Category Archives: Discourse.net

Downballot Recommendations November 2012 and my analysis of the proposed Amendments to the Florida Constitution, plus extra information on why you should vote to retain our excellent State Supreme Court Justices. Or maybe Why I Do Not Have A Treadmill (Sears Can’t Deliver). (This post will stay on the front page until the election.)

So Mitt Romney will be here tomorrow to be interviewed by Univision on Hispanic issues. Talk about good timing! President Barack Obama is due here on Thursday.

Tickets to both events are being limited to students, but I’ve applied for press credentials as a blogger. Hey, it worked last time President Obama came to visit.

So far I’ve heard from the Obama people who said yes in principle but that actual distribution of credentials would happen later. Silence from the Romney people. Which either means they have bigger things to worry about, or maybe I’m not the sort of press they feel any need welcome. (Even though I’m not in the 47%.)

Seems that the first attempt did not go according to plan, so we’re trying again tonight, a bit earlier in the evening (US east coast time).

Things could be weird (or offline) for an hour or two.

Update: Well, that went better!

The blog will be down for maintenance some amount of time Wednesday evening. IF all goes well, we won’t have to do it more than once, for an hour or two.

This is the first of a series of renovations designed to fix stuff under the hood.

Step one is to move the blog to a different directory. That’s what’s due to happen Wednesday night. If all goes well everything will look the same after it’s done.

Step two is to alter the URL structure to something more standard in the hopes that various caching and mirroring things will stop being so temperamental. With of course some auto-forwarding of the old structure so links (we hope) don’t break

Step three is try to figure out what is the best combination of cloudflare (provided free by my hosting company), Amazon S3 (not free, but so far just costing peanuts for the low level of usage I have), and WP Super-Cache (free, but ornery) to serve up the blog. That could get ugly.

When it’s all over, things should look much the same, just work better.

Update: That didn’t work. We’ll have to try again.

For reasons unknown to me, the blog is sometimes showing Pentagon Whitewash Watch (posted Dec. 24, 2011) as the lead item.

I’m working on it….

Today’s fad in citation counts was set off by The Volokh Conspiracy » 790 Westlaw Documents Citing the Blog, which celebrates what it sounds like (database: TP-ALL). I know it’s a trend because Prawfsblog touts its 237 in TP-All and two is a trend in journalism, so it ought to do for blogs.

I figured what the heck, let’s look at discourse.net. I predicted to myself that I would find three citations to “discourse.net” in TP-ALL. Whoa! 100? How did that happen. But wait, it’s a mirage: 86 of them are to my article Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace. So those don’t count. Even so, 14 >> 3, so I think I’m happy.