In no particular order…

• The visitors who did not find their way to this site by typing in the address were most often directed here after searching Google (and others) for: ‘sweet pickles books’ (and variations), ‘spaceballs the sequel’, ‘gay adoption negative’, ‘Galveston Island’, and ‘Second Negative’. A number of people searched for ‘Greg Hanover’, but those are probably people I know, so they don’t count. The Sweet Pickles entry that I wrote a couple of years ago remains the most visited and commented page on this site. The search engine traffic has created a mini Sweet Pickles message board. And for the record, I wrote in support of gay adoption back in 2004, so I’m guessing people searching for ‘gay adoption negative’ aren’t finding that entry very helpful.
• The majority of people who left this site by clicking an external link were going to the photo site. Most of the rest were going to a Noteworthy link. The political links are the most popular, which is odd because that isn’t typically the case with the political entries.
• I’ve written a lot about television/entertainment and have received a lot of referral traffic from TelevisionWithoutPity. Trench over at 7MilesDown sent the most people my way from a standard link (rather than from a comment I left somewhere). And Google directed the most visitors to all areas of the site. Google Image Search sent people here regularly for a picture of Skeletor that I used in this entry.
• The most visited posts of 2006 were Two Horns and a Tail, and A Word About Beer.
• I wouldn’t classify anything I’ve written as a ‘favorite’, but I do like what I wrote a few days after I asked Nicole to marry me. I’ve also enjoyed the feedback over the last year, and laughed for a long time at Stefan’s comment on kids from back in January. Hilarious. It’s also nice to hear from old timers like Jeff (lurker!) who pop back in every few months or so. One day I’ll write about Where the Red Fern Grows and how it can make a grown man cry, and Jeff will know what I mean.
• The browser of choice for visitors to this website is still all versions of IE at a rate of 51%. That is dissapointing, but Firefox comes in second at 38%.  Safari (Mac) clocks in at 5%, and a long list of others come in under 1%.
• The resolution used by 46% of Second Negative visitors was 1024×768.  Some 9% of visitors are still using 800×600 and 17% are using 1280×1024.  I’m using 1920×1200, but only 1% of visitors do the same.

And that’s it. Thanks to everyone who stopped by to help to make this site everything it was in 2006. And thanks to spell check, IBC Root Beer, and The Hanover Band for helping me to put out a third straight year of total nonsense. See you on the other side.

Oh, but why the change?? Calm down you rabid fan base! I was mostly looking to elevate the level of fug around here, but I was also tired of looking at the brown/beige. That “design” wasn’t really intended to last longer than a few months and I wanted to move the bacon over, because it was time for something leaner. Mmm…fake pig. I also brought back a modified version of the logo, and went nuts with the Silk icons.

The body text is set in Lucida Grande, but you may see Arial if you don’t have that font installed. I’m not sure about the percentages on that for Windows users, but it’s a great font, and comes standard on the Mac. Fascinating sidenote: I type all of these entries up in Courier New. I don’t know why. The site should look like this to most visitors. IE6 users may see some overflow in the comments section, and I’m working on that, but it’s your fault, and you know why.

If anyone has upgraded to Shaun Inman’s full version Mint update and wants to send me their thoughts, I would appreciate it.

Until then, that’s all folks. Oink.

I had intended to take the site down for a few days while serving up that wonderfully descriptive 403 page, but a few days turned into a few weeks. If you’re one of the people who checked in every day hoping I had written something new, I apologize for the long delay. I appreciate your interest and thank you for your continued patronage of this website. Give me a hug.

The current site is a complete rebuild from the ground up. There are certain elements that are similar to the old design (which you can still view from the About page), but I rewrote, re-edited, and basically cleaned up everything that had come before. I wrote a bunch of conditional PHP to make certain parts of this site as dynamic as I’d always wanted them to be. And I attempted to simplify and streamline the CSS, which had become somewhat of a functional mess. Rest assured, it is still far from perfect, but I’m satisfied enough to launch this rebuild.

If your monitor is calibrated correctly and we have somewhat similar color vision, you should see a beige/tan content area and a brown sidebar. If the brown is indistinguishable from the background, your monitor may not be bright enough. I had that problem myself until a few months ago. I’d constantly read about some mystery guy in the background of photos that I could never see. A new monitor fixed the problem and changed my life. Yes it’s true. I can see people in photos now. And I’ve come to realize that there are SHADES of black. Gasp!

This color scheme was partially inspired by our wedding colors.  Hopefully I’ll get around to posting one of our invitations in the next few days, and you’ll see what I mean. Nicole can’t spot the difference between #333 and #666 (smirk) but she has a great eye for color.

I removed the old logo and tried to improve the site in ways that focused on greater access to content. It is simpler in some ways, and more complex in others. I hope you enjoy the new look. It will undoubtedly change over the new few weeks as I tweak compulsively.  As always, thanks for reading.

Most of the album links on Second Negative have been updated and a redirect is in place to send search engine visitors to the new site. I’ve moved the photo albums over to my main website so that I will be able to share photos with friends and family without necessarily subjecting them to something I’m writing (or not writing) on this site.

Visit the new photo site if you have a minute, browse around, and leave us a comment.

About a week ago, I got an email from my web host (Lunarpages) letting me know that the contact script I was using for my contact form had been exploited and that they had temporarily renamed it until I could fix the problem. Apparently the script had been hijacked by spammers who were using it to send a bunch of crap to AOL members. Which, thinking about it, doesn’t really seem all that terrible, considering the huge pain in the ass most AOL users are.

I was a little surprised, but it didn’t seem like a huge issue. That is, until a few minutes later when I received another email from Lunarpages labeled “URGENT” notifying me that my account had been suspended. They didn’t give a reason or any details, only that it had been suspended, and that I needed to contact them. I assumed that the suspension had something to do with the exploited contact script, but I didn’t have a clue how that had escalated into my account being taken offline in only a matter of minutes.

Lunarpages only has phone support during regular business hours, and this was late in the evening on Sunday, so I opened a trouble ticket on their website to figure out what was happening. Then I waited for a response. And waited. And waited. And waited some more. Nothing. No response, no acknowledgement that there was an issue, no message to say that they had read my ticket, nothing. Their support chat said it was “temporarily unstaffed”. Out of options, I waited some more, and then went to bed sometime well after midnight.

The next morning before leaving for work, I checked my trouble ticket again, and someone had posted a response asking for my security code. This was about 12 hours after I had posted my original message. Uh, 24/7 tech support? So I provided the security code, and left for work. I checked the site during the day, but there were no further responses. After I got home that evening, and noticed that there was still no response, I called tech support. The guy told me that phone support hours were over in about 5 minutes. At that point, I was averaging more than 12 hours between responses. That is assuming that you count ME calling THEM as a response.

The guy on the phone was nice enough, but basically said that Wordpress was causing the problem. Older versions of Wordpress (1.2.x and earlier) are vulnerable to a worm that is (or was) going around, and somehow the exploited contact script led somebody at Lunarpages to believe that the entire Wordpress install was being exploited. This guy’s manager apparently said I needed to install something else that mimicked Wordpress since it wasn’t secure. I laughed about that for a while. You know, during the times when I wasn’t inventing new profanity.

The problem is, Wordpress wasn’t even an issue. The contact script was completely separate from any of my Wordpress files, but these guys thought it was all part of the same package. No, it turns out this site is a bunch of different parts, all held together with a lot of spackle. Oh, and guess what? I’ve been running WP 1.5.x since February. The new version. The new, safe, version. Since FEBRUARY.

Their solution (as told to me on the phone) was to upgrade to the very latest version of Wordpress, and delete the bad contact script and then they would unsuspend my account. The problem with that was that my account access had been locked, so I couldn’t even get to the files to make changes. The support guy said someone was going to allow me temporary access in the next few minutes, so I could make the necessary changes, and then I could post on the support ticket, and they would unsuspend my account.

So I got off the phone, and waited for that to happen. This was around 7pm. I waited, and waited, and waited some more. Nothing. I went to bed around 2am and I still couldn’t access my account, and Lunarpages wouldn’t respond to my messages on the support ticket.

They finally brought my account back online sometime later the next day. It was just about the most frustrating experience I think I could have had in that situation, excluding having the exact same thing drag out for more than a couple of days.

It’s not the time it took, and it’s not the action they took (even if it didn’t make any sense), it was the fact there was almost no communication. Yes, I don’t post on here everyday, and yes, I’ve got plenty of other stuff going on, but if this site goes down, for whatever reason, I want to know why, and I want to know right away. And if you are a web host, and you can’t manage to do that, then you need to get into another business. Or at least stop crowing about your 24/7 tech support, or how much you value the customer experience.

Oh, and next time you reinstate a suspended account, how about NOT deleting the contents of the .htaccess file? That’s kind of important in a whole “making things work around here” kind of way. Okay? Thanks.

If you’ve been coming around for a while, you may have noticed that at one time or another I’ve tested out a number of plugins. This includes Live Comment Preview, Comment Quicktags, Fancy Tooltips, and way too many others that were overkill for me, but that may fit your needs nicely.

I’m running most of the more standard add-ons/hacks, but I’ve added a couple of others in the past few weeks that are worth mentioning and that you may be interested in reading about.

• Subscribe to Comments

  This allows your commentors to check a box and receive email notification when a new comment is posted to a particular article.

  Yes, they could just subscribe to the comments feed instead, but I don’t think most people use the comments feed. I know I don’t. And on top of that, I’m not sure that too many readers know what a feed is. Especially you guys using IE.

  This works great for me because I often forget which sites I’ve commented on, and I’d like to be able to easily follow up on comment threads.

• Auto Comment Moderation

  This plugin holds new comments in the moderation queue after a post (or post activity) is older than a specified number of days.

  Very few spam comments ever make it past my spam words filter, but since I’ve implemented the Subscribe to Comments plugin, it’s wise to take additional steps to protect users from receiving spam comments in their inbox. I’m still in the process of testing this out, but so far so good.

• Talkback

  This is a comment history feature that I implemented several months ago, but I can’t figure out what to do with it. It outputs a list of all comments associated with a particular user. For instance, we could look at Clay’s comment history.

• Wordpress Database Backup

  This plugin makes a backup copy of the site database. Options include the ability to email the copy to yourself, download it to your computer, or save it to the server. These features are (more or less) available through the control panel of my hosting account, but this brings it all under the WP admin panel, and I like that.

• WP-Cron

  This plugin, by the same guy who made the Wordpress Database Backup, allows you to setup a scheduled daily backup of your site database, and have it emailed to the account of your choice.

  Used in conjunction with the WP Database Backup, I always have a current copy of the site stored locally. In case of disaster, you can be assured that these incredibly important posts will not perish from the Earth.

And Finally, A Quick Word About…
I purchased Mint the day it was released, and I can honestly say that it’s great and I love it. It looks fantastic, and the default feature set combined with the promise of the Pepper API is very exciting.

But it should be said (and it has been said) that it’s not for everybody, and it’s not meant to replace more comprehensive stats applications. It is what it is. Just like Popeye. Check out the support forum to learn more, and feel free to IM me if you’re curious about my Mint experience thus far.

The bad news is that it’s going to take a week for the man to get my cable connection hooked back up, so I’ll be without internet and…gasp…television until that happens. I could drag my laziness up to one of the countless locations that provide free Wi-Fi in Austin, but that might be too much fun, and I can’t risk it. I realize that I haven’t posted in a few weeks already, but it’s been a real last minute crunch to pack up our life and move it a few miles down the road. The usual blather will return shortly.

In the meantime, use the few minutes you set aside to read Second Negative and visit one of the sites on the recommended list. I’ll see you on the other side.

Like a number of other people, I usually sign up for a trial account with BrowserCam when I make design changes. It’s the easiest way to view the site as displayed across multiple platforms and browsers. I make a (small) effort to adhere to web standards, and this site will usually validate, but that doesn’t mean it will display correctly for everybody. And truthfully, I only worry about it so much. The stats show that the far majority of visitors are either using a version of Firefox, or Internet Explorer 6.0. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this site should always display correctly in those browsers. As much as I wish Second Negative could be all things to all people, if you’re using IE 4.0, or Netscape 4.78, then you’re probably looking at a mess. Things improve a little with IE 5.0, but there are still a number of display issues. All I can say is…why are you using those browsers?

Also, while you’re listening, do you run Windows XP? If so, and if you haven’t already, then I strongly recommend that you turn on ClearType. In most cases, it will make a tremendous difference in the quality of on-screen text. Considering that novice users probably never figure out how to turn it on (or that it exists), it seems like it would have made more sense to enable it by default.

After I made changes to the layout this weekend, I created an aged paper header that I liked, but I wasn’t sure if it fit the way I wanted it to. Nicole really liked it, so I may bring it out every once in a while. The current header should have a background color similar to navy blue. It’s actually the same color I was using in the original site header. My question is, do you see a shade of navy blue? It’s possible that you don’t, and I may need to consider using a more web safe color. I have a couple of machines over here, and one of them seems to think that the header should be a washed out shade of grey. If you have a minute, and can leave a comment regarding the color you see (or anything related), I’d really appreciate it.

Update (05/11/2005): Okay, I’ve reverted back to a slightly modified version of the original “design”. Sorry if you were a fan of the new design, it just bothered the hell out of me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m not comfortable with change.

Because the upgrade process involves replacing files and changing code, some features may not be available. It’s only temporary. I realize that some of you guys can’t live without the service I provide. And by “service”, I mean unwarranted sarcasm.

While I’m tinkering around under the hood and riding out the NoDoz high, you’ll be treated to the wonderful stylings of the default template.

Stay tuned…

Update: The site is now powered by WP 1.5. I’m still working out the template system, so you may see flashing layouts, and other crazy stuff.

Update: Okay, I fixed the comments section, which had been refusing to display correctly. I need to get the other pages (About, Contact, etc.) to work with the stylesheet, and adjust the category/date groups to show all posts, rather than only the main page default. Considering the time, most of this will have to wait until tomorrow.

Update: Everything should be working properly. Relatively painless.

I’ve mentioned it on the About page, but I ran a very short lived political site before Second Negative was born into the world. It didn’t take long before I realized that talking about politics all the time was too much like real work, so I scrapped the whole enterprise. But lucky for you, some of the original documents have recently been declassified.

Around the time the political site was coming together, I decided that it should have a clever tagline, so I asked Nicole to help me brainstorm a few ideas. The results were incredibly bad. I mean, just awful. The site was called Armadillo Politics, a name inspired by the fact that I live in Texas, and I wanted to write about politics. I only mention it because the awful taglines we came up with were often directly related to the site title.

A few of my embarrassing attempts to write something both catchy and humorous:

• “Ain’t nothin’ in the middle of the road but yellow stripes & dead armadillos” (actually a quote from Jim Hightower)
• “Counting on not being counted for several years now”
• “Corrupted by even the thought of power”
• “Nothing but left turns all the way home”
• “Lying, cheating…and bad stuff too”
• “Easier to read than the Presidential Daily Briefing”

And several of Nicole’s (apparent) attempts to redneck it up:

• “Didn’t find any weapons of mass destruction under my ten gallon hat neither”
• “We don’t elect movie stars for governor; we put carpet bagging idiots into the Oval Office”
• “Heel to toe along the yellow line, boots optional”
• “Making a right’ll land you in a hole faster than diggin’ a ditch”

Ah, instant classics, aren’t they? Hey, I warned you. Now go and gouge out your eyes.

Like most years, I accomplished less than I had hoped, but am often reminded that all things come in time. As my mother sometimes tells my sister, setting the oven to a higher temperature won’t necessarily make your cookies bake faster.

I was reminded this year that we live and work together, but we approach life from very different perspectives. I was reminded that the power of ignorance is not easily combated by the power of knowledge, and it’s mostly because knowledge can’t get its foot in the door.

This past April marked the launch of Second Negative. The audience was very small, but it was an exciting and experimental period that shaped how things later developed.

I’ve made mistakes that have hurt others over the past year, and I regret that. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a conspiracy to screw over the clueless, or to target only those with bad dye jobs. No, it’s just bad judgment combined with a careless attitude. I’m proud to say that I’ve given of my time as often as possible this year, and I’ve shared whatever knowledge I have to make things easier for others. I like to think that although I rarely have all the answers, I’m fairly adept at finding them.

The Best of Everything

I was considering selecting my favorite post from this past year, but then I realized that most of them are crap. Instead, I’d like to mention a few other interesting highlights from the award winning first season of Second Negative. Be on the lookout for the DVD in 2005.

• I was amazed by the relevance of Bobby Kennedy’s words from 1968.
• I love the image from The great wide open because it represents a feeling of freedom that I rarely experience during the daily grind. It’s a photo that I took out by the VLA in New Mexico during the magical summer of 2002. It is easily my favorite post image.
• The post election Bushwhacked entry received more comments than any other, and featured a notable war of words waged effectively by Clay, the official Harvard student of Second Negative. In second place, The Austin traffic report proved that bad drivers are pretty much the same all over.
• The entry that marked the site re-launch in August became the most visited of any that I’ve written. My thoughts on losing the pets that we’ve loved wasn’t far behind, and inspired a number of really nice emails.
• The majority of people that arrived here via search engine came looking for “deep fried candybars”, a phrase that I never actually wrote, but was left in a comment by Clay on the Texas State Fair entry. Other notable search terms included “doodle artist”, “Greg Hanover”, and “William Frist”.
• The photo section of the site is still coming together, and I have a lot of images to upload, but Horse At Sundown is easily my favorite photo from the past year. It’s not much by any standard of photography, and truth be told I’m still learning how to use my (fairly average) digital camera, but it’s a beautiful image.
• The top referring site of the year (besides Google) was atthe404. Many thanks to Root for including Second Negative in his discussions. (Note: I didn’t include a site link because it’s been down for over a month. Where are you Root?)
• The browser of choice for visitors to this site was Firefox by a fairly slim margin over all versions of Internet Explorer. If you’re still using IE, 2005 would be a great year to trade in that clunker.
• And finally, outside of the United States, I seem to be the most popular in the United Kingdom, Canada, The Republic of Korea, and Germany. I value your international support. Sehe Bokmanee Bateuseyo!

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

It’s been a special year in many ways, and I’m hopeful for 2005. Hopeful for changes in national policy, and hopeful for peace. On a personal level, I plan to make an effort to spend more time with Nicole, and less with my computer. I hope to make a new commitment towards realizing my goals, and finding the motivation to see them through. I hope to be a part of work that I am passionate about. I hope to continue to be a part of the blogosphere, and the free exchange of ideas that it supports. Best wishes in the New Year to you and yours.

The traffic has been good these past few days, largely due to a link posted in the WP forums by Root. An interesting detail about the “new” stats is the browser breakdown. While the old site registered that about 70% of all visitors were using some form of Internet Vagrant Explorer, visitors to the WP version are using Firefox at 48%, versus Explorer at 21%. That’s a pretty amazing shift. The odds are after the forum referrals die down, I’ll go back to my usual IE audience.

I also experimented with Re_Invigorate for a while, and read the documentation on BBClone. They each have very nice features. I particularly like that BBClone shows a list of visitors by hostname (ip). That would be a nice feature in ShortStat. I edited a bit of code, and managed to get it working, but it also generated a nice list of errors. I’ll probably get around to playing with it again eventually. Well, that or I’ll get around to finding somebody who has already done it better.

Off topic, I’m still in the process of tweaking the site. I can’t seem to stop messing with the meta font (line below the post title). I implemented Gravatars in the comments section. I should get all the old posts imported this weekend, but I tend to lie, so it could be a week.

As changes are made to the structure and content, the software used to administer this site updates the live version immediately. If you happened by late last night, things might have looked pretty strange as I was experimenting with layout components. I’m honestly still pretty frustrated with the sidebar component heads (and a few other things), but I should probably quit while I’m relatively satisfied.

This is a good time to mention that all of the many failures on this site (junk code, display irregularities, etc.) are completely my fault, but anything that looks decent or functions nearly adequately is only because of the great sites I have studied. I’ll never be able to create anything halfway as good as those I admire, but I’m thankful for the direction and inspiration.

In no particular order, I should thank: Erik, the evil genius behind Kartooner, for making me think about how images really add to a post (and for the most eclectic posts anywhere), John Martz who made me reconsider using Georgia as a title font because he did it so well on the old version of RobotJohnny, Angie McKaig whose constant site redesigns gave me a lot to think about, and Ryan Sims at JustWatchTheSky for the wide angle image style that I have shamelessly co-opted.

UPDATE: I had to change the default doctype in order to use the image shadow effect (thanks to Dunstan), but this introduced a whole new set of problems.

The images would disappear when the window was resized or if certain things were moused over, etc. Using BrowserCam, I also noticed that some browsers would display the page aligned to the left instead of centered. This was because of a tag labeled #Content instead of #content.

Over the months since I created the initial listing, I’ve developed an interest in several other sites that I’m going to update the current list to include:

Airbag, Blurbomat, Kartooner, Jeffrey Veen