i'm going to be taking a brief blog hiatus as i settle things up in atlanta and prepare for my move back to d.c. and my final quarter at medill. see you in a week or two!

if you can believe it, today is the four-year anniversary of this space on the internet. amazing!

check out the first post ever (by tommy); here's mine (before i knew a blog was for more than sticking photos up there).

i have gotten hundreds, if not THOUSANDS (probably not thousands) of comment spam on this particular entry in the past week. the entry is a short blurb pointing people towards photos of our italian vacation last year. what is it about that post? is it the fact the word voyeurs is in the title? is it the fact that it links to weird photo hosting sites? is it the fact that i am going insane with the deletion?!? gah, spammers. i will kill you all.

ooh! the blogher conference is going to chicago next year. although i have no idea if the conference is actually worthwhile and provides anybody with any enlightening information (my fault for not having researched it very much) it would certainly be a cool excuse to visit my favorite recently-departed city. (via)

folks on the DCist mailing list this morning pointed out a legal times article that refers to DCist as "relatively hip." how awesome is that? at least as awesome as the time i got called a d-list internet celebrity.

Behold! Catherine's lovely new design for the site, which I stayed up waaaay too late last night implementing. There are a lot of pieces that still have to be done — archives, a different header, the about page, some fancy del.icio.us crap that Catherine asked for and I'm happy to oblige, plus who knows what else I forgot. But here we are. It's filled with XHTML goodness (although the entries' crappy, non-compliant HTML will usually prevent the page from validating). Plus actually well-written CSS (relatively speaking), some unnecessary Javascript, and Flickr integration. Woo!

Since parts of the design are still in flux I haven't yet applied the individual entry template, which means that as soon as you click on a comment or try to "read more" you'll be back at the old ugly blue site. I've got a few more things to wrap up before that goes away — plus, I probably ought to wait for a low-traffic time to do the rebuild, since we've already incurred the wrath of our host for taking more than our fair share of the CPU.

tommy and i realize we are SUPER out-of-date on our blogroll and there are many lovely people out there we should have added eons ago. but, we're lazy. so whenever the new redesign comes around, so will a current and mind-blowing new blogroll. prepare yourselves.

So, Hasweb briefly disabled Movable Type over the weekend. They said mt.cgi was consuming too many resourced — I suspect they just took a snapshot of the system's CPU utilization during a rebuild for a new entry, making it seem like we were hogging the machine (we were, but only for five seconds or so once or twice a day). I convinced them to turn things back on, but they're keeping a watchful eye on us.

The thing is, mt.cgi isn't supposed to be cause these problems. The comment scripts can (as in Unfogged's case), but not mt.cgi itself. As far as I can tell this is just a combination of bad luck and some slightly inefficient templates.

So, just a word of warning: I'm likely to put up a Six Apart-approved template sometime today. It'll just be a stopgap — Catherine has come up with a good-looking design, but I want to add some bells and/or whistles, then it'll probably take me some time to turn it into HTML. So, something mediocre is forthcoming. But hey, it couldn't be as bad as the status quo, right?

do us all an effing favor and stop searching for li/ger. jeez:

Dear Customer:

You submitted the following rating request to SonicWALL CFS Support:
Rate zunta.org as "14.Arts/Entertainment" at 2006-06-30 09:25:00.777

The request has been reviewed and rated as:
"31.Web Communications" at 2006-06-30 13:28:01.557

You should see this rating change reflected within 1 to 3 business days.

Thank you for your request,
SonicWALL CFS Support

Thanks for all the thoughts & prayers. It's been an emotionally difficult couple of hours.

Thanks very much to Justin for sending this along. Apparently Panera's content filter is blocking this site:

Hmm. I don't think this site is filled with violent, racist hate speech (unless "Food Network Chefs" now count as an ethnic group). But I suppose I'm not the one who gets to make that call.

I guess I should be somewhat diplomatic, since I'm now patiently waiting for SonicWall to review our case. So I'll put it as gently as I can: SonicWall appears to be run by a bunch of goddamn morons. What'd you guys do, put "hate" into Google and ban all the sites that came up? If you're intent on being in the business of facilitating societal prudishness — surely a noble calling! — you ought to at least figure out how to do it properly, you miserably incompetent fuckwits.

Related: BoingBoing's guide to defeating censorware.

these blogs are installing some wanderlust in me lately, so i thought i'd pass them on.

tania: an american living in cortona with her husband and apparently eating incredibly well. when we stayed near cortona last year i took several restaurant recommendations from her blog and all of them were spot on. plus she takes some gorgeous photos. my favorites include her series on "god spots," the weird little shrines you find all over tuscany.

betsey goes to china: betsey went to china (and the archives are on the site) but now she's living it up in singapore. she seems to go on getaways to india, thailand and hong kong every other weekend, so you're getting quite a bit of beautiful photos with her droll and sweet commentary.

sarah lane: some of you may know sarah as the adorable blond lady formerly of "attack of the show," which tommy and charles would watch all the time. she recently got married and her honeymoon involves a 13-month trip around the world with her husband (who was also on the show. i read somewhere they met on the show a year ago; was she dating kevin rose at the time? WAS THERE SCANDAL!?!). anyways. currently they're in turkey, and her most recent post features some amazing shots of the capadocia region, whose terrain reminds me a lot of my perennial italian favorite, matera.

the satorialist: not exactly a travel blog, but my favorite fashion blog (a photographer in new york who takes and posts pictures of beautiful people wearing beautiful and interesting clothing out on the street) has been commissioned by style.com to shoot the men's shows in milan and paris. but when he's out in the piazzas, he's taking shots of the italian ladies. and they are, as usual, stunning. the italians. oi.

So, uh, I accidentally screwed up our RSS a while ago. Sorry about that. An effort to include the extended portion of entries ended up producing some incorrect XML. Everything should be better now (or shortly, depending on when FeedBurner reindexes us).

Just received via comment spam:

Now, I'm just a simple country blogger. Your modern marketing concepts confuse and astound me! But it seems, even to my old-fashioned and no doubt primitive sensibilities, that if you're trying to appeal to bloggers and blog readers, you should conduct your marketing campaign in a manner other than by hiring scumbag spammers to pollute our sites, insult our intelligence and generally infuriate us. Peddling d1sc0unt v1agr4 is one thing, but for a movie, where you're trying to build "buzz" and "word of mouth" about your project, you'd think it would be important for that buzz to be about something other than what a bunch of assholes you are. Just a thought.

Oh, and I hope your pathetic ought-to-be-direct-to-video abomination is out of theaters before the first showing is over. Go to hell.

I feel weirdly guilty about posting this: it's fundamentally a recommendation that you go enjoy some writing that wouldn't exist if not for a wonderful guy's terrible misfortune. But I'll pass it along anyway, for those few of you who read this site but not unfogged.

Ogged stopped blogging a while ago to focus on real life. We were all sad to see him go — aside from being a nice guy and the internet's foremost expert at facilitating highminded conversations about lowbrow topics, he's got a writing style that's elegantly spare, tightly constructed and extremely clever. His cobloggers and replacements have done a great job since he left — but Ogged is Ogged, and I and a lot of other folks missed him.

Well, the good news is that he's writing again. The bad news is that he's writing about his illness.

But I suppose there's not much to be done except to try to avoid embarrassing the guy by feeling guilty for enjoying his work. So head on over to his new site, read some great blogging, and add to the tidal wave of good thoughts that's headed his way.

it's stupid for me to like it, but i am liking it anyway:

yglesias: it's pretty weird to have one's social circle
pablohoney: defined by blogs?
yglesias: yeah
pablohoney: indeed
pablohoney: i have come to embrace it though
yglesias: I feel like we're the clique of the future
pablohoney: that is my favorite thing you ever said
yglesias: maybe we should get Tom to make a group webpage and that can be our slogan

indeed.

who is responsible for this?

We got our first C&D letter! Yay!

Apparently someone has a problem with the comments left on this post. Because I do feel sort of badly for the complainant, I'll refrain from repeating his/her name here (perceptive readers can probably figure it out). But a cursory glance at our archives would have revealed to them that my EFF-loving ass probably wouldn't react very well to this kind of thing. To wit, here's what I sent back:

I think there may be some confusion here. The comments to which you refer seem to me to express a personal opinion, which does not constitute libel or slander. Nor were the postings "in your name" -- no one in the thread purported to be you, they simply referred to you.

Even if they *were* libelous, we would not be obligated to police this content, which neither Catherine nor I wrote or endorsed. See here: http://www.chillingeffects.org/defamation/faq.cgi#QID709

Our site is a personal blog written for our and our friends' amusement. Comments are open, unmoderated, and unpoliced except for spam removal. I'm sorry, but we have no interest in mediating a tedious spat between children from New York who we've never heard of.

Finally, please also note that, contrary to what is implied by your email footer, neither Catherine nor I have entered into a contract with you or agreed to keep our correspondence confidential. You are, of course, protected by copyright. But please be aware that we reserve the right to legally protected fair use of that material, including use for purposes of commentary.

Isn't it cute when two jerks on the internet pretend to be lawyers? I think it is, anyway.

The funniest thing about the whole incident is how it started. The letter-writer wasn't mentioned in the entry at all! It appears that someone just googled for "socialite", dropped in and started talking shit. And then — this is the kicker — someone else arriving from Google stopped by to note how shallow Americans are for being obsessed with socialites. Presumably they found the thread by searching for the thing they find so shallow! Too fantastic. The only way it could be better is if they signed their comment with some dumbass name like, say, "dropsofjupiter1". Oh wait! They did!

But although this one mounted a strong challenge, I think my favorite Google-enabled thread on this site is still the one devoted to how dreamy Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington is. Good times.

It's strange, but I think we may be running out of internet. It might just be me — but I don't think so. Catherine's been complaining of the same thing. I now frequently find my RSS reader empty, forlorn. Oh sure, Wonkette can be reliably counted on to fill up a feed with entries I've already read, since its authors are now pathologically incapable of leaving a post unrevised. And sites like TUAW and Gizmodo reliably spam me with totally uninteresting posts, thanks to the Dentons and Dobkins of the world deciding that they earn their pay with quantity rather than quality. But post volume seems to be down on the good blogs — by which I mean my friends' sites.

Certainly, I'm guilty as well. Although the site's traffic has mostly levelled off, I feel a lot more pressure to tone down the bloggy self-indulgence here than I used to. I know that people who are professionally, personally or just plain old important to me stop by here with some regularity, and that makes me think twice before rattling off a thousand-word screed about how such-and-such or so-and-so ought to be publicly euthanized for society's benefit.

There are other reasons, too. In the last year or two, many of my friends' online lives have taken on a more professional character. By and large, this is fantastic — I'm incredibly glad that Kriston is getting paid to blog, that Catherine is writing papers on RSS, and that I can claim "blog reading" on my timesheet. But it does sort of change the way the whole thing feels. The days of pretending to work in a Crystal City cubicle, furiously penning Wonkette-bait are over.

It's pretty stupid, in retrospect — approaching the internet like a private clubhouse for you and your buddies. But I'm still sort of sad to feel the thing become complicated. I don't think there's a solution, short of fleeing to MySpace. And I'm not prepared to debase myself like that.

For what it's worth, I'll do my best to be a little less self-conscious about writing here. There's no reason we can't reclaim the heights of lowly self-involvement we once reached.

POSTSCRIPT: Aaand before even hitting publish, I've already violated my new resolution. There's an entertainingly passive-aggressive anonymous note plastered all over the men's room. I doubt it's from a coworker — but this is a shared office space, so there's no telling. So: no putting it on the internet. Drat. But just between you and me, anonymous bathroom-note-author, I'm not the one who's been peeing on the seats.

Becks and Catherine are already providing multimedia insights into the contemporary state of sexual politics. So let's continue the trend — behold! Emily's take on what web 2.0 means for women.

(that's right — it takes only the flimsiest of excuses to get me to embed video these days. I've been entirely corrupted)

Or does this seem really, really stupid?

I suppose I shouldn't be the one to cast the first stone — I'm more guilty than most of turning hilarious-while-drunk-isms into websites. But the hilarity:effort ratio here seems pretty goddamn low.

And haters, for that matter: NBC4, 4:45. Potential live TV embarrassment! Not for me, mind you. But for certain bearded associates.

I'll have to see if I can sneak a plasma TV channel-change by the people who run this temporary office space. So long as I can withstand the barrage of passive-aggressive notes that will show up tomorrow, I like my odds.

UPDATE: Just saw it. Nice job, Martin! No DCist.com graphic, sadly, but still a good piece. And Kathryn made it to the screen, despite her in-comment pessimism.

Among the many things I like about my new job is that it's given me the opportunity to learn a bunch of new technologies. Email triggers, .htaccess files, SVN repositories, XML, and of course the power to raise the dead (from the command line!) — lots of good stuff.

And useful stuff. For instance, this morning I finally fixed out broken archive URLs. Movable Type 2.66whatever built entries in the format

• /blog/archives/000001.php
• /blog/archives/000002.php
• etc.

But since the upgrade to 3.2, we've switched to a more useful format, oriented around a value that MT generates called the basename (which is basically an abbreviated, URL-safe version of the title). The new URLs look like this:

• /blog/archives/2004/01/22/round_the_world/
• /blog/archives/2005/12/16/sweet_nostalgia/

The problem is that there are still lots of links to the old URLs, both within entries on this site and elsewhere. That's no good, since they don't get rebuilt when new comments are added, or when their entries are updated, or when we redesign, or when anything else happens on the site.

But now I can do something about it. And since it took me a few hours, and since it might help someone else, I thought I'd post my solution.

DCist just lost to DC Metblogs at Wonderland trivia by a single point.

It was a nice idea — the Metblogs folks approached Ryan and Martin about it a few weeks ago. Loser gives $50 to charity, just like actual celebrities do. Wayan of Metblogs is the trivia night MC, but they're honorable folks and we knew he wouldn't share the questions beforehand.

And yeah, they beat us fair and square. We led most of the night, but Hemal, Martin and Scott had to take off early, leaving me and Ryan. The later rounds were unkind. And we had already learned a painful lesson about not trusting Ryan's instincts — he's unassuming, but that guy is trivia night gold. We lost at least two points second guessing him about the number of USSR republics and what was the oldest noncontinuous parliament in the world. Trust your editors, people!

But here comes the venting: those were the worst trivia night questions I've ever encountered. First and foremost, the entire last round was devoted to blogs, and a large portion to DCist versus Metblogs. Way to make us feel like dicks for wasting everyone else's night, guy. Second, the questions were date-heavy. That's fine and good for the DC history round — it was painful but understandable. But asking what date DCist first wrote about Borf?! That's just terrible. Considering that it was asked shortly after "How many cities is Metblogs in?", it came off as a transparent attempt to job us. Fortunately, we knew the latter but not the former, making it a wash.

But here's the thing: if the people who are in the best position of anyone on the planet to know the answer to a question can't answer it... Well, maybe it isn't such a great question. Asking "Has DCist or Metblogs used the word 'penis' more?" is a great way to prove how clever the question-writer is (clever enough to use the word penis, apparently), but not actually fun for anyone else. At all.

The beauty of trivia nights — aside from having an excuse to sit still and drink heavily — is the sensation that SHIT I should know this. It's on the tip of my tongue, I saw a terrible movie on TBS that mentioned it once, crap, what's the name of that actress? Man, before that last beer I would have gotten this in a second. Shit. I really wish I was allowed to text message my buddy. He would totally know this.

To be fair, there were a few questions that fit this bill. The celebrity suicide round? Inspired. But when most rounds of ten questions end with teams getting less than four points, something is wrong. You're turning it into a crapshoot. And making an impossible question true or false doesn't make the situation any better — it just makes me wonder why I'm wasting my time trying to guess an answer.

But in the end, Metblogs legitimately claimed their triumph. I certainly won't begrudge them that — I truly believe the questions were just as terrible for them as they were for us. And I don't mind losing; I kind of expected to. I just wish I didn't somehow feel implicated in ruining the evening of everyone else in that bar via involuntary internarcissism.

Next time: an impartial arena. And, hopefully, a less masturbatory one.

UPDATE: Now that I've had time to let the bitter tastes of beer and defeat fade from my mouth, maybe I should temper my remarks. Although harder than I considered optimal for fun, the first six rounds were well-themed and not, say, the type of thing that could be used to justify their author's indefinite detention and torture in Cuba (it's to protect us all!). That seventh round, though...

that being called a d-list internet celebrity could so UTTERLY MAKE MY DAY.

but it does. i am all atwitter.

pablohoney: btw did you read the nabob's puppy-drug post?
pablohoney: and the dceiver's wolf parade post?
pablohoney: today was a veritable cornucopia of excellent posts

is fun to see. (he linked to tommy's hysterical analysis of the metro voice contest below.)

by the way, DCist is having a contest to see what lovely and interesting metro messages readers can come up with. i highly recommend you submit something.

Charles finally provides me with the reason to root against the Steelers that I've been looking for.

confirming what i've known since i was 16 and meeting people off the internet: blogging, etc, makes you more social!

The cyberworld expands people's social networks and even encourages people to talk by phone or meet others in person, a new study finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to whom they can turn.

Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it ``was actually helping people maintain their communities,'' said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.

The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.

``There's a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,'' said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director. ``They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.''

Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts -- a median of 37 compared with 30 for non-users -- and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.

that's right. where you going to get your friends from now, ogged?

if you know me, you know i check the sitemeter to this blog pretty obsessively. i'm not concerned with the number of visitors, but i love seeing referrals, ip addresses and where people are reading from. i have to say, we get residents of some pretty charmingly-named towns on a regular basis. recently? lake in the hills, IL; little neck, NY; cantonment, FL; saint cloud, MN; and i swear to god, one time we had something like "floating lily on the wood nymph, massachusetts." wish i could remember what it was exactly, but i'm basically sure all its citizens lived in a thomas kinkade painting.

Or, morning roundup to write. And I was way too busy at work to write anything. But! Via stereogum, check out my beloved Attack of the Show making fun of Kevin Federline.

UPDATE: Man, that Stereogum post just keeps on giving.

I've been meaning to link to it forever, so here it finally is: PayItForwardForward. Conceived of and executed by a duo with the two talents necessary for comedy: a love of abstract, high-concept nonsense; and a distinct lack of concern over breaking their poor mothers' hearts.

I've been a pretty lame blogger this week. That's largely because I've been a pretty lame human being — I've had some sort of nasty whiplash-ish condition as a result of my bike accident, and only yesterday arrived at a painkiller dosing schedule that made me less than constantly cranky. I'd like to issue a personal shout-out to the people who make mobic, by the way. A doctor gave me some samples for a sore back a while ago. They didn't do anything for my back, but I stumbled across the leftovers last night and MAN do they fix my neck. Thanks, evil pharmaceutical industry!

But I've got plans, internet. Plans that involve you. What would you say to a programming tutorial aimed at the non-programmer? You'd be pretty goddamn excited about it, I bet. I'll be trying to keep things simple and short, with an emphasis on doing cool internet-y things quickly. Like stuffing the ballot box of online polls. Or having your computer text-message you when concert tickets go on sale. I'm still working out the outline in my head, but I think I can get everyone equipped to work some useful HTTP/regex mojo in just 4 or 5 lessons. That'd be worth knowing, right? Right.

But tonight, I'm off to Chicago. So for now I'll just direct you to the anecdote at the end of this post from my sister.

Back in the good ol' days (mid-2005), when Catherine blogged a blue-streak for DCist and I simply basked in her local media aura, I was dismissive of her complaints about commenters on that site. "You're too sensitive," I would say. "They're just feeding their own egos."

This was and is true, but now I've completely lost my disinterested moorings. Today I made a really, really stupid mistake, accidentally posting something that said the Washington Times owns the DC Examiner. It was an easy mistake for me to make. Excellent sports section? Check. Red masthead? Check. Unseemly interest in deporting hispanics? Check. All the pieces fit. But somewhere along the line I got my megalomaniacal conservative media moguls confused. It was dumb of me.

To be honest, the commenters today treated me far more fairly than my boneheadedness warranted. But it's all relative — these are people who have expressed a wish for my best friend to get AIDS (that one was totally his fault, though). I wonder if Marc Fisher gets socked in the face by random passersby on the street.

i am a superior internet stalker!

that is all.

Earlier this afternoon Yglesias, Kriston, Ezra and I met a bunch of folks from Unfogged, including the mysterious, pseudonymous ogged — one of the blogosphere's most elusive species.

My initial impressions:

• Very tall.
• Big nose.
• Big hands (ladies).
• Goggle tan is real.
• Arms like tree trunks.
• Breathes smoke, belches fire.
• Has an enormous blue pet ox.

Apostropher, Michael and Matt were also in attendance, and similarly mythopoetic. It was nice to meet all of you guys.

Those posts were conceived independently, believe it or not. For the record, I would cherish either present.

BoingBoing featured a photo of an entertainingly bad translation to English. For the hell of it, I sent in a link to our Italian gas pump post. I just got a trackback. So if you smell ozone and hear a bubbling noise, that's just the webserver.

If anyone knows how to export the contents of a Movable Type blog to which one has author but not administrator rights, let me know. Otherwise it's a weekend of Perl scripting for me. I guess I need to learn XSLT sooner or later.

I'm trying out a few new plugins to cut down on comment spam. I had thought that MT 3.2 had finally solved the spam problem, but it didn't. There was a brief improvement, but then things started up again — except now we don't have MT-Blacklist with which to defend ourselves. Argh.

So there's now some javascript trickery involved in comments. I'll be testing it out in a moment, but the best-case scenario is that you'll need JS enabled in order to post a comment. How do folks feel about that? Would it be better to use a captcha (ie an image-based code that you have to read and enter)?

UPDATE: Okay, looks like everything works — even from my phone. Since I'm the only person likely to care about mobile commenting, I'll count that as "good enough". In other news, I'm a dope: blacklist capabilities still exist in MT, you just have to go through the plugins page to get to them. Not super-convenient, but tolerable. I think I'll keep the new javascript obfuscators enabled anyway, though.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has launched a blog helmed by the one and only Kriston Capps! Nice job, buddy.

You can congratulate Kriston here; you can write to your congressman about this horrifying waste of tax dollars here. Don't worry about sending mixed messages — it's all part of the stealth marketing campaign. If we can get Rush Limbau