the matter, but it was discouraging, despite Anil's best efforts.
Until recently. Sixapart seems, to me, to be doing almost everything right with the new open-sourcing of a basic version of MT. They're running the beta wide-open, there's a nice big download button on the front page of the new movabletype.org website (as opposed to hiding the free version so deep in the last few revs of the .com site that I couldn't find the damn thing sometimes), they've put put up a new MTTags.com site with a whole bunch of reference materials (two tips there -- 1) don't link back to the execrable old movabletype.com reference materials 'for more information' please and 2) put a link to the MTTags site in a visible place on the movabletype.org site -- I had to search through old posts to find the URL!).
As far as the new application itself goes, well, it's evolutionary. I'm not overly thrilled or particularly disappointed, but I am happy to see that they're rethinking some things. The widgets still seem like a half-baked afterthought to me, and the theme management is still opaque to me (which doesn't matter, because I like to do my own css), but there are some good and interesting ideas there. I'll continue to use it, of course, unless they break it horribly. But all indications are that they're listening this time, and taking as much care as they can to make sure we know that.
The most important thing to me, though, is that MT 4.0 is going to have an open-source version, one with no licensing restrictions. I'll be able to use MT guilt-free to build sites for people, and if they want to buy a license later, that's up to them, regardless of what they use the site for. That makes me happy, because I still think that of all the tools in the same class that I've tried, MT is the one that works for me, and that I feel most comfortable building sites on.
Is it too little, too late? I don't know. I'm sure there are a lot of other people who've hung on, hoping for an MT Renaissance. And I hope that the kind of community that once existed around the tool, all plugins and widgets and themes mutual aid society, like the one that has grown up around Wordpress, will grow again. We'll see.
I'm really pleased to see Sixapart's new direction with Movable Type. I haven't really seen that much talk about it around the blogs (which I only keep half an eye on these days, mostly because I'm busy on my own projects and building sites for other people), and I guess that's an indication of how far the app has fallen in mindshare over the past few years out amongst the blogs.
Of course, there've been changes in the weblogging demographics, too, changes that Sixapart decided to chase with Typepad, the Livejournal aquisition, and Vox, possibly to the detriment of MT. The great majority of weblogs these days, I think it would be uncontroversial to say, are run by people who aren't particularly web-savvy, who don't care about the technology substrate, who don't write code and don't want to, and who are (and this continues to surprise me, because middling as my skills are, I'm in love with design) effectively blind to design. They're writing their hearts out, or posting pictures of their kitties, or socializing, or trying to build readership and get famous, or just make a buck.
This is in contrast to the first wave of webloggers, who started playing with this stuff from, say, '98 to around 2001. The tail end of that wave was when I hopped on. Back then, a lot of people were rolling their own content management systems, or (most of them) using Blogger or MT, basically. The relative complexity of MT was no great barrier to a lot of these folks, many of whom were techno-capable (or at least design-oriented) already. That's changed.
Which is all as it should be, to some extent, perhaps. Since back near the beginnings of the Blog Era, I've argued that it's all about the words. I'm starting to think that that's less true that I once thought, and wasn't even as true as I thought it was back when I thought it.
Use your words, stav.
So tools like Blogger continue to present a low barrier to entry, joined by LJ and Typepad and Vox and the very cool Tumblr and hosted Wordpress and all the rest, and down in the moshpit, social stuff like MySpace and Facebook. Wordpress appears, at least from where I stand, to have emerged triumphant in the host-your-own space, judging only from the enormous number of plugins and themes and tools available out there for it, and the number of high-profile old and new-school personal-website-maintainers that have adopted it.
I've tried to like it, but I can't get my head around the way it cobbles together pages, and I keep coming back to MT.
But I've felt in the past few years of the MT Diaspora that I was one of the lonely few, those last couple of people at the party who just won't go the hell home. I spent a great deal of time learning MT's ins and outs, learning to love the power of it, and getting pretty handy with it, if I do say so myself. Every time I thought about a new web project (most of which haven't seen the light of day, of course) that needed some form of structured content, I could always work out a way that MT would handle it. I still love the app, but I started to feel the way that people who never could make the jump from Wordperfect felt way back when, maybe, when it started to become less a de facto standard than a quirky outlier.
I watched Sixapart make all manner of bad and incomprehensible decisions (from the outsider's perspective, of course). It's unclear whether the mis-step and ensuing kerfuffle of the new and poorly thought-out licensing policy they introduced a couple of years back was the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, but things started to seem to go sideways for MT around that time. And even though it turned out that a lot of the pushback and outrage amongst bloggers came as a result of poor corporate communication about the decision rather than the actual licensing changes, it was too late. The water was muddied. Successive revamps of the Movable Type section of the Sixapart site seemed like it was deliberately designed to show off the content-management aspects of MT in the worst possible light, and had to be offputting to anyone thinking of trying the application for the first time. Things became harder to find, the plugin directory was one-dimensionally hard-categorized, tag code examples (if you could find them) dried up and began disappearing entirely, it all seemed complicated and confusing, when the site that showcased the tool should have been showing it off in the best light.
Despite Anil Dash showing up everywhere MT was mentioned, it seemed, sometimes, and being consistently helpful and reasonable (Hi, Anil!), it has seemed for a couple of years that he was the only person left who actually gave a damn about the old-school MT community. I'm sure that impression was far from the truth of the matter, but it was discouraging, despite Anil's best efforts.
Until recently. Sixapart seems, to me, to be doing almost everything right with the new open-sourcing of a basic version of MT. They're running the beta wide-open, there's a nice big download button on the front page of the new movabletype.org website (as opposed to hiding the free version so deep in the last few revs of the .com site that I couldn't find the damn thing sometimes), they've put put up a new MTTags.com site with a whole bunch of reference materials (two tips there -- 1) don't link back to the execrable old movabletype.com reference materials 'for more information' please and 2) put a link to the MTTags site in a visible place on the movabletype.org site -- I had to search through old posts to find the URL!).
As far as the new application itself goes, well, it's evolutionary. I'm not overly thrilled or particularly disappointed, but I am happy to see that they're rethinking some things. The widgets still seem like a half-baked afterthought to me, and the theme management is still opaque to me (which doesn't matter, because I like to do my own css), but there are some good and interesting ideas there. I'll continue to use it, of course, unless they break it horribly. But all indications are that they're listening this time, and taking as much care as they can to make sure we know that.
The most important thing to me, though, is that MT 4.0 is going to have an open-source version, one with no licensing restrictions. I'll be able to use MT guilt-free to build sites for people, and if they want to buy a license later, that's up to them, regardless of what they use the site for. That makes me happy, because I still think that of all the tools in the same class that I've tried, MT is the one that works for me, and that I feel most comfortable building sites on.
Is it too little, too late? I don't know. I'm sure there are a lot of other people who've hung on, hoping for an MT Renaissance. And I hope that the kind of community that once existed around the tool, all plugins and widgets and themes mutual aid society, like the one that has grown up around Wordpress, will grow again. We'll see.
It's all weird and fractured. It's all electrical and chemical. It's all bump and grind. It's all cheese and mustard. It's all time to drink and go to work. It's all fuck you buddy and love your neighbour. It's all speak truth to power and hunker down. It's all shitstorm and cherry blossom. It's all shits and giggles. It's all 2.0 and it's all in beta. It's all primal scream and raised eyebrow. It's all therapy and meds. It's all beer and skittles. It's all anger and love. It's all young things and old farts. It's all permalinks and permagrins. It's all disappointment and hope. It's all pimples and slipped discs. It's all be, it's all do. It's all epistemology and metaphysics. It's all cigarettes and beer. It's all desire and it's all thirst and hunger, it's all middle way and eight-fold path, and it's all a sacrament. It's all beginnings and endings, and ends of beginnings, and beginnings of ends. It's all dying young and cheating death. It's all cancer wards and Pringles. It's all rock and roll. It's all good fun.
It's all Cheap Trick at the Budokan. It's all strungout sunrise, it's all smell of night air. It's all champagne Caribbean surf and acid artifacts. It's better than the alternative. It's all guitar and drum. It's all night and all day. It's all that you touch, it's all that you see, all you taste, all you feel, it's all that you buy, beg, borrow or steal. It's failing flesh and willing spirit.
It's all too hard, it's all too goddamn easy. It's all better than the alternative.
It's just a kiss away, it's just a kiss away.
It's all weird and fractured. It's all electrical and chemical. It's all bump and grind. It's all cheese and mustard. It's all time to drink and go to work. It's all fuck you buddy and love your neighbour. It's all speak truth to power and hunker down. It's all shitstorm and cherry blossom. It's all shits and giggles. It's all 2.0 and it's all in beta. It's all primal scream and raised eyebrow. It's all therapy and meds. It's all beer and skittles. It's all anger and love. It's all young things and old farts. It's all permalinks and permagrins. It's all disappointment and hope. It's all pimples and slipped discs. It's all be, it's all do. It's all epistemology and metaphysics. It's all cigarettes and beer. It's all desire and it's all thirst and hunger, it's all middle way and eight-fold path, and it's all a sacrament. It's all beginnings and endings, and ends of beginnings, and beginnings of ends. It's all dying young and cheating death. It's all cancer wards and Pringles. It's all rock and roll. It's all good fun.
It's all Cheap Trick at the Budokan. It's all strungout sunrise, it's all smell of night air. It's all champagne Caribbean surf and acid artifacts. It's better than the alternative. It's all guitar and drum. It's all night and all day. It's all that you touch, it's all that you see, all you taste, all you feel, it's all that you buy, beg, borrow or steal. It's failing flesh and willing spirit.
It's all too hard, it's all too goddamn easy. It's all better than the alternative.
It's just a kiss away, it's just a kiss away.
I'm screwing around with about 17 different projects at the moment (and one of them I'm actually going to get paid for, woohoo), but here's something that I've always wanted to do, and Tumblr has finally made easy-peasy and pretty and stuff. So check it out -- it's a wonderchicken Aggregator, with all my de.licio.us bookmarks, Diggs, Lastfm songs, posts from here and OutsideinKorea, posts from Metafilter, random stuff that catches my attention, and a bunch of other crap I forget what-all at the moment, a-rivering at you snorting and throwing off clods of digital turf like a horny horny hippo of hyperlinking. Stalkeriffic!
Share and enjoy.
[Update: DNS has gone weird for some reason. Please stand by...]
[Update 2: DNS deweirdified. Resume rocking out...]
I'm screwing around with about 17 different projects at the moment (and one of them I'm actually going to get paid for, woohoo), but here's something that I've always wanted to do, and Tumblr has finally made easy-peasy and pretty and stuff. So check it out -- it's a wonderchicken Aggregator, with all my de.licio.us bookmarks, Diggs, Lastfm songs, posts from here and OutsideinKorea, posts from Metafilter, random stuff that catches my attention, and a bunch of other crap I forget what-all at the moment, a-rivering at you snorting and throwing off clods of digital turf like a horny horny hippo of hyperlinking. Stalkeriffic!
Share and enjoy.
[Update: DNS has gone weird for some reason. Please stand by...]
[Update 2: DNS deweirdified. Resume rocking out...]
I've spent a lot of words over the years railing against the infiltration of advertising into our weblog world, and enjoyed that righteous glow that comes from standing up for a principle, regardless of how well- (or poorly-) founded the thinking on that principle be.
Here comes the 'but'.
But I've rethought things a bit, in no small part after reading the essay Matt Haughey wrote here.
I've always been annoyed by advertising in general, on the web or anywhere else. A lot of my ire in recent years has been directed at Adsense, and that has been mostly because of its ubiquity, I suppose. I've always been unshakeable in my conviction that advertising is about the enrichment of the marketing company and the manufacturer of the product or provider of the service being advertised, and about the deliberate manipulation of the people being advertised to, typically to their detriment. Defenders of the Ad often suggest that we, the Consumers, wouldn't be able to find out about all these products and services created and sold to improve out lives. Well, I suppose there were times when I discovered something I simply couldn't live without through advertising, but I can't remember it ever happening. Documentaries like the excellent four part 'Century of the Self' did nothing to dissuade me from this, and hammered home for me the ways in which I thought that advertising had interpenetrated and cheapened our modern cultures.
I still think that I'm right about all that.
But Matt triggered some new thinking for me, new thinking that I suppose I'd been tenderized for by building one of my other sites and putting Adsense on it out the gate -- the rarely-updated OutsideinKorea. From the get-go, I assumed that it would be a site that people would mostly arrive at from search engines, and not be a regularly-updated, regularly-visited-by-readers webloggy kind of project. And so I put up the ads (for which I've still not made enough to get a single check, more than a year later, but I've really let it languish, so the fault is nobody's but my own, from a revenue point of view).
But I hadn't really followed that thinking through, and what Matt had to say helped me do that.
Two ideas here: that when we're talking about weblogs and advertising, that an awful lot of people who land on the site (by far the largest ongoing slice of visitors -- bar the Digging and Slashdotting et al last year, which was a transient traffic rogue wave) come from search engines. From Google itself, mostly. These people are looking for something, something they're hoping they might find here. Probably not a product. More likely some piece of information.
It's possible, I hope, that they find it on the individual archive page they land on here at the 'bottle, but they might not. If not, then they'll go on to find it elsewhere, and it's entirely possible that they might find it following a contextual ad from Adsense.
The ads might actually help them, as well as me, if they click on them. They might actually serve some useful purpose to both parties involved, something I'd never really been able to get behind as a justification for advertisements for the latest variation of Coca Cola, or the newest erectile-dysfunction chemical.
But I didn't want ads plastered all over the place creating visual clutter for people who actually do regularly visit, who arrive from other weblogs or comments I make elsewhere, or from RSS feedreaders when I make an update. People who are here for the wonderchickeny goodness, not the sifting-through-sum-total-of-human-information.
The solution, of course, as Matt suggested, was to display ads only if people come from one of the traffic firehoses (Digg and Slashdot and Wikipedia and Stumbleupon and the search engines), and not display them if people come from their bookmarks or another weblog or pretty much anywhere else.
I don't know why I never thought of it before.
So here's what I've done to display ads to visitors conditionally, based on the referrer, using Movable Type. Feel free to borrow and use this yourself -- it's not complicated, and all the reading I've done has indicated that it does not in any way violate the Adsense terms of service. There may, of course, be better ways to do it. My coding skills are, to put it kindly, somewhat haphazard.
1) I created a couple of modules in Movable Type, one for each Adsense format I wanted to display. At the moment, I have two modules named module-banner and module-leaderboard Each holds the appropriate Adsense-generated code for that style of ad block, wrapped in a div and a bit of php code to check where the visitor has come from.
The modules look like this. I wrap the whole thing in a div so I can style it, if I want. (You could, of course, customize the referrer list anyway you liked.)
<div class="topbanner">
<?php
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) && preg_match("/^https?:\/\/[0-9a-z]*\.?(google|yahoo| stumbleupon|digg| wikipedia|slashdot|lycos|altavista)\..+\/.*$/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
echo <<<ENDADSENSE CODE GOES IN HERE
END;
}
?>
</div>
2) I include the modules in any index template I wish to conditionally display Adsense ads like so:
<$MTInclude module="module-banner"$>or
<$MTInclude module="module-leaderboard"$>depending on which of the two ad styles I want to include.
I may make other module variations in future, of course. At the moment, I'm only displaying ads in Individual Archive Templates.
3) I long ago switched all of my extensions over to .php to use some other php inclusions, so that just worked for me. You may need to do make a filetype change (it's in the settings area in Movable Type) (and possible .htaccess edit -- I fly this stuff by the seat of my pants!) .
And that's it. Now searchers/visitors from the sites I nominate get ads that may help them find what they're looking for, if it isn't here, and regular blog visitors who come from pretty much anywhere else don't. You can test this out by hitting this Google search, then following the first hit back to here. You'll see ads. Paste the URL directly in to the address bar (for example) and you won't. Magic!
I probably won't make much money from this, either. But given the 10,000+ visits that make up an average month at the bottle, more than half of which arrive from search engines, perhaps I'll make enough for a beer or two each month, and do it without (I hope) annoying any of my loyal readers who've stuck with me for all these years.
Share and enjoy.
[Update: Thanks to the most excellent skills of my friends and neighbours, I've made a few changes to smarten up the referrer checking code. Major thanks to Ed Eliot, who was kind enough to whip up something better and explain what the Evil Regex was doing. I've updated the code for the MT modules above accordingly -- my implementation is very slightly different from his, which ought to work anywhere PHP is spoken, of course.]
I've spent a lot of words over the years railing against the infiltration of advertising into our weblog world, and enjoyed that righteous glow that comes from standing up for a principle, regardless of how well- (or poorly-) founded the thinking on that principle be.
Here comes the 'but'.
But I've rethought things a bit, in no small part after reading the essay Matt Haughey wrote here.
I've always been annoyed by advertising in general, on the web or anywhere else. A lot of my ire in recent years has been directed at Adsense, and that has been mostly because of its ubiquity, I suppose. I've always been unshakeable in my conviction that advertising is about the enrichment of the marketing company and the manufacturer of the product or provider of the service being advertised, and about the deliberate manipulation of the people being advertised to, typically to their detriment. Defenders of the Ad often suggest that we, the Consumers, wouldn't be able to find out about all these products and services created and sold to improve out lives. Well, I suppose there were times when I discovered something I simply couldn't live without through advertising, but I can't remember it ever happening. Documentaries like the excellent four part 'Century of the Self' did nothing to dissuade me from this, and hammered home for me the ways in which I thought that advertising had interpenetrated and cheapened our modern cultures.
I still think that I'm right about all that.
But Matt triggered some new thinking for me, new thinking that I suppose I'd been tenderized for by building one of my other sites and putting Adsense on it out the gate -- the rarely-updated OutsideinKorea. From the get-go, I assumed that it would be a site that people would mostly arrive at from search engines, and not be a regularly-updated, regularly-visited-by-readers webloggy kind of project. And so I put up the ads (for which I've still not made enough to get a single check, more than a year later, but I've really let it languish, so the fault is nobody's but my own, from a revenue point of view).
But I hadn't really followed that thinking through, and what Matt had to say helped me do that.
Two ideas here: that when we're talking about weblogs and advertising, that an awful lot of people who land on the site (by far the largest ongoing slice of visitors -- bar the Digging and Slashdotting et al last year, which was a transient traffic rogue wave) come from search engines. From Google itself, mostly. These people are looking for something, something they're hoping they might find here. Probably not a product. More likely some piece of information.
It's possible, I hope, that they find it on the individual archive page they land on here at the 'bottle, but they might not. If not, then they'll go on to find it elsewhere, and it's entirely possible that they might find it following a contextual ad from Adsense.
The ads might actually help them, as well as me, if they click on them. They might actually serve some useful purpose to both parties involved, something I'd never really been able to get behind as a justification for advertisements for the latest variation of Coca Cola, or the newest erectile-dysfunction chemical.
But I didn't want ads plastered all over the place creating visual clutter for people who actually do regularly visit, who arrive from other weblogs or comments I make elsewhere, or from RSS feedreaders when I make an update. People who are here for the wonderchickeny goodness, not the sifting-through-sum-total-of-human-information.
The solution, of course, as Matt suggested, was to display ads only if people come from one of the traffic firehoses (Digg and Slashdot and Wikipedia and Stumbleupon and the search engines), and not display them if people come from their bookmarks or another weblog or pretty much anywhere else.
I don't know why I never thought of it before.
So here's what I've done to display ads to visitors conditionally, based on the referrer, using Movable Type. Feel free to borrow and use this yourself -- it's not complicated, and all the reading I've done has indicated that it does not in any way violate the Adsense terms of service. There may, of course, be better ways to do it. My coding skills are, to put it kindly, somewhat haphazard.
1) I created a couple of modules in Movable Type, one for each Adsense format I wanted to display. At the moment, I have two modules named module-banner and module-leaderboard Each holds the appropriate Adsense-generated code for that style of ad block, wrapped in a div and a bit of php code to check where the visitor has come from.
The modules look like this. I wrap the whole thing in a div so I can style it, if I want. (You could, of course, customize the referrer list anyway you liked.)
<div class="topbanner">
<?php
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) && preg_match("/^https?:\/\/[0-9a-z]*\.?(google|yahoo| stumbleupon|digg| wikipedia|slashdot|lycos|altavista)\..+\/.*$/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
echo <<<ENDADSENSE CODE GOES IN HERE
END;
}
?>
</div>
2) I include the modules in any index template I wish to conditionally display Adsense ads like so:
<$MTInclude module="module-banner"$>or
<$MTInclude module="module-leaderboard"$>depending on which of the two ad styles I want to include.
I may make other module variations in future, of course. At the moment, I'm only displaying ads in Individual Archive Templates.
3) I long ago switched all of my extensions over to .php to use some other php inclusions, so that just worked for me. You may need to do make a filetype change (it's in the settings area in Movable Type) (and possible .htaccess edit -- I fly this stuff by the seat of my pants!) .
And that's it. Now searchers/visitors from the sites I nominate get ads that may help them find what they're looking for, if it isn't here, and regular blog visitors who come from pretty much anywhere else don't. You can test this out by hitting this Google search, then following the first hit back to here. You'll see ads. Paste the URL directly in to the address bar (for example) and you won't. Magic!
I probably won't make much money from this, either. But given the 10,000+ visits that make up an average month at the bottle, more than half of which arrive from search engines, perhaps I'll make enough for a beer or two each month, and do it without (I hope) annoying any of my loyal readers who've stuck with me for all these years.
Share and enjoy.
[Update: Thanks to the most excellent skills of my friends and neighbours, I've made a few changes to smarten up the referrer checking code. Major thanks to Ed Eliot, who was kind enough to whip up something better and explain what the Evil Regex was doing. I've updated the code for the MT modules above accordingly -- my implementation is very slightly different from his, which ought to work anywhere PHP is spoken, of course.]
So, yeah, the colossally stupid Kathy Sierra Pantyshopped Trollgate shitstorm is subsiding, and in the wake of the sturm und drang and handwringing, folks are taking up the pitchforks and the duct tape and proposing all sorts of protect-the-fatherHomeland ideas for stringing up anybody who doesn't toe the civility line. Or at least pronouncing them anathema.
Not that the 98% of people out there in the long tail give a good goddamn if they're excommunicated from A-Listory by the Usual Suspects.
Now, look, I'm all about civility and politeness and tea and crumpets. I'm the very model of a modern wonderchicken, and my reputed diet of whiskey, raw meat and bloody forehead sweat is purely apocryphal. I've reformed my ways, and I almost never tell somebody to f--k off unless they really, really need it. I am sweetness and light, snips and snails and expensive cologne.
But I see via Shelley that some Conference Organizers and Luminaries of The Holy Order of Self-Appointed Custodians of The Weblog Word and Sacred Sepulchre of Permalinks (Reformed) 
are suggesting (like so many years ago, when it was just rebecca blood doing the suggesting) a Blogger Code of Conduct. A lovely little badge has even been made for our use, to show what good blogistani citizens we are.
To which I fell compelled to say, in the nicest possible way, mark me, without trying to be mean, or scare anyone, or utter anything that could be construed as death threats: why don't you take a flying f--k at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying f--k at the mooooooooooooon?
Now I realize there are Big Important Issues of anonymity and free speech and sexism and the ethical bankruptcy of our culture at play here, but I'm just going to let my important internet opinions on those simmer until another day, I think.
Instead, here are some alternative badges I've made up, which express a little better, perhaps, my feelings on the matter. They're roughish, but feel free to download and use any of them, if you like, or make your own, here.
Share, enjoy, and don't forget to talk nice, or your ad revenues will decline, and nobody wants that, now, do they?
[Update: I cleaned up the backgrounds a bit.]
[Another update: I can't believe the day after I randomly used a Kurt Vonnegut quote to make a funny, the old bastard up and dies. No disrespect to the man is intended -- he was one of my favorite human beings, and he taught me (amongst other things) how to be angry without hate. 'bye, Kurt.]
[Yet another update: Ooh, see, this is what I missed about the erudite, reasoned and civil to-and-fro of weblogging. It seems I am one of Them (judging by the title of the post, 'them'='bigots'). I have made 'knee-jerk Hitler associations', embarassingly ignorant and unimaginative ones. I haven't read my history, and my natural response to being 'lectured' by my betters (like f--k) is to go Godwin. After seven years of this weblogging thing, that's the first time I've been accused of that, so hooray for something, I guess. Don't I realize that this is just a 'civilized' version of Cultural Revolution self-criticism, and totally OK? Do I need to explain the irony here, when I am caught up in a wide-cast net as one of 'Them'? Well, no, it's just possible that I don't.
And you know, I shouldn't have to say it, but this post was about having a laugh as much as anything else. Stop poking fun and laughing at yourself and those who would tell you how to think, and you really do end up kneeling in the town square confessing imaginary sins to a circle of teenage zealots. You know, metaphorically speaking.]
So, yeah, the colossally stupid Kathy Sierra Pantyshopped Trollgate shitstorm is subsiding, and in the wake of the sturm und drang and handwringing, folks are taking up the pitchforks and the duct tape and proposing all sorts of protect-the-fatherHomeland ideas for stringing up anybody who doesn't toe the civility line. Or at least pronouncing them anathema.
Not that the 98% of people out there in the long tail give a good goddamn if they're excommunicated from A-Listory by the Usual Suspects.
Now, look, I'm all about civility and politeness and tea and crumpets. I'm the very model of a modern wonderchicken, and my reputed diet of whiskey, raw meat and bloody forehead sweat is purely apocryphal. I've reformed my ways, and I almost never tell somebody to f--k off unless they really, really need it. I am sweetness and light, snips and snails and expensive cologne.
But I see via Shelley that some Conference Organizers and Luminaries of The Holy Order of Self-Appointed Custodians of The Weblog Word and Sacred Sepulchre of Permalinks (Reformed) are suggesting (like so many years ago, when it was just rebecca blood doing the suggesting) a Blogger Code of Conduct. A lovely little badge has even been made for our use, to show what good blogistani citizens we are.
To which I fell compelled to say, in the nicest possible way, mark me, without trying to be mean, or scare anyone, or utter anything that could be construed as death threats: why don't you take a flying f--k at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying f--k at the mooooooooooooon?
Now I realize there are Big Important Issues of anonymity and free speech and sexism and the ethical bankruptcy of our culture at play here, but I'm just going to let my important internet opinions on those simmer until another day, I think.
Instead, here are some alternative badges I've made up, which express a little better, perhaps, my feelings on the matter. They're roughish, but feel free to download and use any of them, if you like, or make your own, here.
Share, enjoy, and don't forget to talk nice, or your ad revenues will decline, and nobody wants that, now, do they?
[Update: I cleaned up the backgrounds a bit.]
[Another update: I can't believe the day after I randomly used a Kurt Vonnegut quote to make a funny, the old bastard up and dies. No disrespect to the man is intended -- he was one of my favorite human beings, and he taught me (amongst other things) how to be angry without hate. 'bye, Kurt.]
[Yet another update: Ooh, see, this is what I missed about the erudite, reasoned and civil to-and-fro of weblogging. It seems I am one of Them (judging by the title of the post, 'them'='bigots'). I have made 'knee-jerk Hitler associations', embarassingly ignorant and unimaginative ones. I haven't read my history, and my natural response to being 'lectured' by my betters (like f--k) is to go Godwin. After seven years of this weblogging thing, that's the first time I've been accused of that, so hooray for something, I guess. Don't I realize that this is just a 'civilized' version of Cultural Revolution self-criticism, and totally OK? Do I need to explain the irony here, when I am caught up in a wide-cast net as one of 'Them'? Well, no, it's just possible that I don't.
And you know, I shouldn't have to say it, but this post was about having a laugh as much as anything else. Stop poking fun and laughing at yourself and those who would tell you how to think, and you really do end up kneeling in the town square confessing imaginary sins to a circle of teenage zealots. You know, metaphorically speaking.]
[Some of this seemed to crystallize for me after listening to Bruce Sterling's excellent talk at SXSW 2007. So thanks to him, and you know, grain of salt.]
We grew up watching. If you're 50 or 40 or 30 or younger, you've spent thousands of hours watching. You still watch -- you watch on YouTube, or you watch your DVDs, or you watch the TV. Maybe you use a PVR to timeshift yourself so that you can watch on your own schedule, congratulate yourself on cheating the advertisers, denying them the eyeballs they crave. Maybe, like me, you fire up bittorrent on boot, and swarmload all your video automagically from the RSS feeds of illicit darknet bulletin boards.
Howl Twitter (with abject apologies to Allen Ginsberg)
I saw the best posters of my generation destroyed by politics, commenting hysterical naked,
scrolling themselves through the n-word threads at dawn looking for a snarky fix,
trucker-hatted hipsters burning for the cheapest DSL connection to the bitwise dynamo in the datastream of night,
who pizza and tater-tots and poopsocking and high sat up typing in the supernatural whiteness of rented condos surfing across the tubes of internets contemplating porn,
who bared their breasts on MySpace under fake names and saw Mohammedan bombers threatening in video streams illuminated,
who played through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Second Life and Warcraft tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were banned from the websites for crazy & posting batshitinsane on the Windows™ of the Bill,
who farted in unshaven rooms in underwear, tossing their tissues in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror on CNN...
Watching and being watched has started to feel like the default human state in these mediated days. You know how characters in video games will go into their idle animation if you wait too long to interact with them? Yeah, like that. Unwatched, they nonetheless go through the motions as if they were.
The last half a century or more is remembered, at least by me, as a succession of moving images -- lumpy raspberry red Kennedy brains sprayed out across the trunk of the convertible, phallic twin towers collapsing like nationscale erectile dysfunction. Watching makes manifest our reality, makes more real our memory. Two or three generations now, we've been immersed eyedeep in it. Hawkeye Pierce and Fonzie, they're signifiers of my childhood as evocative to me as cold lake water and the northern lights. If you spend as much time on the internet as I do, if you're one of the geek-approved flavour of obsessive-compulsives we call 'early adopters', if you've bought a big flat panel TV or covet HD video, if your appetite for bandwidth is insatiable, if you feel compelled to buy ever more complex mobile phones, you're probably in the same boat as me. You swim in the same advertising cesspool in which our media meals float -- eyeballs watch, watching is intentional, intention means awareness, awareness is all when someone wants something from you or when you want something from them. Tree falls in the forest, but it doesn't matter shit unless somebody's watching. We're Schrödinger and his cat, both at the same time.
If you live in London, your picture is taken 300 times a day, but not because someone want to sell you something. You're being watched, and you're meant to feel safe.
We've had another lesson drummed in to us, too, it seems; one that cuts in the other direction. It's a weak inverse solipsist lesson we felt in our bones from the time we were toddlers, of course: you've seen it on America's Funniest Home Videos, maybe. The child falls, howls while the parents with the camera are looking at him and pointing the camera. They move off, out of sight -- the observing eye umbrated -- and the child quiets, sniffs, draws shuddery breath, and follows. As soon as he knows he is once more in the range of the observer's gaze, he busts out into full wails again.
Here: It's easier for you to watch the video than for me to explain it. Watch.
Our thoughts, our feelings, our selves are never as real as when someone else is observing them.
So we used to make home movies, we took Polaroids, we sent cards to distant relatives at Christmas so we'd be alive in their minds. It's a natural and a human impulse. Hell, we painted on the walls of Lascaux. With the technology at hand, we were only able to do it occasionally. We laughed at the Japanese tourists back in the 1970's who lugged cameras around and photographed everything. Remember those jokes? Me, I'm in some Japanese family's album somewhere because they asked me in pantomime to pose with them, back in 1976 in Banff, presumably because I was wearing a sweatshirt with a big red maple leaf and Olympics logo.
We're rubberneckers slowing down to peer at the wreckage flung from the dizzying welter of 'reality TV' programs, where it is purported that we are watching ordinary people raised up or struck down by our collective whim or their own strengths and failings, willing participants watchers and watched alike, sanctified and made flesh by the power of our collective gaze. American Idols are made of people! Barechested rednecks are hilarious and a little sad, reminding us of what me might have been, at least on Cops. Oh, man, that's clever: those fat bastards on the Biggest Loser aren't really losers at all, are they? It goes on and on.
[ripper] I told u I was hardcore
Larger than life as we bask in the collective gaze starts to feel like a necessary platform of life services to achieve Normal, to stand out from the undifferentiated herd in the way that we've been told we should by companies who want us to buy their products. But buying those jeans whose commercials identically mass-marketed the promise of individualist flair to everybody just doesn't carry the same cachet any more for us media-steeped folks. We've gotten too smart and self-aware for that, some of us.
Bud: Look at 'em, ordinary f--king people, I hate 'em.
And so online journals like this very one you're reading right now, and the canonical cheese sandwich post. So weblogs, where what we've seen is posted, so that others can see it, and then go and see the thing seen. So audioscrobbling. So Second Life. So YouTube. So MySpace. So Flickr, where we can upload cellphone pics minute-by-minute, if we want. So Odeo and Twitter. So new, so immediate: so we spread the minutiae of our minute-to-minute existence out over the wires, so that others -- someone -- will notice and pay attention. We are alive to reality when we watch, we feel more real when we are paid in the attention-currency of attentive eyes.
I'm thinking it's a new pornography of the self. We willingly prostitute our privacy, and we accept payment in the form of attention. We always have, of course. But the <