Shadowscope: Blogging and Bloggers Archives

Happy Halloween!

Getting ready to head out. I have a ton of stuff to do today so there will be little if no posting. Hope you folks have a safe and fun Halloween!

Blog Issues...

...we all have them sometime.

~~Anyway, I am working on a couple of things to streamline the site again, such as pagination so if the site acts freaky It won't be long before it's working correctly again.~~

One of the things I have always liked about news sites and some other CMS platforms is that they are able to paginate each page. You know, partway through the entry or list of comments you get a 'next page' link. Thanks to the MT-Hacks plugin Pagination I am able to do so. At the bottom of the main page you will notice their is a link that will take you to older posts rather than having to dig through the archives. That's kind of nice for folks that might only get over here every few days or weeks because anything I may have posted prior to that is harder to access.

I will be adding it to my archives as well as some of the longer posts as well pretty soon and see how it works there.

ch-ch-ch-changes

If you've arrive here on the main page of the site you will have noticed some of the changes right away. I have a few different domains, one of which I have not been using and lately I've been considering moving all of my personal blogging over there. I've mentioned it a couple of times but it took me a couple of hours to dust the place off and get it to the point where I could actually open up to the public, such as it is.

What's that mean for Shadowscope. Not a heck of a lot. I'll still be doing my crime blogging here in addition to some of the weekly memes that I participate in. They are listed down the page.

I have also removed the personal action stream from the main page here as well, which should considerably shorten the page. The action stream was my tweets and Flickr uploads and the like. I figure most of the folks here for crime posts don't really give a hoot about that stuff and if they REALLY want to know exactly when I wiped my ass last and see photos of my kids they can head over to my personal site which I am going to link here for the first and only time. Skullfuckin'.

If you are easily offended and don't like anti-religion, sexist, racist remarks along with commentary on my pissy job, DON'T GO THERE. While it may be tame right now it won't always be. Don't say you haven't been warned.

Back in the Saddle

It's been a great weekend. Got to see quite a few of my blogger and non-blogger friends up in Helen. I'm glad to say I didn't drink nearly as much this year as I had planned or as much as I drank last year. Actually I had more on that last Saturday night last year than I had all three days this time. It was ugly. I couldn't even get out of the passenger seat of the truck to say goodbye.

I'll have some video and pictures to post (aside from the ones already linked to on Flickr, those are just a few from my cell phone) but they won't be posted here.

?

Yeah, I am going to continue doing my crime-blogging here as well as the weekly stuff that I always post like Wednesday Heroes, but all of my personal blogging is going to be moving to another URL that I have had for a year or so and never used. I kind of want to start separating the two. I will have that up and running tomorrow evening or Tuesday and will post a link here. I guess I'll be moving the banner as well and maybe come up with another more crime-related. That's the pictures of my OTHER family members :)

I'll also be pulling the Action Stream stuff from the main page as well, maybe move it to a sidebar widget or something. That way it's just the posts here.

Not Making Sense...

OMFG. I managed to get home at a halfway decent time this afternoon for a change. Won't be going back in for drawer change tonight either. Fuck 'em. They can change their own drawers.

I had every intention of finding some blood-sucking fucknut child molesting bastard to write about but I ended up just sort of surfing the "bloggers I've met" list. Down there. On the right. Cool peeps. Not blood-sucking fucknut child molesters. At least I don't think so.

Anyway, I ran across a link to a blog I've never been to before (not like that's ever happened). I don't remember which one or I would give 'em a H/T (hat fucking tip). Anyhow, I don't guess I have ever been to Pat Hughes' site before. Apparently he is a formerly retired back to blogging fool and goddam he's funny. If you're tired of reading about all of the blood-sucking fucknut child molesting bastards and want a really good laugh, head on over there. If you just want to read about the fucknuts, stick around as I am sure I'll find some douchebag to post about later this evening. I'll probably get around to adding him to my "bloggers I'd like to meet" list eventually but for now You're stuck in this post. This one. Right here. It's a pain in the ass to edit my blog roll because I do it manually. It's the one on the right right. Down there. But not as far as the other one.

Don't worry, I stopped making sense a long time ago.

Right now I have to go pick up the girls and figure out something for dinner. Pizza sounds good. Anything I don't have to cook. Did enough of that crap today at work.

Rest in Peace, Bane

BaneRants used to be one of my daily stops through the blogosphere. Over the last few months I have rarely made it far beyond my own doorstep as it is and it came as a shock when I heard that Bane has passed on after an illness.

Bane was certainly an irascible curmudgeon who could pound out a fiery post or two and he's be missed.

Long Couple of Days

While I am going to try and make the time to get on and post today, unless it's just some breaking news that I feel the need to share and can get online with my Blackberry, the next couple of days will be slow here. I have meetings in Alabama this afternoon and probably won't get home until 9PM or so and then tomorrow I'll be at the Taste of Carrollton until about the same time.

If anything shakes loose in any of the cases I've been following feel free to leave it in the comments and I will update the threads when I get home. Thanks!

Guest Bloggin' and other Weirdness

Image via Wikipedia

While the cat's away the little mice will play. There is a veritable horde of chipmunks playing over at Eric's site while he's gallivanting around Europe and I finally posted something Sunday evening. Go check out the posts.

Speaking of guestbloggers I'm probably looking for one or two to come hang out over here the weekend of 9th-12th whilst I'm getting drunk and engaging in general debauchery in Helen. Shoot me an email if you wanna participate and I'll throw you the keys. Of course you may be there with me so that might be difficult. I'm bound to have some stuff scheduled to post that weekend anyway but a change of pace is always nice around here.

...

I generally enjoy meeting folks that I have spoken to online and I am sad to say that I had the opportunity to stop and speak to Slobokan at the Piggly Wiggly in Bremen the other day and missed out. I was tired and felt like shit, so when I heard, "hey, finally get to meet Richard" I was like CRAP.

We said hello and then I shot out of there like my ass was on fire. Sorry dude, I wasn't trying to be rude but it damn sure did look like it in retrospect. I took my ass on home and had a nice two hour nap instead. Perhaps next time...

Nifty Changes

Rather than blogging or visiting other sites I've implemented some nifty changes within my templates this evening.

The first one is the addition of lightboxes to photos here. It won't work on the embedded stuff but anything I put in like the screenshot below of the mobile site should work OK. Older photos won't work because I don't have the time to go through 5,000+ posts and see what code I have in for the darned pictures. I am using the LightBox for MTOS plugin to accomplish this. I have used other lightbox javascript and never really gotten the results I wanted, but this seems to be working pretty well. ~~For some reason though it works on the individual entry pages but NOT on the main index. Still working on that.~~ Like just about anything else here if you have an older browser or have javascript disabled you are pretty much shit out of luck. I have had some issues lately with folks that use out of date browsers not being able to display the HTML properly, particularly the sidebars and while I am looking for a solution it doesn't seem like I am going to be able to get it fixed. My recommendation would be to upgrade your browser to the latest version. IE5 is from 2000. It's almost nine years old folks.

This screenshot brings me to the other addition. I seem to be doing more and more blogging from my darned Blackberry but don't have any type of mobile version of Shadowscope. I've fixed that now. I took the iPhone template set and hacked it to work with my setup here. It works pretty well on my Blackberry as well as the wife's iPod Touch. I have not rebuilt the entire site yet so you'll get a 404 error if you try and view any older posts from the mobile site but I will set it to rebuild later this evening.

You can access the mobile site at shadowscope.com/m should you be so inclined. I don't have comments set up on it yet and may or may not implement them. Let me know if you have any issues with it.

I figured out why the lightboxes wouldn't load on my home page. The lightbox plugin loads the scriptaculous stuff but for some reason I also had mootools loading on just the home page and don't really remember why. I guess I'll figure that one out later but the lightboxes should be working now :)

What Browser Do You Use?

I try to keep everything where it will show up properly for people but I have had a couple of folks complain about how my site shows up in their browser. I generally use Flock, Google Chrome or Firefox and even when I browse with IE or Safari most everything works properly with a couple of minor display issues. I would like to know what the majority of people that stop by here use as their browser of choice. I will also post another poll on screen resolutions as well, if you have a second and don't mind please vote in the poll so that I know what to concentrate on. I am averaging about 2,000 unique visitors a day so if I can get a decent sampling it would be cool.

OK, I forgot about Sodahead. I tried to use it right after MT 4 came out and had mixed results but apparently they have updated the plugin.