After extensive research and out and out
begging my fellow Kossacks and Kossovarians for advice, I feel I have distilled Cheers and Jeers down to it's
one essential element-
Your Puppy Pic of the Day
This is my dog Frenchy. Actually it's not Frenchy, it's just a thumbnail I stole from Google Images. The Papillon Club of America has many more pictures. Frenchy is an AKC Papillon, but he's much more disreputable than this picture makes him seem. He's the kind of dog who sits around the cafe all day in his tight pants, striped shirt, and beret smoking Gaulois and drinking Absinthe until the 2 liter soda bottles look attractive.
I frequently threaten to strap him to a broom handle and mop the floor with him, but I would never do that. Too much trouble getting rid of the wet dog smell.
One of the things I frequently do is talk about, and by about I mean meta, and by meta I mean about how to push buttons and not about why someone pushed that one of yours that says troll.
There are plenty of other things to whine about.
One recent change that I'm sure will interest the C&J audience is the new rules about image posting.
I had thought to summarize them, but like so much about this site they are in flux. This is why you have not yet seen "Marian the Librarian" (tagging), "So Tell Me What You Really Think" (new comments), and "Searchin' for Celine" (new search). It isn't science if you can't duplicate the results.
More about that later. For now let's concentrate on images. If you were not around this weekend you may have missed these diaries-
I don't generally use images myself, not because I can't, but because I remember too well what it is like to use dialup.
For this diary I went out and got myself a brand new Flickr account. Why Flickr? It's part of Yahoo which I already use for my anonymous email, and it's free and I am much cheaper than you think. My picture which is not Frenchy is exactly 4925 bytes. I have a whole month's worth of bandwidth available for the next 2 days and I'm pretty sure this diary will be fairly heavily viewed. It seems like a good experiment to me, but remember- it's not science if you can't reproduce the results. Am I pushing your buttons yet?
But that's not the only thing to talk about. Let's start handing out some Meta Cheers and Jeers.
Cheers: To Markos. At the beginning of 2005 3 things happened that changed my life, and by changed I mean gave me a reason to live. First I got broadband, which by itself wasn't much of a big whoop de doo. I did go wild for a time downloading abandonware (2 sites I highly recommend are Home of the Underdogs and Abandonia).
The second was the Terri Schiavo custody case. I can't tell you how depressed I was to find out that 62,040,610 United States citizens could vote for, not just a moron (I knew that in 2000), but a war criminal. Strong language?
Text of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate
March 18, 2003
Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)
Consistent with section 3(b) of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (Public Law 107-243), and based on information available to me, including that in the enclosed document, I determine that:
(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor (B) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Sincerely,
GEORGE W. BUSH
Whitehouse.gov
Press Conference by the President
August 21, 2006
Q What did Iraq have to do with that?
THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?
Q The attack on the World Trade Center?
THE PRESIDENT: Nothing.
Whitehouse.gov
The Terri Schiavo custody case was the jump the shark moment for this administration. This President who couldn't be bothered to pay attention to a CIA report titled
"Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." because he was
ON VACATION was willing to interrupt his precious vacation time to pander to the most rabid revolutionary reactionary part of his base by prolonging the agony of a poor brain dead woman.
That woke people up a little bit I think, the polls have declined steadily since.
The third thing that changed my life was Daily Kos of course. While I occasionaly use it to rant and rave it's greatest utility to me is as a community of like minded people with whom I can be emotionally honest and my fictional self.
I have all the games I need now. Terri lives only in the memory of those who love her. The Daily Kos is here every day for me, and for you too.
I can never thank you enough Mr. Moulitsas, sir.
Cheers: To ct. You have a real name and a real life, sometimes very real; I'm just more comfortable using your handle because that's the way I like to be treated. No offense to those who watch the store in your absence, but there is a difference. They also serve who stand and wait for the computer to finish so they can get on to the next step. Damn machines, why won't they do what you want instead of what you tell them?
Cheers: To peeder. You're getting a lot of flack right now about the image thing, but 'New Comments' are really working out, at least for me. I hardly ever invoke legacy comments anymore (because I'm lazy and hate typing that
). Now that you can use double quotes and foreign characters in subjects there's hardly anything to talk about in "So Tell Me What You Really Think". You might see it real soon if I wasn't quite so lazy.
Cheers: To jotter. Did you ever notice all the really cool handles are lowercase only? jotter not only does that "High Impact Diary" thing but he is also the guy who implemented the 'New Search' engine. Now I don't have to wait nearly as long for "Found 0 results, displaying . Search time , run time . Error! err: no results". If you ask though, he's very good at explaining how you screwed up your search terms and he hardly ever laughs at us.
Meta Jeers:
Wherein I piss off everybody I just sucked up to.
I have two dogs in this hunt- one big dog and one little yappy dog who sits around in the cafe all day and... oh wait, you've already met Frenchy.
This is my big dog. Please click on it.
That is the prettiest sight on the internet.
All your stories with the above the fold intro part visible so I can really make up my mind about what I want to read. Fifty of them at a time. It's so beautiful it makes me cry (you only think that's snark)
I call it The Magic Bullet and in Speed Reading dKos and this diary and this one too, I explain how to set it up from the old search engine.
Well you can't do that any more, no 'View story summaries' to turn on.
But that's not so bad, you can bookmark my link (call it whatever you want) or type http://www.dailykos.com/search?offset=0&old_count=50&type=diary&topic=§ion=&
string=&sear
ch=Search&count=50&story_view=long&orderby=date where you normally type your URLs. That still works.
What doesn't work any more is that you used to be able to see a whole day's worth of diaries, all 6 or 7 or 8 pages of them, just by hitting that 'Next' button at the bottom. Go back and try it now, I'll wait.
Not so stunning huh? In fact it looks a lot like this, which is just the 'Recent Diary List' one page back. Don't get me wrong, it's still a totally useful way to look at things, just not as, well, pretty.
Now some of you are thinking, "Hey, what if I fuss with that 'offset=0' dohicky. That sometimes jumpstarts the 'Tag' thing when it's stuck". Sorry, I just tried it again.
pyrrho once said- "ek, you're a rabble rouser". I objected I had no rabble to rouse. He replied "No, I'm right. You make your own."
Sigh. I used to be able to go back weeks at a time.
The little dog barks!
As strongly as some people feel about images, others feel about style. Now there are many terribly subversive things you can do with HTML and I totally accept the site's need to protect itself from evil people like me who never pushed a noun and a verb together except to blow something up. What's odd is that some stuff that should conform to the latest CSS specifications doesn't work and some deprecated old HTML does. It hurts my eyes to see people's text run right up against their pictures and I'd love to teach them how to avoid that, but it's old school.
Also like images, allowable HTML is subject to change without notice. Instead of a lot of Bullfrogs you see a lot of funny looking Angle Brackets.
I miss span because it let me duplicate some elements of the user interface. I miss Font-Size because it let me do headlines. Doing without these things is a little like doing without lists and images to me.
Besides I think I've proven I can be just as obnoxious in orange and black.
About Enough Meta don't you think?
No. Just like skippy has 'Blogtopia' and Colbert has 'Truthiness' I hereby lay claim to 'Future Diary Whoring'. 'Future Diary Whoring' is the act of talking about diaries you're going to write 'real soon now' (i.e. in somewhat less than a Freidman, but more than an Olmert). It can build an audience for your next piece of work, so I'm predicting it will soon be all the rage.
Of course if I'm 'Future Diary Pimping' I'm doing exactly the same thing but I'm putting someone else on the performance hot seat. tvb said they would have some info on various image hosts' Terms of Service later today, if they don't I'll see what I can find out. Doggie269 promised a humpday C&J for 9 am tomorrow. Finally dmsilev has updated the Ongoing Diary Series entry in the FAQ, so you can look forward to some of the other things coming up.
Have a Great Day at dKos!
Al Rodgers style, after the poll and the Vent Hole, are some extra added sections I'll link to here (I'm hoping the edits don't screw up the commenting, every diary is a metadiary if I learn from it). The frist (sic) one is a direct link though and I'll just plop it right here-
One Year Ago in Cheers and Jeers there was no Cheers and Jeers, perhaps because Hurricane Katrina was hitting New Orleans, perhaps because it was Monday.
Linky Links
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