Due to some apparent confusion as to which comment link belongs to which post, I have gone and added a new comments link to the bottom of each post on the main page. If anything breaks, please let me know, and if you know of a better way to do this, feel free to chime in as well.

Dood. CSS2 has verticality now! Well, it has a property called "z-index" with which you can layer different boxes/divs/images/whateverthehellyouwant in an almost-three-dimensional manner.

For those of you who might have noticed (like, say, my wife), the 9-11 corner image was hiding when this webpage was viewed at anything less than full screen. This problem has since been fixed. You may now carry on.

I just upgraded to Movable Type 4.2, and I will be perfectly honest - I am not 100% sure exactly what changed, or even if my current templates can take advantage of the "improvements". If you encounter any problems (any at all) please leave me a comment or drop me a note at "linoge (at) wallsofthecity.net".

I have been receiving intermittent indications that the commenting system on my weblog has been doing what Movable Type commenting systems do - malfunctioning. If you have encountered an error of any variety while trying to leave a comment here, please drop me a line at "linoge (funny-little-"at"-symbol) wallsofthecity.net".

If you go in for that kind of thing, you can follow the newly-created TwitterFeed for this weblog here.

Crazy what these kids come up with, huh?

This post will serve as a fair warning to both of my regular readers: this weblog may encounter sporadic/permanent downtimes in the immediate/near/far future. And, yup, that is about as specific as I can get.

The short story is that my webhost, Dreamhost, is upgrading their servers, and trying to migrate to them in relatively short order. Granted, I do not really care about the whole "green" aspect of the upgrade, but who can blame them for wanting to have more stable servers that perform better and yet cost less than their original hardware? Hell, those are most of the reasons I like and buy fluorescent bulbs.

Well, everyone is going to be shunted over to the new servers in the next year or so, but they were looking for "early adopter" gerb... er... "volunteers" to go ahead and get moved. They did not really provide a comprehensive explanation as to why they need those volunteers, but something tells me that, if something goes wrong with the migration, we will be the first to know (and hopefully be able to help fix it, if only through our error logs or other such information).

Yup, I said "we" - I volunteered to be a happy, go-lucky... volunteer. Why? Well, partially because I know the corner of the interwebs that I have carved out for myself is hardly important, and few people will miss it if it starts doing a drunken tango across the internet. And, partially (well, mostly) because Dreamhost offered free unlimited bandwidth and disk quotas if I volunteered. Free. Unlimited. For as long as I have an account with them. Now, if you check out the site I just linked to, there are a few caveats, but they are relatively normal, straightforward things, and basically boil down to do not "try and run free porn affiliate sites or anime video trading forums or host pirated rips of The Dark Knight on DreamHost", to quote them. I think I can probably work with those restrictions.

So, I have no idea when this migration will take place, but it will be at some point in the next year. Bear with me if things suddenly get whacky 'round these parts.

Oh, and if you are a Dreamhost customer too (and given my positive experiences with them, if you are not, you should be), head on over to the Billing Accounts section of your control panel, and take a look at the offer yourself. You, too, can be a gerbi... volunteer!

I can live with second place.

Oh, and by the way, they still suck.

Ok, so you have probably noticed a few obvious changes to the site, and there have been a few additional not-so-obvious changes. Time for the run-down.

1. The "We Remember" banner on the upper left corner is there courtesy of Mauser Girl. I had to tinker with her code a little, given that I use Movable Type and all of the various joys and frustrations that come with it, but it was not too bad. If you need a hand, just drop me a note.

2. As previously mentioned, I have installed an instance of StatCounter on this webpage, with its little head-counting icon being down at the bottom of the page. Yes, I have had less than 40,000 people visit my site in its almost-three-years of existence... fear me.

3. My blogroll has been spruced up, pared down, and tinkered with a little. Additions include Another Gun Blog, Bear on a Bicycle, Dr. Strangegun, Firearm Blogs, Home on the Range, Lissa Kay, ObamaGun, Rustmeister's Alehouse, Sevesteen, The Adventures of Roberta X, and The Liberty Sphere. Deletions include... well, I honestly do not remember, but they were predominantly dead links, sites I did not keep up with any more, and stuff like that. I know blogrolls account for effectively no traffic in the grand scheme of things, but I consider it to be relatively polite to link back to people who link to me. As such, if you happen to link to me on your site, and I do not return the favor, please drop me a comment.

4. Just because I said I was going to, here is some more stumping for Traction Control, the more-or-less sponsor of my trip to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous 2008. Feel free to check out his commercial site, and his sizeable collection of hand guns, long guns, magazines, knives, optics, and other fun things for sale. Oh. Yeah. And he has a weblog, too.

I think that is about everything. Enjoy!

So I have two "help me" questions today, and my Google-magic is failing me on both counts.

First, my aforementioned issues with SiteMeter. Opera does not have the same problem as IE7, so I can only assume that it is an IE fault with dynamic redirects or something like that... I honestly do not know, but it is really starting to get on my nerves. Update: Seems as though SiteMeter completely removed their cranium from their rectum, and the site is behaving properly again. Still wish I knew what caused the hiccup.

Second, we have another IE7 problem (and, yes, I use IE7, and will continue to use IE7, so suggestions otherwise will be dealt with accordingly) - on my old XP box, whenever I hovered over a link in IE7, the status bar down in the lower left-hand corner would show me the web address that the hyperlink pointed towards. Now that I use Vista and IE7, that does not happen any more, at all. I have to click-and-hold to get the status bar to show the link address, and that hardly seems like a good thing in my books. Suggestions (apart from the fanboyish tendencies of Firefox/Opera/etc. users) would be greatly appreciated.

Is anyone else not terribly impressed with SiteMeter's new, "improved" version?

I admit it - I am a cheap-assed bum, and run their free version, so it has always been a neutered and lobotomized tool for me. However, one of the useful aspects of it was always being able to see what sites were referring to mine - mostly Google searches, granted, but still interesting. Now, the only way I can find to do that with the new interface is to go through the Visitor Detail Report, one item at a time, clicking and selecting each time around. Hardly seems efficient to me. I guess the feature I am looking for is now called the "Path Report", and, oh yeah, it is a "Premium Account Feature".

*sigh*

I guess I am a free user, so I do not really have a place to complain.

Oh, and changing the entire interface over to Flash - sucktacular idea. Period. Having lived and worked with horrifically slow internet connections for the past four years of my life, I can confess just how diabolically evil Flash/javascript/Ajax/etc. really is.

At any rate, I guess I will just end up relying on my own site's stat counter more... but, still, bad "upgrade" choices, SiteMeter.

Update: Looks like SiteMeter caught the drift:

As you're no doubt aware by now, we've chosen to roll back our website to the previous "classic" version.

Unfortunately, they did this too late - I have already implemented an instance of StatCounter (at Brigid's suggestion) on my site, and I have to admit to being more impressed with it than SiteMeter.

However, this is where I ask for help: Every time I try to go back and access SiteMeter again, I get redirected here - every single time. I am not sure if the problem is IE7, Vista's IE7, or just my IE7, but any help would be greatly appreciated!

Ok, so after a countless number of people have griped at me for my comment registration system and the difficulties it causes for them, I have reactivated "anonymous" commenting, meaning that you no longer have to log in to leave a comment. All you have to do now is provide your email address (which will be kept private, not posted, and not spammed or sold), fill in a screen name, and there you go - providing in a webpage address will get you one visit (me) as well, but that is purely optional. Oh, and you can, indeed, still log in if you feel so inclined.

Sadly, and in the past 12 hours since I reactivated "anonymous" commenting, my spam filters have caught no fewer than 35 spam comments... I certainly was never making that much up. As usual, if anything goes wrong, if you have any issues, or if some portion of my webpage is broken, please drop me a note at "linoge (at) wallsofthecity.net".

(And it does take Movable Type a few seconds to process any comment request... not entirely sure why, but this seems to be "normal".)

Well, thus far my experience with Vista can pretty much be boiled down to:

"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure?"

*drooooool*

"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure?"

*drooooool*

"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure?"

*drooooool*

"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure?"

*headdesk*

The thing is a beauty to behold, and more than a little capable... but damn it is annoying for it to keep asking if you really mean to do what you just did. And, knowing me, were I to turn that "feature" off, I would then immediately break something, and have no one to blame but myself. Oh well. I think I can manage to forgive the OS for the sake of having hardware that pretty much defines "screams".

As I probably mentioned in the past, I have been muddling along with a six-year-old Sony COTS computer for... well... the past six years or so. For the first year of its life, that was not so bad, but for the past three years or so, I have not been able to purchase anything even approximating a new game, simply because the machine would laugh its little digital guts out if I tried to install any of them on it. However, with the impending arrival of Starcraft II (assuming Blizzard does not pull a Ghost on us), that simply would not do. I had been willing to wait a while to upgrade my hardware (and, by "upgrade" I mean "completely and utterly replace" - the Sony had already been upgraded as far as it physically could go, and that was still pretty much pathetic), but Tennessee ran one of their nifty sales-tax-free weekends recently, and Better Half and I decided to take advantage of it.

Well, the new toy is here, a little over a week after ordering it, and I thought I would put up a few pictures - hey, this is the first time in a while I have had a drool-worthy computer. Click to enlarge all but the last.

So the box is something of a giveaway, I will grant:

... and its internal quality is honestly a little surprising:

Just the basics - recovery and installation CDs, and a mark 1 mod 0 keyboard and mouse combination (after all, Dell's prices for peripherals are a bit... inflated):

Now we are getting to the good stuff:

There is what I was looking for:

Gotta love that fire engine red trim:

Gratuitous butt shot:

And my computer takes off its... side. I have to admit, getting into it is quite easy - push a slider on the top, and the side pops off. Inside you can probably make out the twin, SLI'd nVidia GeForce 9800 GT cards (cumulative 1024MB of processing RAM), the massive heatsink sitting on top of my quad-core, 2.5Ghz processor, the 4GB of RAM (any word on a fix for 32-bit Vista, by the by?), and all the other goodies tucked away:

Unfortunately, my current set-up is the biggest travesty of them all... Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a brand-spanking-new Dell XPS... plugged into a 19-inch CRT of unknown age. Hey, at least it is a Dell monitor! By way of excuse, my LCD monitor is in some storage bin somewhere, waiting for us to tell the moving company we are ready to accept our shipment. Also, thank God the XPS came with a DVI-VGA dumbing-down-dongle:

And for those who are curious about such things, here is the computer's score, as per PerformanceTest by Passmark. I guess that is good?

For those of you who are wondering, yes, SiteMeter is, in fact, breaking yours and every other webpage it is embedded into (update) so long as you are using IE 7, 6, and probably 5.5. No idea why. No idea how to fix it.

Or, rather, I do know one way to fix it - comment out your SiteMeter code: Just put "<*!--" before it and "--*>" after it (minus the *s), and all will be well. The above page tells you what to look for by way of code specifically.

As for information about this interesting little catastrophe, ironically enough, SiteMeter's own site is... down. Funny, that. Keep an eye on that first link, though - they seem to be keeping tabs on the situation. Then, once it clears up, just go back and remove the comment tags from around your SiteMeter code, and things will be back to normal. If nothing else, it is a lot easier than straight-up deleting the code and having to go find it again.

Update 2: Sitemeter appears to be up and running again, and has been reimplemented on this site without any noticeable errors. Good to hear they were able to fix it.

Trackposted to Perri Nelson's Website , Rosemary's Thoughts , 123beta , Maggie's Notebook , Adam's Blog , Right Truth , Shadowscope , Cao's Blog , Democrat=Socialist , Conservative Cat , Nuke's , Allie is Wired , third world county , Political Byline , McCain Blogs , Woman Honor Thyself , DragonLady's World , The World According to Carl , , Pirate's Cove , The Pink Flamingo , , and Dumb Ox Daily News , thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe .

Apologies for the recent downtime this webpage suffered... DreamHost had to move me to a separate shared server to do some experimentation as to why GoogleBots are going crazy on this webpage, and the DNS servers took a little while to catch up with the IP move. Things seem to be functioning normally again, so have at it!

My website has been attracting a lot of page requests recently... to the point where my account was periodically crashing the shared server it inhabits back at DreamHost. Kind of amusing, I know, but also a Very Bad Thing (TM). Part of the problem was that the Googlebot spiders were getting lost in my domain, and page-requesting far too many times than was healthy for anyone, and the root of that problem seems to be a defective wiki install over at the TDZK Wiki I maintain. The solution to that is simple - block the Googlebots from the webpage. I suppose I could fix it, but I honestly do not know how, and do not care enough to try at the moment (after all, the game is defunct, and the wiki has not really been used in almost a year now).

However, another part of the problem is spam, and a whole frakking lot of it - my webpage receives between 1000 and 3000 trackback spams on a daily basis. Or, at least, it did.

See, the nifty new TypePad Anti-Spam I installed on my weblog was doing a fantastic job identifying spam trackbacks and filing them accordingly... but those trackbacks still get through to my server, count as a page request, and count towards the sum total of my webpage breaking things. Not good. So I have decided to augment it by reactivating MTAutoBan.

What that little plugin does is takes the IP addresses of anything marked as "spam", and then adds a "deny:" line to my webpage's .htaccess file for that IP. And now to interpret the technobabble - it takes the IP address, the unique identifier for any computer connected to the computer, and basically tells my webpage's server to not show that IP address anything. If that computer were to try and visit my site again, or trackback spam it again, or anything relating to my site, it would be confronted with a straight-up 404 error. Alternatively, I can sand-trap them (send them to a "go away" page), but I like the simplicity of a straight up 404 - yeah, it clogs up my error logs, but that almost gives me a warm fuzzy.

What does this mean to you? Well, if it has already affected you, you are pretty much out of luck anywise. But if, one day, you come to visit this site and it behaves like it is completely broken, unresponsive, or just gone, it means a comment or trackback from you mistakenly got filed as spam (the system does its own little automatic discrimination), and thus you are now banned. Drop me an email at "linoge - at - wallsofthecity.net" and I will do what I can to fix it (which actually is not that hard).

I really, really, really hate spammers. Curl up and die already.

A while back, I finally had to go to registration-only comments due to the copious amounts of comment spam I had been receiving. Afterwards, commenting was a little slow, but considering I never really received that many comments to begin with, I was not really surprised. However, after last night, I realized a rather significant problem with the whole set up.

In poking through my weblog's activity logs (a good idea for any weblog administrator), I noticed that Mr. Perri Nelson was having a devil of a time trying to log in and comment. He tried logging in, in tried re-registering, he tried recovering his password, and apparently nothing was working. Since I log in with my administrator privileges whenever I comment, I had not really noticed anything, so I logged out, cleared my cookies and temporary internet files, and tried registering a test-run commenter name.

And then I found the problem.

To register locally at this weblog as a commenter, you have to have a valid email address, and then the system is supposed to email you a confirmation document, including a link, which will then activate your commenter username. My system never sent out that email, beacuse I, in my infinite stupidity, never told it what email address to send it from. Righto.

However, the situation has been fixed, the system now knows to send out its little registration confirmation email from weblog (funny-little-"at"-symbol) wallsofthecity.net (so be sure to add that address to your spam filters, if you need to), and everything should actually be working now. The weblog has been supporting OpenID, LiveJournal (with varying degrees of success, as reported by DirtCrashr), Vox, and TypeKey logins ever since I switched over to reigstered-only commenting, but now it really should allow you to register locally with this weblog, should you feel so inclined - honest.

Oh, and thanks Mr. Nelson, one last time.

And, as usual, all spammers should die horrific, terrifying, excruciating, demeaning, atrocious, inhuman deaths. Right now, if it would be convenient. I mean, for Heaven's sake, since this weblog's inception, and as of 1224 today, I have received 17762 trackback spams alone, not counting all of the comment spams I deleted. That is just absurd, and nowhere near the count on some weblogs, I am sure.

(If, however, the commenting system continues not to work, please drop me a line at "linoge (funny-little-"at"-symbol) wallsofthecity.net" and let me know.)

Well, crud, I did not even notice - my last post actually turns out to be this weblog's 500th.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this weblog has survived long enough to put up 500 posts of mindless meanderings. I guess the good news is that Shane wrote 19 of them himself, so I am not entirely accountable for the quality of material here, but I certainly share the majority of the blame.

Five hundred posts in a two-year-and-fourish-months of existence? A posting rate of a little more than a new one every other day? Yeah, that is a pretty poor showing, especially compared to some people. But, damnit, it is a milestone, insignificant or not!

As I mentioned previously, unless my CafePress store met a certain requirement, it would be cancelled, and new arrangements would be made. Unfortunately, this situation came to pass, and the store fell short by about $10, give or take a little.

What does this mean to you? Well, first and foremost, the old link to the central store no longer works. Secondly, it would appear as though you all lost all of your chances to purchase any People of the Gun, Philosophy of Firefly, or Elvish 42 products, as well as my book. I cannot seem to get the CafePress webpage to function properly on my current connection, and that connection is not going to get any better for quite a few months to come.

I will keep you all appraised as to when the stores are open again (and there will be multiple ones, sinmply because that is the only way I can get all of my designs online), but, for the time being... Yeah, we are just shut down cold.

Be forewarned, though - by the time the store opens again, I should have a new edition of "Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Firefly" ready for publishing... we are already over 100 pages (from a scant 80) and have over 450 life lessons from Firefly. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

How does one get books "really" published?

So you, my probably-not-very-regular readers (not as though I am blaming you… I probably would not read this thing if I was not one of the writers) have probably noticed a decrease in my posting of “sponsored posts”. There are a variety of reasons for this, and most of them coincidentally correspond with the reasons why I am not posting very much in general right now at all. However, those are not the reasons about which I am writing this post.

Instead, I am writing about a continuing trend on PayPerPost. As you probably have realized, this is one of my primary referral methods of sponsored posts, and most of the stuff you see here comes from them. The problem, however, is that more and more of the people buying posts on their site are adding the caveat of “no in-post disclosure”, or “site-wide disclosure only, please have nothing in the post”, or some other comment like that. While there is no way of hardcoding this “no-disclosure” request into the PayPerPost requirements for the post (more the pity, otherwise I would filter them out), the moderators who look over your posts will disqualify it when they see disclosure within your post.

Well, as I disclosed not too long ago, I will always disclose, within the appropriate post, whether or not that particular post is sponsored. I just consider it something I have to do, even though I do have site-wide disclosure on top of that (enough uses of the word “disclosure” for you yet?). Why? I dunno. Personal integrity, blatant honesty, my promise to you, my readers, but it is something I have decided to do, and that is going to stick. Every man has his price, and while mine is lower than most, I still have a few things that stick.

Anywise, while I understand the driving forces behind this trend, I cannot say I am not disappointed by it… If a post is sponsored, it is sponsored, and leading other people to believe otherwise is… well… dubious at best. However, companies asking you to not disclose… well, that just strikes an odd chord with me. Regardless, I made my choice, and chose my side, and will be sticking to that. I am annoyed by the stupid regulations being imposed by companies too concerned about their Google Ranks, but I guess that is life.

PayPerPost never really made me a tremendous amount of money (and will now probably make me less, since it is generally the larger pay-offs that have the no-disclosure request), but at least it paid for two years of hosting. I can only hope that make that much money again for the page’s next two years.

Hey, I guess I might have to work more on the content of my posts, instead of just trying to sell the space. Good for you all, right?

What with Christmas, Hanukkah, and the rest of the gift-giving holidays coming up around the corner, I thought I would take the opportunity to remind all of you, my readers, of the various products being offered at my CafePress Store, The Philosophy of Firefly.

Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Firefly - This critically-acclaimed book is a compillation of life lessons that one can learn from watching Firefly and Serenity. Some are good, some are not so much, some are funny, some are serious, but, in that mixed-up kind of way, they all mirror life.

People of the Gun (1911) - The official tribal gear of The People of the Gun, sporting the classic 1911 semiautomatic pistol.

People of the Gun (Colt Python) - The official tribal gear of The People of the Gun, this time showing off the silhouette of the unforgettable Colt Python.

People of the Gun (Mufti) - The official tribal gear of The People of the Gun, specifically made for those who are afraid of offending the sheeple.

Serenity Athletic Department - Not playing by any civilized rules since 2517.

Browncoats Always 'Rise Again' - A really, really bad pun on the irrepressible nature of true Browncoats.

The Philosophy of Book - If you cannot do something smart, do something right.

The Philosophy of Jayne - You can never have too many grenades... (Or pistols, or rifles, or rounds, or knives, or...)

The Philosophy of Mal - You're on my crew. Why are we still having this conversation?

The Philosophy of River - The popular theory is that I'm not quite right in the head. But, hey, I can kill you with my brain.

The Philosophy of Wash - In the tossup between plastic dinosaurs, your ship, and your wife, you should probably pick the one who can kill you with her pinky.

Grey Goo - Only you can stop grey goo! Please remember to program your nanites with replication-limiting code.

Elvish 42 - For true geek cred, try sporting the answer to life, the universe, and everything, as written in Lord of the Rings Elvish.

Cafepress is always running some promotion or another (at the time of this writing, you can get free shipping on any order over $75 with the code "SHIP07", and you can save $5 off any $50 order with the code "SAVEGAS"), so you can probably manage some manner of discount off the normal prices for the items. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line.

Now, with all that said and the good news out of the way, time for the not-so-good - The current incarnation of The Philosophy of Firefly shop may not survive the holiday season. For those who are unfamiliar with how the system works, CafePress charges us shopowners $50 a year for the privilege of having a single shop wherein we can have multiple designs on each item (such as being able to have all of my "Philosophy of..." designs on Value T-Shirts). For those monstrously big and popular shops out there, I am quite certain this "nominal" charge is something that is easily handled each year... they probably make that much money in a month, if not less time. However, for little piddly shops such as mine, it is another matter entirely. Over the course of its almost-two-years' existence, The Philosophy of Firefly has only managed to bring in less than $50, while I have had to pay $100 to continue its service. As I am sure those of you who are schooled in higher math have already realized, I am losing money on this venture. I was willing to run with it for a few years, just to see if things would pick up... and, admittedly, they have. But not enough.

So here is the announcement - The Philosophy of Firefly has made approximately $25 this year. If it does not manage to make at least $40 before its expiration date (the 29th of January, 2008), the shop will be closed. For those of you who are concerned, I will reopen a free shop after closing this "premium" one, and certain items, such as Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Fireflywill be included in it. In fact, I will probably have all of my various designs in it. But the problem is, if I decide to put the Serenity Athletic Department design on a sweatshirt, that is the only design that you will be able to purchase on a sweatshirt from my shop. Such is the curse of a "basic" shop with CafePress.

Sorry, folks. It is just a matter of cost-benefit analysis. Do not misunderstand me... it is kind of satisfying to see products I have developed and created purchased by other people. However, it does not seem to make a whole lot of sense to pay someone else for that privilege, especially considering these products are supposed to be making me money. So, if you want to ensure the continuation of The Philosophy of Firefly, get thee hence and start purchasing things - Christmas is only a little over a month away, and the turnaround time with CafePress ranges from one to two weeks, not including shipping time. If not... well, you might just save me money.

For the longest time, this weblog did not receive anything except the occasional trackback spam... unfortunately, over the almost-two-years of its existence, that "occasional" has increased to "basically minute-by-minute", and comment spam has thrown itself into the arena as well. There is nothing I can really do about the trackback spam except intercept it before it gets posted, and ensure it never sees the light of day. Unfortunately, spammers do not seem to take note of this defensive maneuver, and continue to throw spam out like it was going out of style. Such is the life of a weblogger.

As for comment spam, I have decided to take a slightly more proactive course of action on the matter. As of now, in order to comment on any of the posts on this weblog (both mine and Shane's), you must be an "authenticated user". Thankfully, this is not nearly as difficult as it sounds, and many options are available to you for your authentication enjoyment. First off, you can simply register with this weblog directly, and have your own local login information for the system to identify you with. Considering my immense and passionate hatred towards all things spammer- and spam-related (excluding the delicious, edible meat, that is), it goes without saying that your email address will never be used for anything, except possibly contacting you if something is wrong with one of your comments. If you do not feel comfortable with that option (and I certainly will not hold it against you if you do), MovableType 4.0 also allows for commenters to have registrations with OpenID, LiveJournal, Vox, and TypeKey. The first and last are nothing more than registration services, with the latter being run by SixApart (the makers of MovableType), if you do not know what the second is, you have been living under a rock for the past few years, and the third is a weblogging solution also provided by SixApart. Can you really blame them for wanting to use their own material? At any rate, one of those solutions should strike you as being mildly secure... and, if not, well, I guess commenting here was not really that important for you.

Yes, I know that some people do not like having to register to leave comments. Yes, I know that this move will probably decrease the number of comments my weblog receives (though, considering I only get maybe one a week, will it make that large of a difference?). But until someone comes up with a way of tracking down all of the identities of all of the various people behind all of the massively numerous spamming engines out there and then sending a tactical nuke to each of their locations... this is about the only option available to me.

Oh, and for the record, yes, I do have MovableType's internal spam system online, and I actually installed Akismet to help out with matters. However, the former is lightyears from being 100% effective, and apparently the latter has issues, so I figured a third layer of protection was warranted.

As always, if you are experiencing issues with comments or trackbacks, drop me a line at "linoge funny-little-at-symbol wallsofthecity.net", and I will see what I can do to correct the situation.

... is exactly the last thing on this advertising company's mind.

You see, I have started selling advertisements on my webpage through Project Wonderful. This company has a slightly different take on how webpage advertising should function, as explained by the "advertising reinvented" section of their webpage:

The problem with online advertising today is that it's mostly terrible. Click fraud is rampant and advertisers aren't sure they're getting value for their advertising dollar.

Project Wonderful changes that by reinventing advertising, replacing CPC (cost per click) with CPD (cost per day). Advertising is sold on the basis of time instead of clicks, which eliminates click fraud entirely, and stops an estimated $800 million in fraud dead in its tracks.

Your advertisers can trust that they won't be ripped off. More value for their advertising dollar means more customer satisfaction, and more profits for you.

A little different, I will certainly grant, and since it makes money based off days displayed and not clicks, it may work a little better for a low-traffic weblog like mine. And since Google and I went our separate ways over their hypocritical use and application of their AdSense system, I figured I needed another advertising system to pick up the slack. And, by "slack", I mean "making-me-basically-no-money". Hopefully Project Wonderful will fare a little better.

And, while it is trying to make a little money for me, I can make use of the free advertising available on it for the People of the Gun webpage. The button-ad I am using at the moment is at the right, and, at the time of this post, it is currently being shown on 26 webpage, has been displayed to almost 2000 unique viewers, and has been clicked on almost a hundred times. Not bad, for not having spent any money to make it happen. When I get off my lazy arse, I might get around to making a button for this weblog as well...

The Amazon affiliate bars are still around on the pages, and any links to Amazon itself will be laden with my unique reference ID so I might make a little money off whatever you decide to purchase (at no cost to you, which is the great part of Amazon). Also, I will still be doing sponsored posts, assuming Smorty or PayPerPost ever decides to put up another opportunity that I could write about without sounding completely fake. Hey, I may be willing to sell webspace for chumpchange, but I will be darned if it looks like gosse.

As always, unless otherwise indicated, no support, approval, or advocacy is intended or implied by any of the advertisements being posted on this weblog... They are simply here to try and help my weblog make a little money, and, at the very least, pay for the hosting space it occupies. Trust me, if I want you to know I support something, I will make it darned clear.

So apparently my weblog is ranked first by the Polish iteration of Google for the search of "inaction".

Color me pomieszany.

I am a bleeding moron.

In other news, my wife is a bleeding genius.

Even after I wiped all of my old MT2.x and 3.x templates and installed the newfangled 4.x templates (look at this shitty thing), they are still all jacked up with the columns and crap.

HELP!

If anyone can help me with the bleeding columns on my webpage, I would do... er... something for you. Gratuitous linkage or something. I have gone thorugh the code twice, ran it through two separate validators, and I still cannot figure out what is wrong with it.

By way of diagnosis, I left a comment, came back to the main page, and it broke. No other cause, no other template editing, no code editing, nothing... blast!

At about 1220 yesterday afternoon, someone referred here by the Technorati Reactions page for Ride Fast and Shoot Straight became my 15,000th visitor. In fact, I am fairly certain it was Ride Fast himself. Well, I think that warrants a "Congratulations" for me, a "Shiny" for him, and a "Spread my name and increase my traffic, damnit!" to the rest of you all. Although, I guess averaging 10k a year is not that bad, but we are still talking small potatoes.

The unfortunate thing is that while the past week has seen some of the highest traffic this weblog has ever experienced, I am about to be disappearing for two weeks, and my posting frequency is going to drop considerably. Just cannot win... well... any of them.