Well, I found one – the original, v0.38.2 Adobe.air TweetDeck install.  All of the old functionalities, all of the old design, all of the old setups, all of the old options, and none of the new idiocy.  Alternatively, you can download the file here – my anti-virus promises it is clean. 

Obviously, this version will not be receiving any further updates in the future, but considering what Twitter considered an “update”, would you really want any? 

Absolute Unique Visitors:  70,150 (84% increase)

Visits:  160,029 (81% increase)

Peak Daily Visitors:  2,113 (11JUL11) (178% increase)

Average Daily Visitors:  438.44 (81% increase)

Total Posts:  949 (24% decrease)

And speaking of discrepancies, StatCounter shows 179,054 unique visitors, 254,022 visits, a peak of 2,701 on the same day, and an average of 696 visits a day.

Top Referring Sites: 
1. Says Uncle (no change)
2. The View From North Central Idaho (+2)
3. Weer’d World (+5)
4. Days of our Trailers (-1)
5. Sharp as a Marble (-3)
6. Handgun Podcast (new)
7. MArooned (+2)
8. The Firearm Blog (new)
9. Everyday, No Days Off (new)
10. Gun Blog Black List (new)
(Google, Yahoo, Sitemeter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, direct links (bookmarks, typing it in, etc.), etc. omitted.) 

Top Keywords:
1. walls of the city (no change)
2. linoge (no change)
3. 9mm luger (+7)
4. remington 870 express tactical (new)
5. walls of the city embassy pen (new)
6. spartacus (new)
7. kwikrnu draco ak pistol (new)
8. c.o. arms (-5)
9. bright as day black as night (new)
10. firefly alignment chart (new)
(Variations or permutations on a theme omitted.) 

Top Posts:
1. graphics matter, year the third
2. online ammunition retailers – a hypothesis
3. the killing of jose guerena
4. the inconsistency of gun control
5. caracals at orsa – the main event
6. janus
7. they did this to themselves
8. sanitary hardware
9. dungeons and midbulk transports
10. Way to be creepy, Zuckerberg

This was something of a big year for “walls of the city”, what with raising almost $300 for Ramon Castillo’s recovery fund, raising $2000 for Soldiers’ Angels, being featured on Reddit, spreading the word about Jose Guerena’s killing, continuing to debunk “gun control” propaganda with nothing more than pictures, breaking the news about a duplicitous ammunition retailer, WizardPC breaking out into his own weblog, and obviously traffic here going through the roof.  I can hardly make promises for the coming year, but the trends indicate bigger and better things! 

[Update] And one of those bigger things actually happened last year, and I did not even notice – sometime late last year, I climbed up over half a million total hits!  Thanks to everyone who visited!  [/Update]

(Note:  unlike some sites, my statistics trackers do not count my traffic to the site.  Doing so would artificially inflate my numbers and mislead you, my readers.) 

Am I being too much of an engineer to say that all I want for Christmas is things that work the way they are supposed to?

[Update] Apparently applying this fix and then removing it fixed the problem. How the hell does that make sense? [/Update]

… And he certainly has not gotten any more reserved in this new medium, but why would we want him to?

(* – Hm. What is the intertube/podcast equivalent of that phrase, I wonder?)

I only ask because the plugin requires a non-zero amount of effort to set up, and if people will not use it, I am not going to bother. 

Amusingly, the plugin also includes an administrator functionality that allows me, with a single click, to remove the username link from a post – an action which has proven to be remarkably useful for eradicating a certain type of troll… 

Anywise, now that you can edit your comments, I went ahead and nuked the live comment preview that appeared below the commenting fields; seemed kind of redundant. 

Point the First: This weblog is private property.  I rent this space from Dreamhost, and, as such, my word is final within the confines of this domain, the law, and the user policies of Dreamhost.  If you do not like that, you are more than welcome to pay for your own hosting and website and rail against me there. 

Point the Second:  I do not have have to accept comments.  Any comments.  Of course, by and large, I do, but I am well within my rights, my abilities as the owner of this domain, and my abilities as the administrator of this site, to delete or simply not publish whichever and any comment I so desire, for any reason I so desire.  Again, if you do not like it, get your own site. 

Point the Third:  If you comment here, you will abide by the terms I have spelled out.  Just as you are expected to follow certain standards of behavior on any one else’s private property, so too are you expected to abide by rules here, or you will be evicted.  Those rules are not hard, and amongst them include: refraining from excessive profanity, refraining from non-stop personal attacks, refraining from spurious allegations/innuendo/etc., and so forth; however, agreement with me or any commenters is not one such rule – I have not deleted/moderated a comment simply because the commenter disagreed with me, nor will I ever.  Like I said, the standard is not high, so it should not be hard to meet.  If you do not like it, go somewhere else. 

Point the Fourth:  If you do not abide by the terms, your comment will be marked as spam.  Why is this important?  I use Akismet, which will take note of your email address, username, IP address, and comment content, and store it away for future reference.  The more times that happens in the future, the more likely your comments will be automatically marked as spam, and automatically dealt with accordingly.  Consider that my small effort for improving the signal-to-noise ratio on the cortex. 

Point the Fifth:  You cannot guilt-trip someone who is doing the right thing.  It just does not work. 

So there we go.  If you have an honest difference of opinions, bring it to the table and let us see what we have.  If all you can do is leave one-line comments repeatedly calling me a f**ker, do try not to act like a petulant brat when I evict you from your attempted “occupy” of my site. 

• Robb at Sharp as a Marble
• John Richardson at No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money
• SayUncle
• Bob S. at 3 Boxes of BS
• Alexander at Hyperprapor
• Jake at Curses! Foiled Again!
• Stranger at Extrano’s Alley, a gun blog
• Patrick at Where Angels Fear to Tread
• Bluesun at Dead Man Dance
• Weer’d at Weer’d World
• FirmitasRex at his self-named blog
• The Packetman at his self-named blog
• Comrade Misfit at Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I

For taking a moment out of their busy days to link to my newest “graphics matter” post.  The links and traffic are sincerely appreciated, and I wholeheartedly hope that this will spread the news that “more guns = more deaths” is historically false, and that the world is just not that simple. 

If you linked here and it did not show up on my pingbacks, please let me know, and I will add you to the above list.  Thanks! 

‘Course, mine are not nearly as cool as some folks’…

Apparently some of my more-irregular readers are too stupid to do some looking around before they open their mouths and prove themselves to be idiots.  However, for the record, the terms of use, commenting policy, disclosure policy, and contact methods are all available on the bar at the top of every single page and post at this website.  Additionally, pressing “Submit” on any comment constitutes an acceptance of and agreement to abide by and respect those terms of use, and specifically the commenting policy, of this webpage; if you do not so agree, please do not press “Submit”. 

Sorry for the brief detour, but apparently some folks needed it. 

This morning, bright and early, WizardPC announced that he was heading off into the wilderness on his own, by way of his new site, Guns, Cars, and Tech.

In the intervening time, WizardPC has written posts about local government corruption, Facebook’s "creative" use of thread-compression, armed, law-abiding citizens being speciously painted as "vigilantes", Representative McCarthy-inspired purchases, the hypocrisy of those who would force you to be defenseless, firearm safety, TSA abuses, bias in local newspapers, the illogic of "gun control" laws, how the government "helps", and countless other topics, all with the same poise and wit that originally caught my eye.

Something tells me he will do just fine at his new digs.

Thanks for spending the past few years helping improve the signal-to-noise ration here, WizardPC. I am a little sad you are leaving (and not just because you will probably be taking a not-insignificant amount of traffic with you), but I am very pleased you were able to use this experience as a springboard to move on to bigger and better things. Lord knows that having more voices supporting individual rights and freedoms is only a good thing.

To my fellow webloggers, forum residents, tweeters, and other internet denizens: if you repost an image or picture that was originally found on / generated by another website, and the owner/administrator of that website requests that you take the image/picture down, you are honor-bound to comply with the copyright holder’s originator’s wishes. Period.

You did not take the picture or generate the image. The graphic is not your property. You are simply borrowing someone else’s work, and when that someone else decides that you should no longer be using their work, it is your responsibility to acquiesce to their request.

Worse still, if you are expressly and admittedly using someone else’s image, graphic, or other property (intellectual, intangible, or otherwise) for your own personal gain (i.e. traffic hits, advertising dollars, etc.), it is incumbent upon you to ask permission to use the image before you actually do so.

These are not complicated concepts I am explaining here, so it pains and disappoints me that supposed pro-rights activists are repeatedly, and rudely, violating them, especially given that "property rights" are one of the key, core outgrowths of "individual rights" as a whole. Be respectful of other people’s work, and be respectful of their desires regarding that work – how hard is that, really?

To my fellow webloggers, forum residents, tweeters, and other internet denizens:  if you repost an image or picture that was originally found on / generated by another website, it is generally considered poor form to do so without linking back to the original post/page on that other website – citing your sources, as it were. 

More specifically, the terms of use for this webpage clearly indicate that: 

All quotations, including both text and graphics, from wallsofthecity.net will include credit to wallsofthecity.net or to Linoge (or other applicable author) and, wherever practicable, a hyperlink of the form http://wallsofthecity.net.com … to the site.

Most folks honestly do not mind if you use their images, so long as you give them proper attribution – this should be automatic for all reposts from all weblogs, and should be nothing more than a matter of common courtesy, but it was brought to my attention that some folks seem to lack that particular character trait. 

I write this weblog to entertain me, not you. 

If you like what I write, fine.  Dandy.  Great.  Knock yourself out.  Repost (with attribution, of course), comment, debate, deliberate, whatever. 

If you do not like what I write, fine.  Dandy.  Great.  Knock yourself out.  Repost (with attribution, of course), comment, debate, deliberate, whatever. 

But if all you want to do is pollute a comment thread with all manner of pointless insults, lies, threats, prevarications, and other childish behavior, really, just save us both the trouble – the Way Out is hiding right behind that little “x” in the upper-right of your window.  Please.  Use it. 

That is all. 

(Oh, and for the love of All That Is Holy and Good, do not respond to this post with a, “You’re trying to suppress dissent / create an echo chamber / etc. etc.,” comment.  If you feel the urge to write that kind of thing, you apparently have not been reading this weblog for very long, and obviously do not have a clue, but that can be Our Little Secret™.) 

2.  Does anyone have any experience with any read-confirmation functionalities that are compatible with GMail?  I have been sending off emails and never getting responses, and then wondering if spamtraps or whatnot ate them, and the folks at the other end never saw them. 

I have an unlimited storage / unlimited bandwidth account with Dreamhost, and, as you can imagine, I use an absurdly small amount of it on a daily basis. As such, I have space to spare, which leads me to realize that other people could use it… So:

If you run a pro-rights* weblog and want to move to a significantly more-stable, more-capable, and more-useful host, I can offer to host that weblog at your own domain for all of $10 a year.

You read that right – you get your own domain name (i.e. www.yourdesiredandavailablenamehere.com versus name.blogspot.com), you can use a weblogging platform that can actually do things and you can actually control (I have experience with WordPress and MovableType – anything else you will be on your own), and you even get an FTP account for images or whatnot else. For $10 a year (which covers your domain registration fee, and nets me no income, if that matters). If you ask nicely, I might even help you import all your old posts, though that has varying degrees of success depending on what platform you are emigrating from.

There are, of course, a few other details and caveats to be ironed out (most notably that I am not a hosting company, and I am not "subhosting", so Dreamhost remains in ownership of the servers/tech support/etc.), but if you are interested, drop me a line at "linoge (at) wallsofthecity (dot) net", or hit up Weer’d Beard and ask him how much he prefers his non-LiveJournal weblog.

(* – Yes, I decide what that means.)

NOTE: If you do want to pursue this option, please hold off on registering a domain. I will do that for you, since companies charge you for both registering and transferring domains.

So, useful, or no?  I confess to not fully grasping its utility, but I kind of like the inline searching… 

We literally live in a world where someone unwittingly liveblogged a super-secret assassination mission as it was going down, and hours before the first glimmers of it showed up in “traditional” media.

And while I honestly wrote this post before he published his (I swear – days sometimes pass between my writing a post and getting around to actually publishing it), Michael Silence has an outstanding, all-too-related article up in the Knoxville News Sentinel regarding the pervasive, effectively-zero-time-lag nature of online information now, primarily through the aforementioned 140-character-maximum webpage…  Why is this article so outstanding?  Well, apparently, I am now famous. 

Or, at least, my wallet-shopping post is now famous. 

But, hey, if it gets my little weblog into the public eye of the KNS readership, I can live with that…  though I should warn folks arriving here from reading that particular article that “consumer blogging” is only a very small part of what I do here, and more often than not, the things I am consuming and blogging about have a tendency to go “boom”… not as though that is often a problem here in the Patron State of Shootin’ Stuff. 

And speaking of the power of Twitter, I wrote up that post, put up a Tweet asking for people’s input, and got a response from the man behind Saddleback himself – through what other means of communication can you get that kind of immediate response, if at all, from the folks behind the reins of such interesting corporations?   

In the end, if nothing else, boy does Twitter generate an unending supply of blogfodder… including metafodder like this! 

(And literally as I pushed the submit button on this post, I got an interesting email from someone I mentioned in a previous post very related to this particular one…  I may have another review up in the very near future!)