Links and Minifeatures 10 02 Tuesday

Admin stuff: Sorry but I had to do away with Trackbacks. I was getting hundreds per day of spam, and hadn't had a real from from outside the site for months.

Redirects of external links are largely complete. The URLs for individual articles on the old host looked like this:

http://www.searchlightcrusade/net/posts/XXXXXXXXXX.shtml, where XXXXXXXXXX is a ten digit numeral.

There are still some w that have probably fallen through the cracks. The problem is that there isn't any efficient way to know until someone hits a 404 error. At this point, actually, until someone hits several 404 errors per page.

The only way they're going to get fixed quickly is with user cooperation. If you encounter one, please email me the URL that didn't redirect. I promise you that I'll not only fix it, I'll email you the updated URL back (or you can also follow the directions on the 404 page).

Trackbacks and comments, you can get off the article page, and comments at least are still here. If you'll get rid of the extraneous stuff down to the format above, the site should re-direct you to the updated URL, unless it's one of the those that have fallen through the cracks thus far. If you're trying the unformatted .html extension for the old host, add the s to make it .shtml, and it should work. Chains are gone, and have been replaced with tag clouds. Categories have been modified a bit, but you should still be able to find them.

If you want to comment, the new software supports several types of communal comment account. For example, the TypeKey community gives you just one logon for every site supporting that protocol (of which this site is one), or you can use Movable Type to create a unique logon for this site only.

I think I'm just about done with the administrative parts of the changeover, except for one project on the sister site. Still need to fix some display html to somehow get rid of the black bar that displays in IE (why does Internet Explorer cause all the problems?), but I might even have time to think about it soon. Please email me about any other issues you encounter.

UPDATE: Sorry if anyone has tried to contact me at work over the past two days. A decision was made, over my objections, to migrate to an apparently cheaper broadband connection, with the result being that we have been completely without the internet for two days, and I don't see any concrete reason to believe that's going to change tomorrow.

I finally came home in disgust. If anyone has emailed me at my office, I apologize for not getting it. To make matters worse, most of my loan pricing information, etcetera, comes via email, so I'm basically dead in the water until my office email is restored. Even five years ago, this wouldn't have been so important, but the way the industry has gone, I'm basically dead in the water.

Carnival of Personal Finance

Peggy Noonan on fear and free speech and discourse with the political opposition. I keep trying to recruit a rational liberal I know, who would argue the other side of most issues. He almost agreed last time I asked him, too. I can name at least two others potential co-authors that I've known for years that I'd like to have participate also.

The truth may lie wholly on one side or the other, but more often it falls somewhere between. How is either side to know unless they're willing to have an honest discussion and examination of the facts with those who disagree. There's a name for what happens when you will only listen to your side of an argument. It's called "groupthink." But just because the name is modern doesn't mean our founders didn't understand it, likely better than we do. The phenomenon runs all through all dealings with unelected rulers.

All sides benefit from transparency, and from having their issues, their beliefs, their arguments, and most importantly, their never questioned assumptions examined by someone who doesn't agree. And you know something? Every so often, somebody persuades someone else to change their mind. When enough people change their minds, what they changed their minds from will no longer be policy, and what they changed their minds to will be the new policy. This is real democracy.

(many folks seem to define democracy as "getting my way." That's not the way it works either.)