Category: meta

Categories
life meta politics

Surprise Benefit

When Congress passed the measure to extend daylight savings time I thought it was a silly move. I still do. They claimed that it would save some great amount of energy while I argued that the amount of energy saved was insignificant. Honestly it is an issue  that is not worth much of a fight either way. I only bring it up now because I discovered a benefit to the extended daylight savings time – it is not dark by 6:30 on Halloween night which means that walking the neighborhood with young children is much more pleasant than it was before that change.

I forgot to mention that in my Halloween post but that is another reason that I was able to enjoy Halloween more this year. I remembered it today when I realized that I had to adjust my blog for daylight savings – I can’t wait for WordPress to fix that bug.

Categories
life meta

Cascading Changes

After splitting my political blogging onto another domain I realized that the change in focus here would necessitate some other changes such as a more appropriate set of features and a different theme. I realized that I had taken two years of experimenting to finally get the right setup to foster the dialog on political matters. I figure I have a headstart here since the purpose is a bit simpler and I have two years of experience that I did not have when I started Pursuit of Liberty. I don’t think this will take anywhere near two years to get the right setup to make this personal site operate like I want.

Today I unveil a new theme – it’s not complete, but it’s a start away from being a copy of what I had before splitting the sites.

Categories
life meta

New Domain

I have been wanting to get a more suitable domain name for Pursuit of Liberty for some time and I have been wanting to do some less political writing (family journal type) here. I finally took the plunge and purchased pursuitofliberty.net (I’m looking into getting pursuitofliberty.com, but while the current owner mulls multiple offers I decided to move ahead with something). Nothing is being removed here although anyone who actually visits the site will see that I have gone back to a previous theme. This will start to be updated less frequently and less politically and I will be developing a more personal theme that fits the different focus of my website. I have imported all the posts of any political nature at the new domain and will continue to write politically as I have been doing – minus the really non-political stuff. For those who are interested in my political writing, here is the new feed. I hope that everyone can make the transition smoothly with me so that all the great comments keep coming.

For those few people who have long wished that I would talk more about my family (Mom) your wish is granted, and you don’t even need to remember a new URL.

Categories
culture meta politics State

Public Discussion

Obi wan Liberali recently asked others if he was considered liberal. Apparently some of his liberal friends thought he was not liberal enough because he is not inflammatory. The discussion that followed in the comments got me thinking about different sites that I have visited and my perceptions. I try to follow sites across the spectrum of political thinking. In doing so I have found some sites (liberal and conservative) where I cannot bring myself to follow closely. In my case, most of the ones I avoid are liberal. I suspect that a reasonable liberal, such as Obi wan, would find that there are more conservative sites he cannot bring himself to follow closely (I am not suggesting that he does, or should, read across the spectrum – only guessing about what I would find if I were liberal like him). That got me thinking that public discourse could be measured along two axis – liberal/conservative and reasonable/unreasonable.

I believe that reasonable discussants find it easy to read other reasonable discussants across the spectrum and less than reasonable discussants who match up with them ideologically. I also believe that unreasonable discussants provide fuel to other unreasonable discussants who are ideologically opposed to them. In other words it is probably fairly easy to follow those in adjacent quadrants, but unreasonable contributors tend to drive away reasonable contributors who are ideologically opposed to them. (Reasonable contributors probably bore unreasonable contributors who are ideologically opposed to them.)

It’s time for another grid:

I have tried to depict who would be alienated by a person who fell at various positions on the grid. For each dot, those on the other side of the line matching the color of the dot would be alienated (according to my theory).

By way of experiment, I am cross posting this at One Utah to see how the discussion differs since that site attracts a very different set of commentors.

Categories
meta State

Regions for BNN/Utah

It’s been a busy month for me personally since I asked about implementing regional classifications for Utah blogs listed on BlogNetNews. I am finally ready to implement regional categories. The options are going to be:

The classifications will be self-selection – if you want to be identified in a particular region you just email me or leave a comment with the region(s) you want to be listed in. Please only request to be listed in regions where you have an interest (that would generally be living or working in that region). Please do not choose Salt Lake if your only interest is that you follow the legislative session.

If you are going to be listed in a region with two names, please vote on which name you prefer to use. (We’ll use straight democracy – I’ll break any ties.)

As an example, I could be listed in the Davis (live) and Salt Lake (work) regions – in the past I could have been listed in Utah Valley (before I moved).

Update 8/28/08: The names of the geographic categories have been settled. Only Utah Valley has more than the basic name attached to it (valley) because “Utah” might appear to be general for the whole state (even though that would have been redundant).

Categories
meta

Two Years (By One Way of Reckoning)

Last year I recorded my first year back to blogging. I recorded the statistics at the time and set a goal to average one post per day. In the last year I have:

  • 365 posts
  • 1364 comments
  • ~20,000 spam comments (the spam count got reset when I upgraded to WP 2.5 so the count listed is 9100)

I have more posts this year than comments last year, more comments this year than spam comments last year, and obviously more spam comments (I’d hate to be ignored by the spammers). I have also imported posts and comments from before my 8 month blogging hiatus so my totals right now are 735 posts and 1749 comments (as a future point of reference).

I do not anticipate reporting statistics yearly, but anytime I do choose to do an anniversary post in the future I will mark the anniversary on June 23rd (the day I first started blogging in 2004) rather than August 14th. It’s been very rewarding to see more people commenting and helping to refine my thinking. Thanks.

Categories
meta State

Editing for BNN/Utah

I have been given the opportunity to function at the editor for BlogNetNews/Utah. That is not likely to produce visible changes to the site because the purpose of BNN is to remain neutral while providing an image of what’s happening in the various corners of the blogosphere. Functionally, it means that when people want to have their blog added to BNN/Utah I will be the one who receives and processes the request. On the other hand, I have been invited (if I choose) to categorize the Utah blogs geographically.

There is currently some categorization between liberal and conservative leaning blogs and a category to identify blogs connected to MSM organizations but there has been no geography-based categorization thus far. You can see how the categorization works by clicking on the arrow next to “Sort By” in the header. If you visit BNN/Virginia you can see an example of geographic categories in use.

Having been given that invitation, my first action as editor is to ask my fellow Utah bloggers whether they would be interested in geographic categorization – which would allow people to sort blogs based on those categories – and if so, do you have any recommendations on what categories would make sense for Utah?

Categories
meta

Picking Up the Pace

I realized yesterday that I have been losing steam on my review of the Federalist papers partly because the idea of 84 posts is rather daunting. I also realize that I am not obligated to break them up exactly as they were published. I have determined that I could have covered 2 – 5 in one post 6 & 7 in another and 9 & 10 together as well. Right there I would have cut the number of posts so far in half. In the future I will combine papers as it seems appropriate to me.

Another realization was that, while I hope to generate some discussion and even awareness of the contents of these founding documents, another result of this undertaking is to solidify the foundation of my own thoughts on issues of government so that I can write more soundly as well as return to a record of my conclusions.

Categories
meta pictures technology

Similarity

I have been using Darren’s Related Posts plugin (DRPP) for a long time. For my purposes it was the best plugin for showing related posts that I had encountered. After a while I decided that I was not completely satisfied with the way that it seemed to favor more recent posts. I developed a new algorithm that I felt would not give preference to newer posts unless they were actually more related.

When I learned that WordPress would be adding native tag support in version 2.3 I decided that I would create my plugin to work with tags after they arrived. Life got busy so I never worked on the plugin until version 2.5 came out (partly because I wanted to convert the post_meta “keywords” from DRPP to tags). I finally buckled down and created my Similarity plugin this week. I have tested it on version 2.3.3 and version 2.5 (I assume it will work with any version of 2.3). I will continue to test it on new versions of WordPress as they are made public. (Przeczytaj opis wtyczki po polsku)

Latest Version 2.13.1 (September 9, 2009)

New options make it possible to layout and style the php function generated lists (for sidebars) independent of the auto-generated list. – Version 2.13 was released with an incomplete development copy of the plugin so it did not have the promised functionality. (In other words, “Pay attention Miller.”)

To install it simply unzip the file linked above and save it in your plugins directory under wp-content. In the plugin manager activate the plugin. Settings for the plugin may be altered under the Similarity page of the Options menu (version 2.3) or Settings menu (version 2.5 or later).

Options include:

  • Number of posts to show – this is a maximum, it won’t invent connections that don’t exist, set it to 0 (or less) and it will display all matches.
  • Minimum match strength – enter a number between zero and one (one being a perfect match) and items related weaker than the number indicated will not be included – this limit is ignored for the one extra if that option is used.
  • Default Display if no matches – if there are no matches this is what will be displayed, this is not displayed if there are matches, but fewer than the set maximum.
  • Text and Codes before the list – assuming you want to do a list this is where you would place the <ul> or <ol> You may also place any other code you would like to have preceeding the list. (There are two boxes here – one for function calls in your template and one for auto-generated lists.)
  • Text and Codes after the list – this would be the place for </ul> or </ol> You may also place any other code you would like to have following the list.(There are two boxes here – one for function calls in your template and one for auto-generated lists.)
  • Output template – this would be where you place the <li> tags. (There are two boxes here – one for function calls in your template and one for auto-generated lists.) There are also 4 template tags you may use (in any configuration you can imagine) to define how the results are displayed
    • {link} – provides a link – equivelent to <a href=”{url}”>{title}</a>
    • {strength} – outputs the calculated degree of relatedness
    • {url} is the permalink for the related post
    • {title} is the title for the related post
  • Display format for similarity strength – Value displays the {strength} in a decimal format (0.873), Percent displays the {strength} in a percentage format (87.3%), Text displays {strength} as a word (Strong, Mild, Weak, and Tenuous are the defaults), and Visual displays a color block (Green for 100% fading to Yellow and then to Red for weak connections)
  • Relative mixing weights – these values determine the ratio given to the weight of tags vs categories when using the sim_by_mix function. Invalid ratios are treated as a 1 to 1 balance.
  • Custom text for strength – allows you to insert custom text (including markup) for the strength indicator when using the text display format. (Hint: using markup allows for the possibility of showing custom images.)
  • Show one more random related post – dig deeper into the related post list with one random selection (you can set a minimum strength for these random items).
  • Auto-display a Similarity list at the end of a single post – without modifying any templates.

The plugin allows for three function calls anywhere in your page templates or their shortcodes in text widgets (all use the same options):

  • <?php sim_by_tag(); ?> – determines similarity based on the tags applied to the posts (shortcode: SIM-BY-TAG)
  • <?php sim_by_cat(); ?> – determines similarity based on the categories assigned to the posts (shortcode: SIM-BY-CAT)
  • <?php sim_by_mix(); ?> – determines similarity based on the tags and the categories with the relative weights determined by the relative mixing weights setting (shortcode: SIM-BY-MIX)

Alternately you may choose to auto-display any of the similarity lists at the end of posts on single-post pages without getting into the php by selecting the function you wish to auto-display on the Similarity options page.

Categories
culture meta

Wandering

I thought about the value of wandering as one of our neighbors walked past our house this afternoon. He was just out for a walk with his daughter and their dog. There are many possible reasons that might have prompted the walk, but arriving at a specific destination or in a specific time was obviously not a major concern.

I was reminded of similar walks that our family has taken over the years – like our first Christmas soon after we moved into this house when the girls wanted to go for a walk and we met a bunch of our neighbors for the first time after their Christmas mornings. There is so much that we can gain from having times when you do not have a specific goal to strive for and you are free to follow a whim or prompting that you could not plan in advance.