Note added after I posted this: Ironically, a bug has popped up that I cannot seem to fix. So, at the moment, you can leave comments here on the blog but the connection to BAUT is off.
BABloggees, welcome to the new age of commenting.
Comments to this blog are now being routed to the Bad Astronomy & Universe Today (BAUT) bulletin board, specifically to the Bad Astronomy Stories section. The blog entry will still be posted here at badastronomy.com, but comments will go over there. Each new blog entry will create a new thread automatically, with an excerpt from the blog entry there as the first post.
What does this mean to you, the intelligent/sarcastic/perceptive/loquacious/etc. reader?
- The first thing is that you’ll need to register at the board to post a comment (you will not need to register to read them). Registering is easy, takes about 30 seconds, and that’s it. We do nothing with your email, with the exception that on very rare occasion we send out a mass emailing to everyone registered when we have an important announcement about BAUT. We don’t sell your emails or anything like that. Spam is so evil that anyone accusing me of sending it out will spontaneously burst into flame. It’s true.
- Good browsers (cough cough FIREFOX cough cough) store things like passwords and usernames, and will automatically sign you in when you go to BAUT. So you don’t have to type in your info every time.
- Yes, there are rules for posting there. You’ll need to read them. Basically, they say "Be polite". Rule 12, dealing with politics and religion, has been revised. It used to be basically against the rules to bring up those topics on BAUT, since they almost inevitably lead to fights. As has been noted here, I have dipped my bloggy toes into those waters lately, so we need to relax those rules, but it will be for that section only, and must remain on topic. In other words, don’t get all hot up over some political thing I wrote, then take it to the Conspiracy Theories section.
- This also means comments will be easier to read, easier to link to (yay!), and easier to quote (also yay!).
- Spams will be virtually eliminated. This will mean little to you, since you never see them, but that’s because I have to filter through a zillion comments and zap them when they crop up. So it means a lot to me.
- I’m hoping it means a lively crowd of folks making comments, too. BAUTers tend to be thoughtful, interesting, funny, and smart — just like my commenters (I need to wash my nose now). Getting these two groups together should be fun. The more the merrier.
- Really, if you’re reading my blog, you’re almost certainly going to like some of the other stuff going on at BAUT. If you haven’t been there yet, now’s your chance.
So, got something to say about this blog? Click on the comments link below and get started!
P.S. One other thing: the system I used to migrate the old posts over to BAUT has a weird bug that won’t let it move over anonymous comments. Once that’s fixed I’ll migrate all the old entries over, and let everyone know here. Until then, old entries on the blog look like they have no comments, and you’ll get an error if you do try to comment. I hope to have that fixed ASAP.
October 8th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
Sigh.
October 9th, 2006 at 12:39 am
yay, i’m loquacious!!
on a more serious note, has the bug been fixed yet?
October 9th, 2006 at 4:40 am
Firefox? Good Browser? Pfft! Mozilla wouldn’t know a good browser if you shoved it in their face. Now, Opera, there’s a good browser.
October 9th, 2006 at 5:42 am
Ah yes, Opera, the one that takes longer then Firefox to load any sort of image.
October 9th, 2006 at 5:59 am
BB & GDwarf; Careful there, you are straying into religion and politics….
Vive Le Firefox!
October 9th, 2006 at 6:03 am
GDwarf, the results of this site:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
show otherwise. Especially if you use windoze.
October 9th, 2006 at 7:52 am
RIP the speed of IE 6. It may have been broken and insecure, but at least it didn’t take 15 seconds to load a page like Firefox and Opera. Now IE 7 (currently on RC1, so I’d imagine it should be released soon) has copied Firefox all the way. Sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. That was the only reason I used IE over firefox:P.
Stupid hackers that make it necessary to sacrfice speed for security:(.
October 9th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Spam’s a bitch. I was getting the “very good site” comments with links to totally unwanted sites. I toggled on the Word Verification and that seems to have stopped it for now. I presume that when a blog starts getting hits in the thousands, the spam returns?
October 9th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Pretty pathetic that you guys have to argue over how fast pages load in your browsers. Have you forgotten just how miraculous it is that they work at all? So a page takes a few seconds to load — back in the old days you’d have to drive around to get the information you’re itching for. After that mess, the differences in speed between browsers should be seen as insignificant, but alas, it seems you three have no patience whatsoever! Naturally, our biggest concerns in browsers should be security and extensibility.
October 9th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
That’s progress for you, Aerik…
October 9th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
I was hoping to work on the problem this morning, but I couldn’t. It’s top priority for tonight.
October 9th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
So where do we register, or is our BAUT registration sufficient?
October 9th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
I don’t care about how fast it loads pages, opera is just so much more convenient. You can customize the interface however you want it, doing almost anything you want to it, it automatically saves your session as you go so that if say your computer crashes, the next time you open it, all the tabs that were open when it crashed are still there, open to the same page (unlike firefox, which only does that with a special tabbrowser extension, and then only when you close it and specifically tell it to save the session, never when your computer crashes). The panels and widgets are incredibly convenient, and my favourite feature: say I want to search for the bad astronomer in google: just type “g bad astronomy” into the address bar and voila. Many others are programmed into it, and others can be programmed into it (I’ve put w->wikipedia search, i->imdb search, d->dictionary.com search, t->thesaurus.com search, q->gamefaqs search and c->cia world factbook search. So, any time I want to search for something, I just type the appropriate letter and what I’m looking for into the address bar and I get what I’m looking for. So convenient! Not to mention, Opera is the smallest, fastest, browser and uses fewer resources than any other one out there.
October 9th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
There are several extensions that allow you to recover tabs and sessoins upon crash, BB, if only you just look for them. Such as this search for which I’ve altered the URI so that you get 50 results per page. As for why this may be an important issue, that kind of crash-recovery was seen by the Mozilla developers as a potential risk for privacy violation. Mozilla prides itself on the fact that Firefox can serve as a kiosk browser, which is made obvious by the fact that they have a branch of extensions under that specific heading (kiosk).
As for the search features, Mozilla Suite/Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey are all fully capable of this behavior and more. In fact if you look in sites such as tech-recipes.com, lifehack.org and lifehacker.com, you can find instructions how to easily build your own search plugins!
And finally, compared to the heap of unneccessary and non-standards-compliant code involved in IE, the difference in disk sizes between open-source and standards-compliant browsers is not a significant issue unless you have a really crappy/small harddrive and little RAM.
October 9th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
BAUT registration is what you want, so if you’re already registered there, you’re golden.
October 9th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
I have to add something. “You can customize the interface however you want it” on Mozilla products as well, in fact, to a greater extent than Opera. Via CSS and Javascript (Stylish, GreaseMonkey, Usercontent.css, Userchrome.css, User.js, themes) you can change everything about how the browser looks and functions.
Heck, allow me to let you in on some secrets. Thanks to some GreaseMonkey userscripts, the partnership of CoComment.com and Haloscan.com, the CoComment extension, firefox’s form/password/name storing, Every comment page is as good as a forum, and every forum is even richer than before, and so is blogging. Firefox even makes the internet work better.
Top that.
October 10th, 2006 at 12:00 am
But I use a different e-mail address for the Blog as I do for the BAUT forum, will that cause any issues?
October 12th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Sticks, it shouldn’t cause any issues. I don’t know how he’s converting old comments over. From as soon as he sorts out the bugs, the new comments on the blog will be on the board, and use your board username.
October 15th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
I posted on this blog (different topic) and it didn’t show up on the forum. And I have a different name here but the same e-mail. Guess I’ll wait for the system to run the bugs out before worrying about it.