This Is Not News

Special Order Speeches essays from prior incarnations of Not News are now available from the SOS link on the sidebar. This category includes essays that were written for the Humor section of the site when that was its own entity. Transferring them into blog posts reminded me that I enjoy that kind of long-form not-quite-serious writing. I oughta do more of it, although now I probably will have to label those entries so that they don’t get taken too seriously.

(Oh, for what it’s worth, I did notice that one entry got reposted twice. I’ll fix that soon while I’m transferring the Culture & Media section.)

I’m thinking of reposting some discussion threads as blog posts, and leaning toward doing them as single posts with a sequence of block quotes. Probably not the most aesthetically pleasing option, but not every old poster is set up as a commenter here and I’d like to keep ghost accounts to a minimum.

I’ve finally resumed the process of putting old articles from the site’s prior format into the blog database. Tonight, Life in Practice essays from 2000-2004 can now be found from that helpful link in the sidebar.

My to do list says I’m supposed to tackle the Special Order Speeches section tomorrow, but that’s seeming ambitious.

I don’t know how much longer the old phpBB forum will be around on the site. I’m going to pull all old essays and reviews into WordPress, if my fingers don’t fall off. If anyone has a particular discussion thread and/or response they want to preserve, let me know and I’ll find a way to wrangle ’em.

The site performance must be back closer to normal. The spam comments have resumed. Ah well, at least I can access the controls to kill them.

Thanks for your patience, everyone. I’m still considering other options for the future, but for now it’s good to have things up an running.

And remember that Crowded House song I was talking about before? The video is available online thanks to an Australian newspaper.

I’ve been having more trouble than I’d like accessing the site for the last week or two – any attempts to access the database-driven parts of the site (the current blog structure, the old forum) are just grinding on without much luck. If updates get spotty, this might be why. If anyone else is seeing this, let me know. It may be time to start thinking of moving to a new host, as little as I look forward to such a project.

If nothing else, this is motivation to get the older content moved over into one database sooner rather than later. Always good to have motivation, I suppose.

Some time over the next few weeks, there may be some alterations to the comment system in order to try to cut down on spam. I’m in the process of wiping out 770 comments that accumulated in the moderation queue since yesterday, and it ain’t my idea of fun. So if I accidentally killed something that wasn’t an ad for discounted pharmaceuticals, my apologies. There may be some kind of verification system added soon, and I’m adding some words to the kill file.

The Public Policy articles from the HTML and phpBB versions of the site have now been brought into the current WordPress edition. For the most part I have not gone through and rechecked all of the links in those pieces, so there are probably some dead links and stuff that’s behind subscription walls right now. But if you want to see what we were talking about from 2000-2004, you can go take a look from the Public Policy link on the sidebar. And if you’re like me, you’ll marvel at how much it seems like the country’s talking about the same things in 2006.

Since the old phpBB forum was being overrun by spambots, I’ve switched it over to a read-only archive. I kind of regret that there’s not a space for folks to initiate conversation topics anymore, but the forum’s been dormant for months anyway so it’s not as though we’re cutting a function that anyone was using.

I also aim to resume the bringing-old-content-into-WordPress project this week. Wish me luck.

I know content has slowed to a trickle lately. Heck, a trickle might be optimistic. I’m in the middle of a number of things that will hopefully provide much fodder for discussion soon enough, not the least of which is the defense of my dissertation coming up in less than two weeks. So we’re not dead. We’re just resting.

Just a little bookkeeping right now. Mark Wagner’s Educational Technology & Life blog has moved to http://edtechlife.com/ – Mark’s set up his own WordPress site to get some added functions beyond Blogger. Go check out the place while he’s still remodeling.

I’ve also added Robin Zebrowski’s Hyper-textual Ontology to the sidebar. Robin’s a philosopher of artificial intelligence, something I thought I would be once upon a time. Anyone curious about how philosophy, science and other disciplines intersect should check out the blog.

I’ve begun pulling essays from the original HTML version of the site and both incarnations of the forums and putting them into WordPress with timestamps that reflect their original dating. When I’m done this should make it far less cumbersome to explore the content we’ve accumulated over the last five years. When I’m done, I’ll remove the link to the HTML archive from the sidebar. I’ll probably keep the link to the phpbb forum active, though, since there is good stuff there that’s not easily translatable to the blog format. (Well, I could just turn each thread into its own post. But that is so low on my priority list that it’s underground.)

Right now I’ve brought the philosophy section up to date. Public policy will be next up.

There should be some actual new posts coming as well tonight or tomorrow.