Peiratikos

As you can see, our little linkblog has changed. No more sidebar, now the links are integrated into the blog itself, but formated differently. Links now also have their own permalinks and comments threads. The idea for setting up linkblogging this way comes from Matt Mullenweg. This is a neat way of doing it, I think, because it’s more compact and slicker than the sidebar and better integrated into the blog.

You can still see the old links at https://peiratikos.net/archive/goto/.

We’ve also upgraded to WordPress 1.2, which has finally been released! As long as we’re upgrading, we figure we might as well play with the design a bit, so expect quickly changing looks over the next week or so. If you encounter any problems with the site, let us know!

Next project, beating the citations archive into shape. When will do that? Ah, who knows.

I got myself a college degree! Go me. I was getting really burnt out this semester and devoted what little energy I had to my schoolwork, which resulted in a serious reduction in blogging. But now I’m free, and I just read Grant Morrison’s Seaguy #1 and New X-Men: Here Comes Tomorrow, which may very well be my favorite of the New X-Men TPBs. (I should also give a ’shout out,’ as the cool kids probably don’t say anymore, to Cameron Stewart and Marc Silvestri, who bring lovely visual life to Morrison’s scripts.) I’m feeling inspired to get back to blogging!

Speaking of Morrison’s collaboration with Stewart and Silvestri… David Fiore has harsh words for those who idealize writer/artists! Consider: if we accept only writer/artists, you know what that means—no Seaguy as the wonderful result of the collaboration of Morrison and Stewart, colorist Peter Doherty and letterer Todd Klein. And a world without Seaguy is not a world I want to live in.

That thing over on the right that says “goto” is our new linkdump. Links we want to link to but don’t have much to say about go over there rather than over here on the blog. Up to 10 links go on the sidebar over there, old links get bumped off the list. Older links may be found in the goto archive (not yet, obviously). The linkdump has its own RSS 0.91 feed.

Also, we’ve been without a blogroll since we switch hosting services earlier this month. We promise to add some kind of half-assed blogroll soon and then think about how to do a good blogroll.

Well, here we are. Here I am, anyway—my neighborhood of the Web has finally learned that peiratikos.net is now pointing to a new server. If you’ve been using http://63.247.87.138/~sberg/blog/, you can go back to https://peiratikos.net/. If you’re using Mozilla, Netscape (maybe Opera, I don’t know), you can use our cool popup menus to the right of your screen. If you’re using Internet Explorer, use the non-popup menu to the right of your screen to navigate to pages with various archive lists and lists of XML feeds. Either way, you’ll want to check out our new citation archives. Want to know what we think of David Fiore or New X-Men? Want to know what mean things we’ve been saying about you? Now it’s easy!

New feed URLs (for uninteresting reasons related to the upgrade of our WordPress system which was necessitated by my earlier erroneous upload): see https://peiratikos.net/feed/ or peruse the menu to the right of the screen.

We’ve completely restructured our categories to give them more, well, structure. We’ve also eliminated a few superfluous categories. The new category structure looks like this:

• Comics by Steven
• Peiratikos
• Politics
• Roleplaying
• Textual Criticism
  • Media
    • Comics
    • Literature
    • Movies
    • Television
  • Superheroes
    • X-Men
  • The Fantastic
• Theory
  • Postmodernism
• Web/Internet
  • Blogging
  • CSS

Good structure? Suggestions very much welcome!

If you’re using Mozilla or Netscape browsers, you’ll note our site menu across the top of the web pages has been replaced by a sidebar menu with popup submenus. No Javascript—it’s all CSS (link to the web site of Eric Meyer, international man of mystery/CSS expert). For those who care, it’s an easy effect to achieve:

li ul { display: none; }
li:hover > ul { display: block; }

is the basic CSS foundation, add formatting and positioning code to that and you’re set. Of course, it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. Our menu there is not in its final state, but still, I think pretty neat.

Yes, we’re experiencing some technical difficulties here (the result of my uploading some test scripts into the main blog directory rather than the test directory on the web server, oops). Until those are resolved, enjoy our fun new look as I switch over to the default WordPress index page for now.

I was looking through our referrers list here at Peiratikos just now, and I discovered three rather odd referers. I won’t link to two of them, because they’re real sites. I will give you the third URL: http://paris-hilton-sextape.blogspot.com/. That’s not a real URL—there is no Paris Hilton Sex Tape blog. So that’s clearly not a legit referral, but the other two are highly questionable: one is an Internet service provider and the other appears to be a Belgian company. I.e., not web sites that are likely to link to us.

Folks, the newest innovation in spam has arrived, and it is referral spam. Apparently a lot of bloggers are getting hit with referral spam for John Kerry’s blog, whihc is pretty pathetic—Paris Hilton spam is to be expected, but when Presidential campaigns start spamming… or maybe it’s some Republican script kiddie trying to turn tech-savvy people against Kerry.

At any rate… come on, referral spam? It’s wasted on our site, since Rose and I are the only ones who can look at our referrers list. It would certainly cause us a lot of difficulty if we start getting hit hard by this method—not least because of all the wasted bandwidth used up by serving bogus referrals—but nobody will actually see the spam ads except us, and it’s not like we’re going to buy something from a company that 1) spams us and 2) wastes our precious and expensive bandwidth. So whoever decided to spam our referral list made a poor marketing choice. For people who list their referrers on their web sites (I know several bloggers do), this could create a larger public annoyance.

But still, referral spam?

You know you’re really somebody when an I’m Feeling Lucky search on your name takes you directly to your blog post about Watchmen.