Still trying to get my arms around how to (a) manage folks in Plus and (b) get the info back out of it.
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In prep for the impending de-socialization of Google Reader (sniff), I’m figuring out how to get Google Plus to replace it I’ve been pondering a content-based approach. Right now, folks who follow me…
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In prep for the impending de-socialization of Google Reader (sniff), I’m figuring out how to get Google Plus to replace it
I’ve been pondering a content-based approach. Right now, folks who follow me in Reader get a deluge of miscellaneous items — whimsical and serious. I’ve often wondered at whether there are folks who are interested in one vs. the other.
It’s easy enough in Reader to skim through share titles, so it hasn’t struck me as a big deal. But it’s not nearly as easy to do that sort of skimming in Plus (one of its, ahem, drawbacks). In some ways, it’s much more like Twitter — and in both Plus and Twitter, to date, I’ve been very selective about what I post, usually leaning to the personal (on Twitter) and whimsical (Plus).
So I’m thinking of creating two new circles on Plus — call them Whimsical and Serious. I’ll take the folks currently following me in Reader (and probably everyone else in my Circles except for the folks who I’m just following) and put them into both groups, but offer them the opportunity to “opt out” from one or the other. Not interested in my being all screedy about the Religious Right? I’ll pull you out of “Serious.” Bored to tears with cute Doctor Who graphics? I can pull you out of Whimsical.
Hmmmmm … though, on the other hand, how do my followers know what circles of mine they are in, or how to get to just one or the other?
Okay, so maybe that won’t work.
The other problem is that I don’t want this stuff stuck in Plus. I want it (as with my current Reader-spawned) Unblogged Bits) pulled into my blog. There are some unofficial ways to generate an RSS feed from Plus … but that only works for Public posts — stuff that goes to any particular circle(s) isn’t visible in that fashion. And all that gets generated are the titles — the spiffy commentary notes go away completely.
That’s a big problem to me, even if I leave off of the Whimsical/Serious thing.
*Sigh*
Irksome move, Google.
Note: Folks who aren’t interested in Technical Web Stuff should move along to the next post, or look at cute kittens or something.
I have a delicate web/info/posting ecosystem I maintain here (here‘s how it looked in 2009, and that’s largely still accurate). I Tweet. I Share stuff in Google Reader. I cross-post. And I do it all with some design goals in mind:
Google Plus, because of it’s new nature, has been something of an exception here. It’s not been possible to auto-share stuff back and forth, which has meant that using it is an extra, manual effort.
One major center of my web content generating world has been Google Reader, an RSS reader that has been brilliant in being able to read, share, and forward on links to all sorts of stuff. It’s also been a bit of a red-headed child for Google, who hasn’t really done much with it the past couple of years. Indeed, amidst all the regular claims by webnoscenti that RSS is dead, there were fears that Google would drop Reader altogether.
Well, it hasn’t, but the announcement today from Google has me moderately concerned.
In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love.
Which is a great sign. The Reader design was a couple of generations old, so bringing it in line with the rest of Google’s redesigns is not only good in and of itself, it’s a sign that Google is interested in maintaining the app.
Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.
That’s … good.
No, really. G+ integration from Reader has been something folks have been talking about since G+ was issued. Though the problem has been figured out through Reader “Send To” capability (kinda-sorta), it would be great to be able to have (selectively?) my Google Reader shares show up in G+ automagically.
Except …
Well, for example, RSS feeds from G+ are only available from the Public shares. So telling me that I’ll be able to share “the best of my feeds with just the right circles” is vaguely worrisome, for reasons I’ll mention below.
As a result of these changes, we also think it’s important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader’s social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week’s time we’ll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.
On the one hand, this makes sense. G+ is Google’s social app, so making it the sole focus of social aspects is logical.
On the other hand … I spend the majority of my time in Reader on the “People You Follow” list. That’s where all of the RSS feeds that folks who I follow in Reader have their shared stuff show up. It’s compact and easy to use, much moreso than following a G+ stream.
Reader items are (or can be) full-text when expanded, but a single line when collapsed. G+ items are a short summary blurb (unless you click through) plus whatever note you craft for it. It doesn’t collapse. So a screen of Reader items may show thirty or forty at a time, which I can skim and choose the ones I want. A screen of G+ items may show four or five. It’s much less efficient.
(I am currently following 30 people; 43 people are following me.)
So in the new regime, will I have a single G+ circle to which I can share Reader items to? Or for each Reader item I choose to share to G+, will I be given a choice of what circle(s) I choose to share with (if not Public)?
The loss of the shared link blog (currently viewable here) probably doesn’t affect too many people — though I know Margie uses it as a quick shortcut to read my “Unblogged Bits” items (more on that below).
We think the end result is better than what’s available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles.
As yet undefined what “Reader-specific circles” means.
We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That’s why we will also be extending Reader’s subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.
By the way, that Google has been so diligent about letting you download your data out of it is one of the reasons I trust then in ways I trust no other Net vendor. Because they fundamentally recognize it’s my data. Yeah, if I put it into their services, then they will make some use of it (TANSTAAFL), but I can always, prior to shutting down my account, get my data out. The historian in me rejoices.
Your subscriptions
Your shared items
Your friends
Your likes
Your starred items
I will definitely be pulling this data out, even though I anticipate continuing to use Reader as a source for getting info off the web. RSS rocks.
Like always, the new Google Reader will be a great place to read and share your feeds. And in addition to Google+, you’ll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To. We’re looking forward to launching the new features very soon.
Blah, blah, blah. Though it sounds like Reader, even if now less of a stand-alone app as much as a feed itself to Google Plus, will continue as a product. Which is a Good Thing.
So here’s my concern.
Right now, I do a ton of reading and sharing through Google Reader (visible through the Reader auto-blog here, or the RSS feed here, or as routed via RSS to Twitter here, or as pulled into my blog as “Unblogged Bits” here).
Will the Reader2Twitter still work under the new Reader?
More importantly, will the RSS feed of my Shared items still exist if the auto-blog doesn’t? Because, if it doesn’t, then my Unblogged Bits posting goes away. Which would be … unfortunate.
If there was RSS support for G+ circles, that would (I think) fix the problem. You can get an RSS feed of the Public posts, but not (so far) of specific circles. So if I end up having to route my Reader shares to a specific G+ circle, then I won’t be able to do the Unblogged Bits posts. Again … unfortunate.
Another side-twist in this whole thing is that Google is getting rid of Buzz, it’s previous Twitter competitor. Which makes perfect sense, given the Google Plus strategy. While all of my Google Reader shares have been going into Buzz (previously viewable from GMail, but also viewable, for me, from my Google Plus screen), I never go into Buzz proper any more. But that’s because all Reader comments on things I’ve shared go into Buzz and thence to my email, where I see them and can comment back automagically. Question is, if Buzz is going away, how will that all work, too?
Let me note that I think Google is moving the right direction with all of this. G+ is a cool app, and if Google wants to make it the hub of its social infrastructure, that’s not only their prerogative, but I think it’s a good idea. But … I have my web ecosystem. I want to be sure that I can continue to, let’s say, share things I find in Reader, or Plus, and then have them appear in my blog through some means. I don’t want to be solely dependent on G+ as the center of my social infrastructure and data on the Web.
I hope that, when the new changes show up “very soon” that some of this FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) will be resolved.
In figuring out recent problems with my blog, and running many, many iterations of WebPageTest, it became clear that my biggest performance problem was Time to First Byte — i.e., how long it took my blog to actually respond to a request for information. In general, it was taking about 20 seconds for my blog home page to load, the first 10-12 of which were that initial response.
As a result, a variety of systems simply didn’t register my blog, including Google Plus (when I tried to link to posts) and WasItUp (which you can use to monitor a website and alert you if it goes down). Worse, some of the automated systems around here (my Twitter digests, my Google Reader digests) were timing out, such that both hilarity and many, many copies of those digests ensued.
I did several things to address this, which I lay out only as some things for others to try. I’m not enough of a WordPress (let alone Apache) techie to know precisely what worked.
1. Show Me the Cache: I installed W3 Total Cache plug-in, which does all sorts of cache-y goodness. Any post you read these days about optimizing WP blogs will probably mention this one. This did a lot of good — WebPageTest gave me back loads of 2 seconds with time to First Byte of half a second … for the second retry on the site. New users (or internal utilities) weren’t getting much.
2. Reduce Clutter: WebPageTest showed me some files that were taking a while to execute, a lot of them Fun Stuff in the sidebar. I took an axe to the least important items, and cut things back a second or two.
3. Deflater Mouse: My host provides a convenient interface through CPanel to “Optimize Websites” — which means making use of mod_deflate in Apache to compress-on-the-fly files being served up (in particular “text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript application/ms* application/vnd* application/postscript”). This helped things a bit (and is generally recommended on most performance sites).
4. Share the Wealth: A lot of optimization info says to push your graphic images to a Content Delivery Network like Amazon A3 and the like. Meh. Lots of work. But … the Use Google Libraries plug-in farms out loads of common javascript libraries to Google’s AJAX Libraries CDN, rather than the sites WP versions. Not only does this increase the chance of grabbing a cached copy, or making use of Google’s superior performance, but it breaks out the stacked requests to my host’s server, improving parallel performance.
5. Cram it In: I used the Delete Post Revisions plug-in to get rid of the many duplicate post revisions that WP had autosaved for me, cluttering up my blog database tables. Then I used the Optimize DB plug-in to compress the database of all that extra space. This didn’t help as much as I’d hoped (nor as much as various sites had suggested), but it’s good housekeeping anyway.
6. Farewell, My Plug-Ins: The initial negotiation between WP’s PHP code and the host’s database (MySQL, in my case) is impacted not just by what shows up on the page, but by all plug-ins that might draw on page data … even if there’s nothing they are displaying, and even if the plug-in is disabled from displaying. So I looked at my plug-ins (many), and deleted those I wasn’t using, had disabled, or could do without. One of the most significant was a second recent comments plug-in I’d played with some months back and then decided not to use, but also an RSS digest plug-in, a Google +1 button, and a couple of others were booted.
By the time I was done with all of the above (esp., ultimately, the last one), I’d dropped down to a 12-odd second load of the page, with only 3-4 seconds to the First Byte. That’s not fantastic, but it’s enough to resolve most of the performance problems / bad scores / duplicated items I was having problems with.
Knock on wood.
I’m assuming, at this point, that it has to do with some of the blog tuning I did a few weeks back, which has helped performance in some ways, but may be causing other time-out problems. So I’m going to be playing with that and seeing how it goes. Unfortunately, it’s not something that lends itself to quick diagnosis and fixing.
If you notice something odd happening here, please do let me know. Thanks, and thanks for your patience.
So one of my frustrations with Google Plus has been an inability to link to items on my blog from it. When you do a link, G+ tries to actually load the file (to read the text, grab the images, etc.), unlike putting a link into Twitter or Facebook where it’s … well, just a link. Which makes G+ more reliable in some ways, but more complicated. And complications mean more places to break.
Including, for me, the inability to link to posts on my blog from Google Plus.
That led me to think that maybe my blog had some performance/latency problems. So I ran through some performance tools, including Google’s Page Speed tool. Which then, in looking up some of the advisory tools, led me to the the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin, which does all sorts of cache-y, performance-improving goodness.
And, it appears, it sped things up enough that I’m able to now post (at least once) from G+.
If you notice something wonky with the performance, images, etc., on the blog, please let me know.
I was pasting in a YouTube embed on my blog today (yes, I did a fair amount of that today), and noticed that the embed code used iframe rather than object. Interesting. I tried it out …
… and then it disappeared from my edited post. Not just simply not showing up on the Visual part of the WordPress editor, but the code actually vanished.
It turns out that the TinyMCE editor (what’s there on the WordPress pages) will filter HTML elements that it doesn’t understand when you swap back and forth between Visual and HTML mode. So you can embed the iframe element while in HTML mode, but as soon as you hop back to Visual mode, TinyMCE gets rid of it.
(That annoying behavior is part and parcel of something that’s sometime useful, e.g., TinyMCE will also get rid of unmatched HTML closing tags, like /div, when you paste in and edit stuff.)
This is apparently a “known” problem. Presumably it’s somewhere out there as a request for WP development, but in the meantime the community has come up with a number of ways to get around the problem (besides not hopping over to the Visual tab, ever, when editing with iframes). In most cases it’s through plug-ins that add various shortcodes, or various tricks using custom fields, or …
Well, that just strikes me as silly (and planned obsolescence if those plug-ins fail to be updated).
Sure, YouTube for the moment still has an option to use the old object code, but I kind of like the idea of including an iframe instead. YouTube is pushing the iframe solution as their preferred way of embedding video into websites. This lets you utilize their new enhanced player, which works better between HTML5 and Flash and so forth (including on non-Flashy Apple products).
So with a bit more digging, I found a more elegant solution in the TSL iframe unfilter plugin, which essentially just tells the TinyMCE to not filter out iframe and its elements. Woot!
Plus I updated the plug-in per this post to keep it from conflicting with other unfilter plugins (which I don’t have, but which makes perfect sense).
So, anyway … for those who have any idea of what I’m talking about, hope this was of value and/or interest.
In the aftermath of the big gun control post commentfest, I’ve changed the configuration at DDtB to use flat instead of threaded comments. I found (a) it too easy for new comments to go unseen if they were made in reply to something in the middle of a post, (b) the REPLY link was going away after you got in a few levels, which caused problems, and (c) I have a larger-print narrow-column format that didn’t lend itself well to that kind of threading.
This has really not been a problem before — most of the conversations here have been single-threaded or fairly linear. But this case showed a problem. So now all comments will go in sequentially.
If you are commenting on a post here and it might not be obvious to whom you are responding, the standard Internet protocol for such things is mentioning the poster name with an @ in front if it, like so: “@BD: Are you out of your freaking gourd?” I also number my comments; you can also reference back to comments that way.
Again, I don’t see a huge amount of this kind of thing coming up — we don’t have that many lengthy and complex discussions here. But in case we do, I think this will work a bit better.
Actually, this is more of a test post than anything else, to see if the Redirection problem has been resolved. But, in the meantime …
Well, all of the gifts that have arrived have been wrapped. This afternoon we prep for the Big Christmas Eve Dinner, and this evening indulge in same. The Great Christmas Triangle Route for tomorrow is mapped out — Christmas morning here at the Ks, early afternoon at my folks’, dinner at my brother’s, dessert at the brother-in-law’s in-laws. Thus wraps up our first week here.
Not sure what next week holds. I’d like to get some more of our pictures uploaded and edited (I did a block of them earlier this week, but haven’t gotten back to it since). There’s serious talk about hitting the Getty Museum Villa in Malibu; with Katherine on a Greek Mythology kick, we thought she might have greater appreciation for it. We have a get-together planned later in the week at Jim & Di’s house, and there are some vague plans around New Year’s Eve brewing that may or may not include a Demolition Derby.
Whew!
Anyway, let’s see if the blog is still broken …
My “Celebrating in Style” post has taken over my front page (if you go to Home, it pulls up that post instead). Let’s see if posting something else breaks that brokenness.
UPDATE: Evidently not. All references to https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/ (with or without index.html or index.php) are sent to https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2010/12/23/celebrating-in-style.html instead. Can’t figure out why, though.
UPDATE: Okay, somehow the Redirection plug-in identified /blog/ as a modified post going to /blog/2010/12/23/celebrating-in-style … no idea why. I deleted the entry, and everything seems okay.
I’ve been using Twitter Tools for quite some time to daily archive my Twitter feed to this blog (which, reviewing the last year, is how I handled most stuff that was personal in nature). That’s worked out pretty well, aside from TT’s tendency to sometimes be a little … enthusiastic in posting an archive (“I liked this post so much, I think I’ll do it five more times!”).
One thing I’ve disliked about the process, though, is that it brings over all the URL-shortened bit.ly links from Twitter (I use bit.ly in general, though the dislike would be true for pretty much any URL shortener) as-is. So if I link to something and it translates out to http://bit.ly/xYz123, that’s the link that shows up in the archive. So as long as bit.ly is around, all will be well, right?
I really hate using URL shorteners for archival purposes, as they serve as a weak link; if bit.ly were to go out of business today — do you know their business model and financial health? — it seems like half the Internet would suffer from bit rot. Heck, I’m uncomfortable that a lot of the links through Unblogged Bits come across as Google proxies, let alone the ones in the Tweets are bit.ly proxies.
Also, they’re a minor security hazard — unless you are using a tool or browser plug-in that will translate them for you, you really don’t know if you’re going someplace legit or http://ihaveinfectedyourmachine.now/trojan.php.
Kelson Vibber recently put together a TT add-on, Twitter Tools NiceLinks. This add-on translates bit.ly links into a link that gives you the underlying URL, displayed with the page title as the link text. E.g., it changes …
Check out this site: http://bit.ly/9MhKVv
… into this …
Check out this site: Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning
Nice. I’ve been using this at Blog of Heroes for the last month (to the extent that I’ve been posting anything over there, ahem, yes, I know) and I think it’s worked well.
I’ve implemented here, too, with a modification (yes, I modified the PHP myself, woo-hoo): rather than giving the page title or site name as the link text (which sometimes can be very long and ugly and textually inappropriate), I just have it generating the nice, compact word “Link” as the link text over the URL. The page/site title show up as a title attribute for the link; hover the mouse over one and see. And the URL for the link shows up down in the status line of your browser.
It seems to have run fine last night. And, regardless of what’s being used as the page title, I’m glad to have the underlying bit.ly take out of the picture. I’ll probably port the modification over to BoH when I next remember to do it.
And that’s probably more info than you wanted first thing in the morning.
So I’ve been struggling of late to keep up the “Recently Read” thang in the sidebar. Because what’s the point of reading something if you can’t show it off to people.
I was previously using a plug-in called “AVH Amazon” to show stuff I’d recently read by building an Amazon wish list of same and then using that plug-in to display it. Alas, Amazon recently changed their wish list API so that AVH Amazon (and a number of similar tools) don’t work. No idea why, unless it was to draw people toward using the official Amazon tools for same.
Yes, there are official Amazon widgets for wish lists (and others), but, honestly, they’re just damned fugly. You’d think Amazon would be jumping at the chance toward flexibility and customizability of stuff that points people back to their site to buy items … but, sadly, no.
After a lot of trying out off various solutions, here’s what I’m currently using for the Recently Read items in the sidebar.
So that’s what I currently have going in my sidebar. The only awkwardness of it is that I imported my old “Recently” Amazon wishlist and, because the plug-in is set to look at the most recently entered, that means the most recently read stuff is not actually showing. That will, in theory, change over time.
I noticed Les had some quicktags for formatting comments in his blog, so, inquiring, I got a pointer to the Comment Form Quicktags plugin. As this is a feature I had in the old MT version of my blog, and have had occasional requests for it back (waves at Avo), I wanted to oblige.
Unfortunately, it’s messing up the formatting of the comments form a bit — rendering the text far smaller than it ought to be. It’s not clear why — the details seem lost in the bowels of the Javascript. The same problem occurs with the similar MarcTV Comment Quicktags plugin. Since it doesn’t happen on Les’ blog, I assume it’s a bad drug interaction with the Thesis theme.
Anyway, I’m going to leave it active for the moment, until I figure out what’s going on. It’s useful enough technology that I think it outweighs the problem (which I hope will be shortlived).
We have a fix, apparently, for the Twitter Tools datestamp / timestamp / timezone issue I reported here. Rich Weingartner on the Crowd Favorite forum:
I seem to have found the fix for this, and another tweak I make to Twitter Tools to use it, since sometimes my digest would post at the correct time but get the wrong date in the title of the post. Here are the two tweaks I make.
These are both in twitter-tools.php in the function do_digest_post.
1) after the “if (!$start || !$end) return false;” line I added:
//RDW Set default timezone to see if it posts correctly
date_default_timezone_set(‘America/Detroit’);Now I hardcoded my timezone I am using, so you’ll have to change it to your timezone PHP string. Ideally this would pick up the timezone set for WordPress, but I didn’t take time to figure out how to do that. What happens is that when the date function is used, if it can’t find a timezone setting to convert the date/time to a local time, it uses GMT.
2) This fix is for when the date in the digest post title would be a day off as well. Which would happen when the post would get added to the system the day after, even though the post time and correct tweets would be in the post.
A little farther down in the function, there is a line that says:
‘post_title’ => $wpdb->escape(sprintf($title, date(‘Y-m-d’))),
I changed this to:
‘post_title’ => $wpdb->escape(sprintf($title, date(‘Y-m-d’, $end))),basically adding the $end to the date function, so that it uses the end date of the digest time frame instead of the current date.
I incorporated this change into my twitter-tools.php (changing the time zone to “America/Denver”), and my Twitter digest last night worked perfectly. Thanks, Rich.
(I copied the whole of the above in here in case the forum post goes away.)
Now let’s hope the fix gets incorporated into future versions of Twitter Tools, so I don’t have to recreate it each time there’s an update.
Now, will this also apply to the similar problem I’ve been having with Digest Post for Google Reader? When I get a chance, I’ll see.
UPDATE: I added in the date_default_timezone_set line in the digest-post.php, at the top of the post_digest function. That seems to have worked!
I finally (re)implemented a graphical logo here at DDtB. It’s using the Droid font (which I had and used as a logo in the past, long before I ever had a Droid phone, so don’t read too much into it; sometimes a typeface is just a typeface).
Nothing terribly exciting, I’m sure. Just a post for the record.
So I’m having a couple of odd problems here at the blog …
I have two different widgets that post content here from elsewhere. One is the WordPress “Twitter Tools” plugin, which will post a daily digest of my various Tweets. The other is Digest Post for Google Reader, which generates the Unblogged Bits from my Google Reader shares.
Here’s part of the problem: my blog sits in the Mountain time zone (GMT-7, or GMT-6 during Daylight Saving Time). My blog’s servers sit in Eastern time (GMT-5/4).
For some functions, WordPress pays attention to local time (there’s a setting for it an everything). For some functions, though, it looks at the server time. This sometimes causes a bit of hilarity, e.g., at the beginning of August my Twitter Tools digest would close itself off at 9:30pm MDT (when I told it to), but would queue the post to publish at 11:30pm MDT (because 9:30pm MDT = 11:30pm EDT, where the server is). If I wanted a Twitter digest for the day, that’s as close as I could do it, and any Tweets I made after 9:30 wouldn’t show up until the following night.
Notice I said, “at the beginning of August.” As far as I can tell, as of 7 August, something changed on the server end of things, so that now the server time reflects GMT (or UTC). Which means it’s 6 hours off at the moment here in Denver. So Twitter Tools cuts off the nightly Twitter digest at 9:30pm MDT as instructed, but sets up the post to fire off at 3:00am MDT the following day, 6 hours later, complete with the next day’s date stamp.
This is irksome.
I have an inquiry in at the Twitter Tools support forum to see if there’s a way to fix this (the system should look at the time that WordPress recognizes, not what the server says). I seem to also recall there’s a way to tweak a PHP module to use a particular time zone. And I need to poke on the WordPress site to see if there’s a way recommended there to resolve this.
In the meantime, sorry if it sometimes seems like things have egregiously offset time or datestamps. It’s not my intent. Really. I seem to have come unstuck in time …
We were already in color here, but I grew up with TV shows announcing that Thrilling and Exciting Difference, so it’s sort of second nature to me.
Yes, we’re at WP 3.0.1 now, upgraded from 2.8.5 with close to zero pain. I could claim that I was just biding my time until a version of WordPress that didn’t end in .0.0 came out … but the fact is I’ve just been lazy.
I’ve now gotten all of my WP blogs upgraded today except WIST (which has actual core files edited on it to rearrange how posts and RSS feeds are produced). That may or may not happen today, but …
If something seems to break here, please let me know.
Well, not that serious — but enough so that I’ve …
(The last worked a lot better once I realized that I had created a “podcasts” directory to store them, and then was creating a WP page called “podcasts” — which, not surprisingly, threw a cryptic but quite justifiable error when I’d try to then go to that page. Stupid, stupid rat creature …)
Anyway, now that I have gone to all this effort, we’ll probably never record another one again (that’s how these mad schemes of mine usually go), but I’ll keep my fingers crossed and we’ll see. At the very least, it will be easy to go back and listen to them when I’m sitting in my rocking chair during my approaching dotage.
… but, unfortunately, a technical gaffe meant that the Second Stupid Evil Bastard Podcast vanished into the aether / bit bucket.
Which doesn’t mean that we didn’t have fun. Chatting with Les about Doctor Who, the Catholic Church scandal, South Park, Sarah Palin, and whatever else came into our heads over the course of an hour was a blast, the contemporary equivalent of a faboo college bull session, stimulating and intoxicating and just damned enjoyable.
My biggest regret is that everyone else missed it.
We’re going to give it another go next weekend, but we probably won’t (re)cover the same items. I look forward to it.
