the old wordpress had this built in, although I don’t know if anybody used it, but me. I used it a lot, so I’ve added a plugin for it. here’s how it works:

bookmark this link, and then when your at a page you want to blog about, click the bookmark and it’ll take care of the rest.

I’ve been putting it off for way to long, but I finally got around to upgrading to the newest version of WordPress.

The site may not seem much different, but the inner workings should be much improved, and hopefully this will help us get the comment spam under control.

If you see something broken or if you are missing a feature that was there before, let me know

So, I found a cool site today that I wanted to share, but I don’t really have much to say about it so I decided not to make a blog post about it. Instead, I did what i normally do in these cases: I added it to my del.icio.us bookmarks.

Since I’m pretty sure nobody ever looks at those (and I never look at anybody else’s) I was wondering if you guys would like to put our respective del.icio.us (or other social bookmarking service, i suppose) feeds where the current list of links is (which I’m pretty sure nobody uses).

would you guys like to (a) see that happen? or (b) see my mostly content free link suggestions as posts? or (c) stick with the status quo?

I was talking to Daniel today, and he asked me if the blog was dying. I certainly hope it’s not, and I feel bad that I’ve been feeling bad for a while that I’ve slacked off so much in my posting. I think that part of the problem for me is that the bar has been set pretty high in terms of what counts as a good post. I’ll dash off a quick comment, but posts have become reserved for well-written, mini-articles, and I rarely have time to write that kind of post. My solution, in part, is that I’m going to lower my standards. If I have something to say, I won’t wait until I have time to write a small essay on it, because then I won’t ever get around to it. So in advance, please forgive the spelling and grammatical errors I’m sure I’ll soon be subjecting you to.

The better part of my solution, though, is just to start posting again. The original idea was that none of us probably had enough posts in us to update the blog daily, but between the seven of us we could get pretty close. I’m going to do my best to post something once a week, and I encourage anyone else who feels like they don’t post enough to pick a weekly or monthly goal for posts.

Oh and I’m totally counting this for my post for this week.

Coffee category

Lately (for the past few weeks), at least 80% of the time when I go to JttM it is fucked up, like Joel posted about here. I still think it’s bush league.

And something that may or may not be important: when JttM is fucked up, and I go down to the bottom of the screen to try to login, it enters my password into the blanks, and I hit enter and it takes me to a screen saying my password’s wrong, then I hit “back to blog” or something, and JttM is “all good” as the kids say and I am logged in. Is this crazy but true?

Are you guys getting this too or am I crazy from listening to too much Coco Rosie?!?

…who can’t post, that is. I will post your post for $20. Just paypal it to me. I will be checking my account every 30 minutes. Once I’ve received the $20 I will give you further instructions.

For the past couple of days, when I roll out of bed at the crack of noon and start looking for porn check JttM, the CSS styling is gone (i.e. what makes it look nice) making it look it’s compliant with Netscape 1.0….

some investigation leads me to belive that wordpress is improperly creating the blog’s address when creating links (such as to the style sheet or the login page….). I’m able to fix this, but I can’t figure out what is causing it to happen repeatedly.

Is any one else experiencing this? If so when? or have I just been taking to many crazy pills again?

Sorry the blog was down for a few minutes today … I was playing around with the login system and as usual there were some errors in my code.

It seems like the new comment-spam prevention is working great. It should only ask the verification question of users that are not registered or are not logged in. I’ve now set it up so that in addition to requiring the verification field, the comment script also displays a link to register and a link to log in….

also while I was at it I added something I’ve been meaning to add for a while. Now, if you are logged in it should say in the top left who you are logged in as and provide a link to the control panel and a link to log out. if you aren’t logged in it will give you the link to login and the link to register.

oh and just so you know the login stuff is based on cookies, so you will have to set your browser to keep cookies (or at least cookies from journeytothemiddle.com) if you want it to remember you.

a.baller raises an interesting question:

is there anyway you could set up a smack board on here, where we can talk trash to each other through the season…

what say you league members? As long as the trash talking stays at a reasonable level (say an avg of 1-2 fantasy league related posts/comments per player per day) I’m content to use the current JttM settup (i.e. blog-posts and comments) because i like a little bit of lively chatter on the old blog. everyone ok with that? If you would rather have a seperate message board style forum that can be arranged. or if you guys are super nice to me i might be able to cook up some sort of alternate page to view posts tagged as sports and their comments as a message board style thinger (in addition to being able to view them within the blog)

I’ve decided it’s time to make a stand. If we don’t fight these spam robots now, next thing you know they’re gonna be runnin’ around blowing everything up and travelling back in time to kill your mom before you are born.

In an effort to prevent this, I wrote a little thingy that, if you are not logged in as a registered user, will require you to answer a simple math question when you submit a post. for now, the question (and, therefore, the answer) will be the same every time. if the machines are too smart for that i might have to make the question change randomly or put in some optical character recognition or something.

anyway, I tested it out so I think it works fine, but let me know if itgives you any troubles.

As you may or may not have noticed, we get a fair bit of comment spam here at JttM. I have tried not to ban comments containing common spam words because I suspect that, from time to time, someone might have a legitimate comment regarding Viagra or online poker. I am however drawing the line at ringtones. I find it almost impossible that anyone who posts comments on this blog cares much about cell phone ringtones, so i have banned the word ringtone from comments.

On a side note, if you post a comment that doesn´t show up it probably got flagged as spam. right now I think anything containing over 5 hyperlinks or a few certain words (e.g. ringtone) will be blocked. if this happens to you, and you are not a spam robot, my gmail address is brown “dot” joel, and I´d be happy to manually aprove your comment.

I very much want to keep comments live (meaning they go up right when you post them rather than needing to be aproved) because it makes for more lively discussion, and i get as much from the comments here as i do from the posts. however at some point if there is enough spam it would deter discussion more than a delay would. Once I´m not stuck using internet cafes I´m going to sit down and write a little character recognition thingy and maybe that will do the trick. if you have any thoughts about spam post ´em here.

P.S. I got this really sweet new ricky martin ringtone…. u guys would luv it!!!!

I’ve decided to use JttM as my travel blog, but I still want to put something up at jb-home.com/argentina so I’ve created a “Travel” Category at JttM. that way I can display all posts by me under the “Travel” category at jb-home.com/argentina. jb-home.com/argentina will also have all my argentina photos. everyone else at JttM can feel free to use the “Travel” category without it showing up on my page.

Since this will also be the first post of my Travel blog, I suppose I should also say something travel related. …

My flight leaves tomorrow and I can hardly believe it. I’m a little nervous about my terrible spanish, but I’m sure I’ll persevere. I’ll be relieved when I’ve made it to my apartment and can relax and adjust to my new surroundings. My apartment has cable and so I’ve been told it will be easy to add broadband internet. Nevertheless I’m not sure how long it will be until I get reliable internet access. Since I’ll be relying on the internet for all comunication (phone, email, and blog) I may be out of touch for a week or two, but I’ll be back on with updates as soon as I can.

When I was first building JttM, I wasn’t sure if it should have catagories. I decided that it might be nice to, for example, use the catagories to find music recomendations. I probably catagorize my posts to less effect than some of you, but I think even when they are well used, they do not appear to serve any real purpose other than amusement. I’m not suggesting that amusement is not a worthy purpose, but typically, blogs have catagories to help organise the content. I’m curious; does anyone actually use them for organization (e.g. do you ever browse JttM by catagory)?

While we’re on the subject of catagories, you may have noticed that this ‘Ask JttM’ post is also filed under ‘Administrative.’ the reason is that I have a second, more administrative question: Should we add or subtract any catagories? I thought about removing the more amusement-oriented catagories (i.e. ‘Cool’ and ‘Scary’). Or maybe adding even more (e.g. ‘Stupid’ or ‘Stoopid’ or ‘Stooopid’). I was thinking that since we seem to discuss computers, mp3 players, etc. there should maybe be a ‘Technology’ or ‘Personal Tech’ catagory. It seems like there should be a ‘Philosophy’ in there but I guess it would go largely unused. Oh and I was thinking of changing ‘Law’ to ‘Jurisprudence’ a la Slate, for erudition purposes. any thoughts?

I added a link - imdb.com, but it goes to jttm.com/imdb.com, rather than just imdb.com. Why?

Dudes,

Would you be so kind as to provide contact information (at least email) for yourself either via comments to this post or zlindsey@umich.edu?

Don’t worry, I’m not signing you up for credit card apps so I can get a free iPod. (Although I’d watch out for Drunk Murder to do that). I’m just updating my address book.

Thanks,

Zac Lindsey
119 Adams Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
734.709.7478
zlindsey@umich.edu

Hey
What’s going on?

I would just like to do a quick survey as to our collective RSS usage. I’m sold on it and figure that you all probably are in favor of it’s streamlining. I see where we can RSS the comments, but what about the Bliznog itself?

Also, does anybody know about Versamail for Palm? Cause, I kinda hate it.

Seacrest OUT!

I made a few changes recently that, aparently, made the posts invisible on safari.
Objective one: accomplished

Other things I changed:
• I tried to mess around with the layout so that things would show up a little more nicely in internet explorer (especially on lower resolution screens, or when the window isn’t maximized)
• There has been quite a bit more traffic on here than I’d anticipated, especially in the recent comments, so in the interest of being able to keep track of all of it, I added a “more…” link at the bottom of the recent comments block in the left menu. This will take you to a page with the full text of the 40 most recent posts.
• I’d like everyone to be able to have a say in the offsite links (right menu) so all authors should see a “Links” tab (along with write, edit, profile, etc) when they login. from here you should be able to add a link to any of the catagories, add new catagories. if you’re not sure what something does, just leave it in the default setting.
• I added links (top right, under the search stuff) to each authors page which displays his name, nickname, and all his posts. this page also shows the authors profile in the left menu (for more on changing your proile go here. Is this enough individuality? or would people prefer to have more custom controll over their individual page (colors, layouts, links, etc)?
• I messed around with the image upload function to make it easier to add images to posts.

Any other suggestions? would you guys like your email adresses published on the site? perhaps a way to email through the site so that spam-bots can’t find your emails?

Hey Joel (and Daniel, who may also be using Safari),

Starting today, JttM won’t load in Safari. The side bars are visible, but no posts are. It works in my IE. Holla back.