Huzzah and kudos to The Commissar for adding Signifying Nothing to the blogosphere map. We’re lurking somewhere in the region of Chechnya, in southern Russia.

The Commissar of The Politburo Diktat has uncovered praised mass perfidity by members of the “League of Liberals” blog alliance that has resulted in inflating their traffic statistics measured by SiteMeter; N.Z. Bear is, shall we say, not amused. Don’t you just love this silly “alliance” business?

I’ve updated this post on the basis of some commentary received from Perseus, who conducted the survey cited by John Dvorak in his “blogging is destined to be a miserable failure” piece.

The PostgreSQL database that runs Signifying Nothing behind-the-scenes was just upgraded (from 7.3.4 to 7.4). Hopefully the dump-and-restore step went smoothly, and none of the old content should have vanished into thin air.

Allegedly this release of PostgreSQL is faster, although how much improvement will filter through all the junk between your browser and the database (namely the LSblog code, which is hardly a model of efficient coding) is something of an open question.

It’s hard to believe, but Signifying Nothing turned a year old yesterday. From its humble roots, before it even had a real name of its own, through the Lottroversy and Little Ricky Santorum’s problems, and beyond, we’ve been carving out our own little niche of inanity and commentary on the web since November 14, 2002.

As always, the old posts we’re particularly proud of—a small sample from our 874 posts over the past year—are linked in the left sidebar from the front page under the “Best of Signifying Nothing” label. But the most interesting posts, I think, are yet to come—or else Brock and I would have given up on this enterprise a long time ago.

Special thanks to my partner in crime, Brock Sides, for his added insight, and to our readers and fellow bloggers who keep us on our toes and—for some inexplicable reason—keep coming back for more. We can only hope that the next year will be even better than this one has been!

Someone needs to tell Cori Dauber, current guest blogger over at the Volokh Conspiracy, to take it easy on the rhetorical questions.

This seven sentence post contains five rhetorical questions. And this twelve sentence post contains seven rhetorical questions.

I’m not saying there’s never a place for rhetorical questions, but, like exclamation points and all-caps they should be used very sparingly.

Overall, Cori’s blogging style gives me the impression that he’s about to blow an artery. So it doesn’t surprise me that he links to Little Green Footballs here, in a post that consists of four rhetorical questions out of eight sentences.

Sorry Eugene, this guy is your worst guest blogger since Clayton Cramer.

Robert Garcia Tagorda (Boomshock), in response to Matthew Yglesias, tries to figure out why he prefers InstaPundit to Atrios, in comparison to Matt’s stated reason why he prefers Atrios to Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit):

Quoth Matthew (via Robert):

Now Josh [Chafetz] is right, Atrios isn’t exactly your source for civil discourse. On the other hand, neither is InstaPundit which Josh doesn’t seem to mind so much and which earns a permalink on his sidebar. Let me suggest that the problem Josh has with Atrios has less to do with civility than with the fact that they disagree regarding the main subjects of Josh’s interests. Personally, I like Atrios a great deal, though he’s uncivil, and I like InstaPundit a little, too, though he’s also uncivil. The secret here is that I agree with Atrios about most things, and I agree with Glenn Reynolds about a few things.

Robert argues there’s another reason:

But Matt overlooks one thing: partisanship. Atrios and Glenn both have biases, but the former’s confrontational style comes under the Democratic banner. ...

Partisanship gives things a different twist. It exacerbates ideological biases, because it introduces an element of “us-versus-them.” It’s much harder to debate somebody who fights not simply for a set of principles and ideas but also for a particular team. Partisanship, in and of itself, is not necessarily reprehensible. However, when you fuse it with an in-your-face attitude, as Atrios does, the entire package becomes very hard to consume.

I think there’s a third reason: Glenn doesn’t have comments. A lot of people seem to like comment sections on blogs—and sometimes they do add some value. But if you go to a site like Atrios, CalPundit, Balloon Juice, or LGF, you’ll find that the comments are generally filled with two groups: the trolls and the “amen corner.” And I think comment sections are just naturally polarizing that way; I’ve caught myself trolling at times, even though generally speaking I’m not a huge fan of trolls. Occasionally a comment thread does add a lot of value—indeed, if it weren’t for that occasional value, I’d probably never bother reading the comments at some of these sites (well, CalPundit and Balloon Juice; I don’t read either Atrios or LGF), and I’d probably enjoy the experience of reading them more on balance.

Now, I realize I probably open myself up to a charge of hypocrisy here; after all, I often post in other peoples’ comment sections. 95% of the time, it’s because I just don’t feel like what I have to say is worth a proper post here at SN, or you’d need the context of the original comment thread to understand it anyway.

All this, I suppose, is a long-winded way of saying “don’t expect a comments section here anytime soon.” But, if you have posted something relevant to something I’ve said, feel free to use the TrackBack feature to let SN’s readers—and me—know. If you don’t use a TrackBack-capable blogging tool, you can use the linked manual trackback form; thanks to Kevin of Wizbang for that.

Glenn Reynolds weighs in.

Blogospheric navel-gazing is always a pleasant diversion; today, Dan Drezner looks at the dispute over whether or not “portals” are the way to go for budding bloggers. Dan correctly points out that only a few bloggers can sustain the level of traffic needed to make the “portal” approach worthwhile—and this applies as much to the “techbloggers” as it does to the “warbloggers” that the Ecosystem statistics are biased towards.

I, like Dan, think Will Baude’s comment is worth repeating:

Tyler Cowen thinks that there are so many good blogs out there nowadays that the most widely-read blogs will be those that “cream-skim” (that is, taking the most useful posts from a wide variety of blogs).

Pardon, but an RSS feed can do that. The reason I don’tread Instapundit is that I don’t particularly agree with Glenn Reynolds about what’s wheat and what’s chaff. Look at my blogroll, which contains a number of fairly low-circulation blogs, and you could probably guess that.

I think the value of “portal blogs” will be somewhat reduced when people figure out how to do category-based aggregation (or topic-based aggregation) of RSS feeds—ironically, bringing weblogs closer to the early 1980s topic-based discussion format pioneered on Usenet before much of its value was destroyed by trolls, crapflooding, and spam. Where the portal blogs like Instapundit will still win, however, is in the area of editorial control—separating the wheat from the chaff, to borrow Will’s phrase—by not only saying “this post is on a topic you may be interested in” but also “this post is a good post on that topic.” To some extent you can add some of that control by filtering the aggregated RSS material against a trusted OPML list, but it’s still not quite the same thing as having a human editor.

In the end category-based aggregation (CBA) will not only help end-users, it will also make it easier for portal editors to pick and choose from a wider variety of blogs. I don’t know how many blogs Glenn Reynolds reads a day, and I suspect he gets most of his links to less-well-known blogs from reader submissions. A mere mortal can only read so many blogs, even with an RSS reader. CBA should make it easier for the portal editor (and for everyone else) to scour more of the breadth of the blogosphere for good material, which should be a win for everyone involved—more eyeballs for budding bloggers and higher quality material for the portals.

I just returned from another enjoyable trip to San Antonio. After the last trip, I blogged about having rather restricted web access at the training center, and I promised a report on what blogs were blocked. Here’s that report.

I’m not going to say what software was doing the blocking, just in case there’s some sort of absurd “Intellectual Property” claim or EULA agreement I might be violating. But do a Google search for “enterprise web filter software”, and you should be able to make an educated guess.

I obviously couldn’t check every blog out there, so I decided to use the best blogroll out there, that of OxBlog. Here are the blogs that appear on the OxBlog blogroll, along with whether they were blocked, and what category they were blocked under.

I’ve made a few minor changes to the stylesheet and underlying code:

• Entries are now color-coded by author, comme le Volokh Conspiracy: I’m this color, while this is Brock’s color. No, I’m not identifying the colors by name, since Brock and I may decide to change them around a bit.
• I’m now using borders for link underlining, like Matthew does at A Fearful Symmetry. I haven’t decided if I like it yet or not; there may be more experiments to come.

A final note: some people seem to find the default font size of Signifying Nothing too big. This is apparently the result of two factors:

1. Browser default font sizes are too big in general. IE, Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird default to a 16 point font, which is close to reasonable if you are legally blind or your monitor is a JumboTron, but otherwise a tad on the large side (I usually adjust it to the 12–14 point range).
2. Because of the first item, many people include FONT tags or CSS to reduce your font size to something that’s reasonable (Outside the Beltway does this noticeably, rendering it mostly unreadable using my default font size). Unfortunately that shoots to hell the accessibility advantages of CSS over proprietary tags.

I don’t have any perfect advice here. No browser that I know of lets you do CSS or font size overrides for particular sites, which seems like an odd oversight, since CSS is designed to allow user overrides of settings. However, all major browsers have font size adjustments in their menus you can use on an ad hoc basis to compensate for font drift between sites.

Signifying Nothing’s 155-member (and growing) blogroll has simply gotten too long to be manageable. So, rather than cut people, I’ve decided to be fairly meritocratic and just trim the displayed blogroll to the last N hours of updates, where N is currently 36 (and may drop even lower). That cut it down to a slightly-more-manageable 85 entries (as of a few minutes ago).

The full blogroll can be seen on this version of the page, which looks suspiciously similar to the old front page, and all of the blogs that provide RSS feeds will still appear in the OPML feed. However, this change means that people who don’t ping services like blo.gs or weblogs.com will just disappear into the ether; Den Beste-land is now off the front page permanently.

I hope this change will produce a better experience for our readers.

I’m back in Oxford after putting 830 more miles on the car, and the blog’s back online. The culprit: a power outage that led to a reboot into an apparently-broken kernel. So much for complaining about BellSouth FastAccess…

While we were sleeping:

• Daniel Drezner got himself a spiffy new Movable Type blog.
• Matthew revealed his surname to the world.
• Joy Larkin got Slashdotted and demonstrated all the cute women aren’t taken (at least, not yet; no word on how many marriage proposals she received).
• A bunch of Windows machines got smacked-down by a nasty virus. (What else is new?)
• A nice big chunk of the country and the most populous parts of Ontario got to enjoy a power outage due to grid failure. Everyone’s traditional enemy of choice (in Ann Arbor, it was fairly evenly split between the Canadians and Ohioans) was blamed repeatedly.

Coming soon from me: why recalls are A-OK by me (despite my general distaste for the initiative power), who has replaced political parties in translating aggregate preferences into policy (and why Madison would like it), and probably a rant or two once my held mail shows up. I’m sure Brock will have plenty to say too. I’m glad we’re back and glad you’re back reading us!

Thanks to Kevin of WizBang! and a little bit of cleverness on my own part, you can now manually enter a TrackBack to any post here at Signifying Nothing; just click on the TrackBack link on the entry (it looks like « and has a tooltip saying “TrackBack”), then click on the “Register a TrackBack manually” link. The needed manual URL will be filled in for you; all you need to enter is the post’s permalink URL, the title of your post, an excerpt, and the name of your blog. Ideal for those of you still slumming on Blogger or other weblog tools that don’t support TrackBack.

Just in case you were wondering, I haven’t driven off Brock. As I’m sure almost nobody outside the city knows (especially if you get your news from the blogosphere), most of Memphis has been without power since early Tuesday morning. Hopefully Brock will be back in the next few days as power there gets restored.

By some miracle, I’ve made it safe and sound to Ann Arbor. I spent Friday night with my friend Eric Taylor and some other wild and crazy guys in Bloomington, Ind., and most of Saturday night over at Dean’s blog party with all sorts of interesting folks in the western Detroit suburbs. I think I can safely report that a good time was had by all involved in both occassions.

I’m also relieved to see that Brock has been picking up the slack for me while I’ve been away (what timing!). More posting from me will appear in a little while…

By the way, if you are reading this in Ann Arbor, and you have a line on a room that’s available for the next four weeks, drop me an email at chris+aa@lordsutch.com. And, if you’ve replied to my email about the Bazaar, I’ll try to get back to you in the next day or so.

In the next few days, Signifying Nothing will be gaining a new co-blogger: Brock Sides. Brock met more than enough of the desired criteria to qualify; I’ll leave it to him to decide whether he wants to specify which ones.

Brock, like me, has led a relatively interesting life; he started out as a philosophy grad student, and is currently working as a computer administrator in Memphis, Tenn. He’s currently the president of GOLUM (pronounced like “Golem” from Lord of the Rings), the Linux user’s group in Memphis. Brock’s somewhat to the left of me ideologically, but he shares my (perhaps-not-always-met) goal of keeping the tone relatively sober.

I hope you’ll give him a warm welcome and I think he’ll be a great addition to the blog!

Apologies for the downtime earlier today; I upgraded Apache on the server and it apparently didn’t like something in the configuration files. Things should now be back to normal…

Due to time constraints, the “generating new content” side of Signifying Nothing doesn’t seem to be as productive as it used to be. I’m also interested in seeing how capable LSblog is for use by non-techies (or at least users who don’t have the access to tinker with the innards of the database). So, I’m looking for one or two people interested in joining the party here at SN (either exclusively or non-exclusively).

I’m fairly open-minded about political perspectives; my guess is that most of the audience is in the “economic right-socially liberal” quartile of a two-dimensional issue space. I prefer the tone sober (less Atrios or LGF; more CalPundit or Tacitus), and I’m not interested in proselytizing—religious or political. Bonus points if (a) I know you personally, (b) I probably should know you but for some odd reason I don’t, (c) I’ve consumed alcohol in your presence, or (d) you “do” mass political behavior, political psychology, or political sociology. A tolerance for minor teething problems with the software is a must (I haven’t lost a post since this blog started, but there are still a few small quirks here and there). Drop me an email if you’re interested.

I’ll also be seeking contributors for a separate, more serious blog venture I’m planning to launch in the next week or two (again, powered by LSblog). More details on that soon…

Like Joy, I’ve decided to add a SiteMeter visit counter to Signifying Nothing. The morbidly curious can compare its statistics with my locally-produced Analog stats, which are updated hourly and date back to February. I also added generic SiteMeter support to LSblog while I was at it.

I did have to make one small hack to get it to play nicely in the all-CSS layout; for some reason, it decides to comment-out the noscript element in the JavaScript version unless you set a variable (g_leavenoscript) to tell it not to. Look at the HTML source of the page if you want to figure out how I did it.

B. at ShinySideUp likes the new look here at Signifying Nothing. It’s based on the appearance of Daniel Drezner Part 2, and is only ten CSS directives (736 bytes, including comments and @imports) on top of the old stylesheet. If, by some chance, you liked the old look, feel the need to mix it up a little, or don’t particularly enjoy doing timezone conversions in your head, you can always set your preferences.

As is apparently all the rage these days, I have added inline trackback to Signifying Nothing and LSblog. I’ve also put together a Blogger-esque CSS file, which moves the sidebar to the left if you’re into that sort of thing.

Also, look for an LSblog 0.6 release sometime in the next few days, just as soon as I get done with some dissertation revisions…

Considering that not too long ago I said I wasn’t going to post a blogroll, and now I have one, I guess I should post my formal blogrolling policy. There are two ways to get a slot:

1. Link me. If I visit your site and don’t projectile vomit after reading it, you’ll probably get a link, and if you have an RSS feed, I’ll probably subscribe to it.

2. I randomly stumble across your blog and feel like I’d probably read it on a semi-regular basis. (I’ll read your content more often if you have a full-content RSS feed. Movable Type should be able to produce one of those.)

Also, you will percolate up to the top of the blogroll when you update your weblog if you do friendly things like pinging weblogs.com or blo.gs (preferably both, because I query them and blogger.com hourly at different offsets from the hour). I don’t use Blogrolling; it’s all homegrown code (the semi-mythical LSblog). And since things like Technorati use those pings to do their special magic behind the scenes, I’ll probably only find out if you link me if you ping somewhat regularly. Check out Laurence Simon’s guide to pinging for all the details you’d ever want. Otherwise, you’ll permanently hang out in Den Beste Land at the bottom.

Finally, if for some reason you think my blogroll is useful, you can grab its contents as an OPML file for your favorite RSS aggregator. And if you read this blog often, and don’t like how it looks or the timezone, set your prefs to change the settings to your liking.

Scholar, blogger, and all-around great guy (see what a beer and some good career advice will buy you in praise) Dan Drezner has moved to drezner2.blogspot.com due to certain unspecified Blog*Spot problems at the old site, as an interim move before ditching Blogger completely. Update your blogrolls accordingly.

Bizarrely enough, “new” posts seem to be appearing on a somewhat random basis at the old site. There’s a ghost in the machine somewhere, methinks.

Now he's back at the original site…

Thanks to the folks at OxBlog for their shout out! Hopefully, however, my days as a graduate student are drawing fairly rapidly toward a close…

In honor of today’s graduates, you can now choose a special red-and-blue themed stylesheet. It looks positively icky in IE6, and (for odd some reason) the background graphic doesn’t render in Opera 7. But it’s a fun little diversion for all six of you running decent browsers. :-)