…from the recent (relative) dropoff in my blogging frequency (and, perhaps more noticably, the odd hours* at which I’ve been blogging), we’re getting into the heart of “crunch time” here. Today is the last day of classes (though I’ve been done since Thursday), tomorrow and Thursday are “stop days,” and exams start Friday (my first is Saturday, not counting the take-home final that’s sitting in my bag right now; I also have in-class finals next Tuesday and Friday). For those keeping score at home, I’m in the bargaining phase right now; I expect the depression phase to set in tomorrow or Thursday, followed by the acceptance phase sometime on Friday. :) But at the moment, I’m not even really thinking about exams, as one of my directed-reading papers was due yesterday, and the other (the Electoral College one) is due today at 5:00 PM — that’s less than 12 hours away, and I still have lots of changes to make, and citations to fix… eek! Anyway, the point is, I’m a wee bit busy, and blogging will be light-to-nonexistent today until the Sabres game this evening. In the mean time, talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: the interstate-compact-based “National Popular Vote” plan is neither “national” nor a “popular vote.” Discuss. :)

*I was awake for approximately 33 consecutive hours Sunday and yesterday, then went to sleep around 4:00 PM yesterday, woke up at 1:30 this morning, and am now at the law library — I got here at around 4:55 AM — surrounded by my research materials (and a big mug of coffee).

I had to laugh at the current top search-engine phrases that are leading people to my site:

Heh. Some of these people may want to check out my Babes, Boobs & Sex category. :) Though I’m afraid the ones looking for “alyssa milano nude” will be disappointed regardless.

Scott e-mailed me this morning asking about the possibility of setting up a Yahoo Fantasy Baseball league for my blog readers. I’ve never done fantasy baseball before, but it seems like it might be fun. And the deadline to get in is eight days from now, so we still have time. So I just thought I’d try to get a sense of reader interest… would you join such a thing? And would anyone like to volunteer to manage the league, since I don’t really know what I’m doing? :)

When the ninth post after this one (not including this one) appears on my homepage, the blog will officially have 1,000 pages. Heh.

Five years ago today, at this very hour, I blogged the fateful words: “This is a test.”

Okay, maybe the words themselves weren’t so fateful. But that was my first-ever blog post, and it’s hard to believe it’s been half a decade. Yet here we are, on my fifth blogaversary.

Excessive amounts of navel-gazing — and a nifty colorful chart! — after the jump.

(more…)

I know when I say “blogging will be light,” I usually don’t stick to it… but I really, really need to get some serious work done today on my Electoral College paper, which is due next week (and which appears likely to be quite long, considering I’m currently on Page 11, but haven’t even finished part “I” on my outline, which has “VI” parts). So I don’t expect I’ll be blogging or commenting much today.

Just a reminder, though: the women’s Final Four is tonight, and the pool ramifications are as follows: if LSU and UNC win, it’s Daniel Port vs. Jennifer Elam. If LSU and Tennessee win, it’s Brian Dupuis vs. Scott Fort. If Rutgers and UNC win, it’s Rick Boeckler vs. Jennifer Elam. If Rutgers and Tennessee win, it’s Josh Krause vs. Scott Fort.

Oh, and for those of you who were just dying to know who won the WNIT (anyone? anyone? Bueller?)… ’twas Wyoming, by a score of 72-56 over Wisconsin in a battle of UWs. The Cowboys’ relatively easy title-game victory followed a triple-overtime semifinal win over defending champ Kansas State.

One of my site’s two primary domain names, IrishTrojan.com, expired today. I never received any notice that this was about to occur because my registrar, WorldWebHosters, still had my old USC e-mail address. And I didn’t notice it immediately because I typically access the site at BrendanLoy.com, not IrishTrojan.com. So when somebody e-mailed me this morning saying my site had been “hijacked,” and somebody else told me at school this afternoon that the blog had been “down all day,” I didn’t know what they were talking about. It wasn’t until I read Terry’s comment that I figured out what was going on. Visitors who tried to access the site at IrishTrojan.com were greeted by this page:

If you click on the image and view the larger version, you can see the various ads at left, including one for Trojan condoms. Heh. Anyway, I just renewed IrishTrojan.com (and BrendanLoy.com as well, since it was set to expire in June), so everything should be hunky-dory again shortly. I apologize for any inconvenience and/or confusion.

I realize we’re getting to that point where almost everything on the homepage at any given time is college basketball-related. It’s a reflection of my mental state at the moment. :) What do you want… Selection Sunday is only a week away!! Anyway, for those of you who don’t care about hoops, this is just a friendly reminder that I created the Non-Sports Page specifically for you. Click it, use it, love it. (The link is also in the left sidebar, so you can find it there anytime.)

Also, I just created the Non-Sports Comments Page, which may be helpful for keeping up with the commentary on threads that get buried by the latest basketball updates.

[UPDATE: Bumped to top, from 7:13 PM. -ed.]

Some of you who’ve tried out the Non-Sports Page may have noticed that the “(more…)” links weren’t working there, so long posts annoyingly appeared “above the jump” in their entirety. This obviously decreased the utility of the page as an alternate homepage for basketball-weary visitors in the coming weeks.

Well, that problem is now solved. With the help of the WordPress support forum, I figured out that I needed to insert the command <?php $more = 0; ?> underneath my custom select query. Problem solved! And to prove it, I’ll insert a “jump” here. If you look at this post on the Non-Sports Page, you can see it there, too!

(more…)

Briandot sends in the following report via e-mail:

I’ve been having a hell of a time trying to read irishtrojan lately. I can only seem to see it one out of every, say, five or six times. It’s incredibly slow and I often get a 503 error. Anything up?

I’m not having any such problems, and I haven’t received any other complaints (aside from the comment error that I fixed yesterday), but… is anyone else having similar problems to what Briandot is reporting? Please leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail (bloy[at]nd.edu) if so. Thanks!

Here’s something that I think will come in very handy for regular readers: a page containing all recent comments, regardless of what post they’re on.

You may remember I had something similar when the blog was on MovableType; I’ve only just now figured out how to implement it on WordPress. But this version is better than the MovebleType version, because just like the blog itself, it’s paginated. So, if you’ve fallen behind in your comment-reading and you want to catch up, you can go to Page 2, Page 3, etc. … all the way back to Page 4,040 (and counting!) if you like. Though I doubt anyone will be “catching up” quite that much. :)

Also, new and improved and now fully functional: The Non-Sports Page. This will come in very handy, I think, for my non-basketball-fan readers as the NCAA Tournament draws ever closer, and the homepage becomes increasingly dominated by hoops (March Madness being the most intense of the “Many Seasons of Brendan“).

The Non-Sports Page, too, is paginated, just like the rest of the blog. And unlike the previous incarnation, this version shows the 15 most recent non-sports posts, regardless of the percentage of recent posts that are sports-related. (Previously, the Non-Sports Page displayed however many non-sports posts were among the 50 most recent overall posts. This presented the likelihood of problems during the NCAA Tournament, when literally 47 or 48 of my most recent 50 posts at any given time might be sports-related… so you’d potentially have only 2 or 3 posts, if that, appearing per page in the Non-Sports pages.)

A few notes on what constitutes a “non-sports” post. It’s all based on categories. Any post that appears in my “Sports” category, or any subcategory thereof (”College Football,” “NCAA Basketball & Pools,” etc.), is automatically excluded from the Non-Sports Page, regardless of whether it appears in other categories as well. This will occasionally produce some “false positives,” i.e., some posts that are not primarily sports-related will be excluded from the Non-Sports Page anyway, because in addition to their primary topic(s), they have a sports-related angle and are categorized accordingly. But I’ll try to categorize my posts in such a way as to keep that to a minimum.

I’ve also devised a way to categorize my sports-related cell-phone posts in “Sports” as well as “Mobile Blog (Moblog),” so as to keep them off the Non-Sports Page as well. But that’s a work-in-progress, so some cell-phone posts about sports may inadvertantly appear on the Non-Sports Page. In fact, if you go back through the archives, a huge percentage of such posts in the past will appear on the Non-Sports Page — I’m really only trying to address the problem with respect to future posts.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering how I was able to create these pages, it was all thanks to custom SELECT queries to the MySQL database. I was going to provide more technical details after the jump, lest someone come googling around someday wondering how to do something similar, but unfortunately, I’m having trouble getting <pre> or <code> tags to work, and I don’t have the time or energy to troubleshoot that right now; I’ve already spent far too much time troubleshooting a wide variety of problems that stood in the way of getting these new pages to work. :) But maybe I’ll post something more about the technical side at a later date.

Anyway, enjoy! I’ll add links to the new pages in the sidebar shortly.

On a normal Saturday with a college-basketball schedule like this, I’d probably sit on the couch much of the day watching — and blogging about — hoops. With rivalry games like Florida-Kentucky and Kansas-Missouri, an intriguing interconference battle in UCLA @ West Virginia, a crucial WCC tilt between St. Mary’s and Gonzaga, a Creighton @ Southern Illinois game that will probably decide the Missouri Valley Conference regular-season championship, and a bunch of other crucial mid-major and low-major showdowns, there’s certainly plenty to watch. (The Bluejays-Salukis game will probably also determine whether #21 SIU is still ranked when they visit Butler next weekend.)

But this isn’t a normal Saturday. It’s “Architecture Tour” Saturday. So instead of sitting on the couch, Becky and I will be in Chicago, sampling the “architecture” of a succession of Lincoln Park/Wrigleyville-area pubs. (The “Architecture Tour” is the politically correct name for the 3rd annual NDLS Chicago Pub Crawl.)

Of potential interest to those who are also coming along on the Pub Crawl, here is a Google Maps version of the whole itinerary, with labels.

So yeah, that’s today. And then on Sunday, Becky and I are going to the Shedd Aquarium. So blogging will be light — and primarily mobile — this weekend.

In other news, the blog upgrade to WordPress 2.1 appears to have succeeded (after a few minor glitches). Please let me know if you run into any problems. Apropos of which, the upgrade to WP 2.1 means I can finally debut The Non-Sports Page! It’s a work in progress, but even so, I’m guessing my non-sports-fan readers will be very pleased to know this option now exists. :) Once I get it perfected, I’ll add sidebar links and such.

Also… this one is probably only of interest to me, but if you’ve ever had the burning desire to visit BrendanLoy.com from a primitive cell phone that can’t load the full homepage… now you can! Behold the stripped-down version of my homepage, displaying 5 posts at a time.

All right, I’m off to bed. Architecture, here we come!

Around 10pm EST tonight, I’ll be upgrading my blog to WordPress 2.1. (My testing indicates that, as Doug suggested, doing incremental upgrades — from 1.5.2 to 2.0 to 2.0.7 to 2.1 — solves the problems I was having.)

The site will be offline for a while, and any comments left after 10:00 may be lost. I apologize for the inconvenience. I’ll post an update when the upgrade is complete.

UPDATE, 11:15 PM: The upgrade is complete. We’re back online, WordPress 2.1 is installed, and so far — knock on wood — everything seems to be working fine. Woohoo!

(more…)

In the wee hours of this morning, I attempted to upgrade my blog from WordPress 1.5.2 to WordPress 2.1. In fact, I did upgrade it, but I’ve now reverted to my pre-upgrade backups (while maintaining the upgraded version in a hidden location on the server) because of several problems that I had with version 2.1. I’m going to post about those problems in the WordPress support forums, but I thought I’d mention them here too, in case anyone has similar problems and googles around to see if others have experienced the same thing. Details after the jump.

(more…)

My dad says his comments are disappearing. The problem may just be an issue with my parents’ computer, but in light of recent events with the server, I want to be sure. So if anyone’s having any sort of technical problem with the blog, please let me know.

UPDATE: I figured out what was causing the problem. It was the same thing that caused the same problem back in April: a plugin called lr2Spam, which “prevents blind [comment] posting by adding a dynamic hidden field to the form and validating that field when posted.” I forgot that it had caused problems for older browsers, so last night, in the course of tinkering with the blog, I re-activated it. But I can live without it, whereas I can’t live without my dad’s sometimes incomprehensible but always entertaining comments. :) So I’ve, uh, re-de-activated it.