Bogieblog

Rest in Peace My Friend

Jeff Soyer was one of the first bloggers I ever met way back when blogging was THE thing. He and I hit it off because our preference was to stay at the outskirts of the goings on at the shindig at the Weekend Pundit's old Manse. He generally gave up blogging to turn to modern FB and forum formats. He had great presence amongst several gaming and writing online communities and he asked me to take over moderation of one of those FB communities about a year ago when his health really started deteriorating. In March of this year the doctors weren't quite sure why he was still above ground.

He was an older generation gun nut with a love of reading, a cat lover. a big donor for varous projects in his community, and a gay guy with a great sense of humor in a time when being "other" was not as acceptable as it is for the younger generations coming up.

Rest in Peace my friend. Although sad for the loss felt by family and friends, I am so happy you are out of pain and have joined all your 4-legged furry friends who passed before you.

His preliminary obituary is here.

Jeff's FB page (for posterity)

This is a Different Typepad issue

Bitching about how pictures upload, or don't (or tell me it isn't of the correct format when it clearly is a JPG file) is old news, so I won't bring that up again. Oops, too late ;-)

The newest issue, is when I am commenting on any bloggers' Typepad post (including my own). When I go to type my email in, a dropdown with the suggested completion no longer appears. However, if I type in 3-4 characters, then backspace once (no more than that), that dropdown suddenly appears.

You just can't get good help anymore, sigh.

 

At Least Read / Watch What you Link To

I find it so funny that people, at times, post a link to an article or video that they are trying to prove a point (I assume), which does nothing of the sort. Maybe the titles seem like they should, or the first paragraph, but you can tell they didn't watch/read the whole thing. Or perhaps they ignored anything further and hope their audience does too (or doesn't get that far.

I've seen that happen on forums, on blogs, and in FB.

The latest case is the Weekend Pundit (who I like, link to and have no beef with) has this on his 4/30/2023 post:

That link goes to this You Tube video.  One would assume it is evidence of some sort that there has been extreme climate change for at least 800 years. It is indeed named 800 years of Climate Crisis but the entire 5+ minutes of video is of hiking their dogs in several different areas.

Unless for some reason the video under that title has been changed, I can only assume that the WP, for whatever reason, did not watch it it and just made an assumption based on the title.

I don't mean to pick on WP - I see this type of thing on a regular basis by all sides of every issue that I care to try to educate myself in. i just happened to come across this at a time I was in the mood, and position to, enter a post on this blog.

 

Comments Closed

I just put in a ticket because for some reason the comments to yesterday's post closed themselves. Oh, they show open on the the both the entry listing (that green area in the first pic), and page I use for creating posts (2md pic)

 

but the blog itself says it is closed.

The auto close is set to 1 month so that isn't it

Sorry for any inconvenience this causes - hopefully it will get fixed soon.

New Look

So I had issues with with the comments that started sometime after I posted last Sunday. Ruth let me know that she was unable to save comments (got a 404 error upon submital) and I confirmed from 2 different browsers than what she was using (Mozilla Firefox and IE). The funny thing was, in that time Cop Car was able to comment from IE. In four tries, I got a comment to go thru, but the next try did not work.

I contacted the Typepad team and they determined that at least part of the issue was the code in my very old templates. I had made these templates sometime in the early 2000's and haven't found a need to change. The team encouraged me to use one of their template builders so I wouldn't have to mess with any code. I followed their advice and the resulting look is from that endeavor. I was able to customize and specify content thru the builder very easily.

The change solved my issues with the 404 error with both Firefox and IE. Alas, Ruth had different difficulties with Chrome in that the "Post" button never became "Live" for her. So back to the Typepad team I went. Thru a series of trials from both the Typepad team (using Chrome) and Ruth, it was determined the most likely culprit was something unique to Ruth. She was a real trooper trying different ideas (most thought of by her), until finally she downloaded another Chrome-based browser that worked.

We still never figured out what was unique about Ruth's set up - which would have been nice in case it crops up for other people. But, hey, sometimes you just gotta say "Good enough is good enough." Thank you so much Ruth for being willing to try different things and report back results!

I would also like to thank the Typepad team, who was incredibly patient and went thru my original custom code and made suggestions for fixing it, or updating thru their builder, then made suggestions for testing the Chrome set up that started having other issues.

Issues with Comments

Seems the only person who can comment at this point is Cop Car. I've tried Firefox and IE, Ruth has tried Chrome. I'll try to figure out the issue

MArooned: And The Results Are In...

...well, by this time you've seen who the winner is in the 2012 Kilted to Kick Cancer Fundraising challenge. Obviously I'm happy to have won, but I want to give a shout-out to Michael and Stingray for a seriously butt-kicking competition. Both of these fine gentlemen really went the distance to raise money as well, and they busted their butts to raise money for cancer research. Great job, guys!!!

First off, let me extend a hearty THANK YOU to everyone that donated. I am positively gobsmacked by the generosity shown by my readers, lurkers, commenters, and passers-by. By my reckoning, over $6,500 was donated to The Prostate Cancer Foundation and LiveStrong through MArooned - that's nothing short of amazing. I'll say it again, gunnies are the greatest people. Thank you all.

Secondly, I want to extend another hearty THANK YOU to the six people that donated their time and energy into making prizes available for me to give away. Michael W., Nancy R., Dennis, Wally, Larry, and Mark, I can't thank you enough for the awesome prizes you made available. I very nearly tripled my total donation from last year, and I owe it all to the six of you, no question about it.

via www.ma-rooned.com

I actually backed a winner! Congrats to Jay for his stellar work on raising funds for fighting prostate cancer.

10 Years

Happy 10th Blogoversary to The Weekend Pundit!

Type Pad Dashboard Quirkiness

So this is the weirdest thing. For the last 2 months, in TypePad dashboard, my desktop does not show me many of the functions such as inserting links, inserting pictures, making text into a citatation (indented both sides and italicized). On my laptop I see all those options, but on my desktop, from where I do most of my posting, I am missing a bunch of the functions. I tried turning on the "Lite" editor, then turning it back off, but that wasn't any help.

Maybe it's a funtion of still using IE 6x, I don't know, but it sure bugs me and slows me down when I have to drag all the HTML stuff out of my brain!

Commenting

Several blogs that I frequent have changed their host and/or comment host. After leaving a comment at each of those blogs, I have not been able to find a way back to the main blog page. I don't know what is up with that, but if the choice is reading the list of posts for the week, or commenting and having to close the tab then reclick the link on my sidebar - I vote for the easy way every time.

Just sayin'.