8 Ways to Sunday

A bug in the WordPress import script has resulted in some of my old entries appearing twice, even on their own individual entry pages. If you run across any of these while browsing the site, please let me know. I’ll be working to correct the problem over the weekend. Meanwhile, I’ll make sure the WP people know about the problem. They’re in a push to squash bugs for 1.2, so hopefully they can get this addressed before the new release goes out the door.

Update: Problem solved. It turns out that it was my fault. I ran the import script twice (to update the converted blog the second time), and didn’t follow the import script’s instructions regarding user names carefully enough.

A study is underway at the University of North Carolina to measure the political leanings of bloggers based on reader response. The ultimate goal is to develop a software program that can do this automatically. Doesn’t this seem creepy to anyone?

I can see the potential benefits from the content aggregation / portal perspective, but couldn’t we just rely on self-reporting for this rather than having a piece of code running around the web classifying people? What if such a technology were misused by an oppressive political regime, either here in America or abroad, to identify troublesome dissenters. Bloggers have already been arrested in China and Iran for what they publish online. Do we really want to make it easier for this to happen?

(citation: Needlenose)

There have been frequent periods of high server load lately that have slowed this site to a crawl. I apologize to anyone who’s tried to visit and been unable to get through.

This was already an issue, but moving from MT to a dynamic CMS multiplied the problem many times over. I just sent my second support ticket about this to my hosting provider, and I’m considering changing services. Bloghosts looks especially appealing. Any other suggestions?