As you can see, we've made a few changes to the blog's look. We're also making changes to the blog's roster, adding some new folks and looking for more.
Details inside... including a comment laying out our site's hosting requirements, costs, etc. because our readers asked.
Winds' Roster
- Regular commenter Praktike has been given a Winds posting account.
- The Discarded Lies team has also been given a Winds posting account.
- We're adding briefing teams in order to make our Winds of War and Iraq Report features twice-weekly affairs. They will now run every Monday and every Thursday.
We're also looking to add more bloggers. Specifically...
- Glenn Halpern can no longer do the monthly Winds of Discovery round-ups of scientific discovery, inventions and policy (see example).
- We're looking to add a Military Transformation Uplink briefing covering new the equipment & technology, organizational changes, and tactical/doctrinal changes being driven by military transformation in the U.S. military - and beyond. This will take a solid grounding in military matters, and volunteering duos or even a team would be fine.
Winds' Design
You'll notice that I've declared defeat and reverted the typeface to its former status. Georgia didn't look good at the "x-small" size in use on our site, and clashed with the sans-serif fonts when the two were mixed.
Per suggestions last time, I have removed the light green background from the blog-posts and increased line spacing to 1.5.
I'm now going to leave the fonts, colors, etc. in the hands of whomever we work with on our blog's redesign, which will be from the banner on down. The feedback we got earlier will be forwarded to whomever we recruit for this task (we're looking).
As our hosting costs are rising, I'm also considering blogads. Very reluctantly, I might add, but I am considering them.
Congratulations, Praktike!
Joe Katzman: "As our hosting costs are rising, I'm also considering blogads. Very reluctantly, I might add, but I am considering them."
OK, if you do that, could you please put them on the same sidebar with all your other information, even if you have to push site information way, way down to do it. What I hope you won't do is have a left and a right column of necessarily fixed widths, and a center column for posts and comments that gets whatever space is left over from the important stuff. At very low resolutions (and much as I love your site I love my eyes more), such blogs become very unpleasant to read. You can wind up reading indented comments with the words practically single file, one a line.
If Blogads is what it takes to keep up the site, that's what it takes. Don't worry about it.
Good choice making praktike part of the team.
I'd like to nominate Phil Bowermeister to replace Glenn Halpern, if he's willing to do it.
As for the blogads, before you resort to that perhaps we should see what kinds of funds we can drum up from the locals here. How much does this place typically cost per month?
The blog area is much easier for me to read, now. Thank you!
Good choices and options for more content.
I would not object to blog ads. What you're doing is premium quality, adds a lot to my day, and is not free. Please avoid any that would result in pop-ups or eye-blasters, though.
Yippee-ky-yea!!! S'about time, praktike.
You've been one of my favorites since I came here! :)
OT: (Sorry)
A few weeks ago I challenged Joe to come up with an example of where Juan Cole (effectively) supported the cause of radical Islamists. Joe denied that he had ever made a claim that would warrant this challenge- that instead he was referring to other MidEast profs (apparently when spoke of leftist academia, he meant to place Cole outside of the "snakepit," or maybe perhaps just on the edge?). Anyways, while surfing this morning I stumbled over this ugly little addendum at Informed Comment:
The Iraqi killer of Reserve Navy Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman has been brought to justice in an Iraqi court. Although he has since changed his story, he at one point admitted to killing Jones-Huffman with a bullet through the back of the neck while the latter was stuck in traffic in downtown Hilla. The assassin said that he felt that Jones-Huffman "looked Jewish." The fruits of hatred sowed in the Middle East by aggressive and expansionist Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza against the Palestinians and in south Lebanon against Shiites continue to be harvested by Americans.
I believe this would be the example that would answer my own challenge to Joe. So, I'm going to retract it.
I would also like to point out that Joe's approach to the WOT fails to deal with the entiritey of Cole's statement. Because Joe, like many hawks, fails to consider a utilitarian ethic in his approach to the WOT, he cannot examine the true, yet ammoral aspect of Cole's arguement: that our involvment with Israel will inevitably lead to more conflict with the Arab world (and more US deaths), due to their current antisemetic attitudes. To clarify, the immoral portion of Cole's arguement is the (unstated) claim that Israel is more responsible for Lt. Jones-Huffman's death than the Iraqi, or the antisemetic mentality.
Yet we know we are going into a world where hatred thrives-- where we will innevitably deal with immoral actors. From a purely utilitarian perspective, when we facilitate the actions of those actors or even aggrevate them-- we are in part responsible for the deaths they may inflict. Recently Praktike mentioned that a good reason not to bomb Iran (aside from the chance we don't end their nuclear ambitions outright) was that it would inevitably lead to a much greater insurgency in Iraq, which would cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis.
Surely, the United States would not be solely responsible for these deaths, but Praktike's comment shows not only his respect for the Iraqi people, but a respect for the consequences just or unjust of our actions. I believe any serious approach to the WOT, will incorporate some level of utilitarian analysis. Much of the current failure in the WOT is the result of a failure of responsibility, intrinsic to the hostility towards utility.
It looks good. By all means do blogads. That's the way things will go. If possible, applying the same changes to the comments would be appreciated, especially the leading.
David,
I have the same queasy feeling about a 3-column layout, for the same reasons.
As for costs running the site...
Monthly bandwidth thus far has been up to 65 GB, ands our storage needs are around 1.5-2.0 GB. The traffic growth we expect and hope for by June 2005 would probably spike bandwidth to 75-90 GB.
That is, alas, way outside most standard hosting plans - and with our site's size, we also have to be wary of people who offer "deals" and then make it up by throttling CPUs so the server is sloooow for everyone, we end up having trouble rebuilding etc., and sometimes the server crashes and we get blamed because of our size.
We're looking at a couple of options that would keep our hosting costs in the $40/month range (TextDrive, JaguarPC... anyone have experience with them?), but if those fail we end up spiking to $75-150 per month on Pair or Hosting Matters and that will hurt.
We also expect the site appearance upgrade to cost something, probably another couple hundred right there barring exceptional circumstances.
Engineer-Poet might be an interesting choice, if he'd blog often enough. Good idea with Praktike.
I'd not mind Blogads. TANSTAAFL.
The font works for me.
Joe, FWIW the web host I'm using for my blog is Lunarpages. Their “Voyager” plan might accommodate WoC: 1.5GB storage, 80GB monthly bandwidth = $23. Neither I (nor the clients that I've migrated to Lunarpages) have had a smidge of problem.
I love all you guys. I promise my posts will be filled with rhetorical gumdrops and lollipops for everyone.
"Love. luck & lollipops!"
-- Pinky & the Brain
Of course, you have to be a bit careful with that close...
Just a small suggestion:
Can you move the recent comments section up to where it immediately follows the recent entries section? That would save me a bunch of scrolling!
As a dial up operator I like the way it is coming up and no problems so far. Blogads seem to be a mark that your blog is more than just a rant so I'd do it as a practical matter. Two, it makes you MSM whether you like it or not. Nor does it change the editorial aspect. Look at the WSJ. For a editorial page I vehemently disagree w/ its writers are among the best in the business.
Congrats, praktike! It's definitely well-deserved.
While I still prefer Georgia, I've never minded the font the way it was. But I'll repeat my request for a full-post RSS feed. Pretty please?
Fling,
Movable Type isn't built to do that, unfortunately. So, we get the limited RSS feed it gives us.
The way MT outputs RSS information would also give us a problem with full-post RSS. Because the RSS info is all part of the page (just invisible to browsers), doing full text RSS would nearly double our bandwidth requirements. Which are already an issue.
Put that together, and the bottom line is the I don't see it as technically possible or (if it was possible) economically a good idea from our side of the table. We try to make the summaries as clear as possible so people using RSS can tell what they'd be interested in, but right now that seems to be all we can do.
Sorry.
Oh, okay. Just thought I'd ask.
The XML template will do full-post when slightly modified (see manual for syntax) and is not embedded in the html like RDF. I do both, giving the user a choice; index.rdf is just a taste and is embedded in index.html; index.xml is full post including images but only the posts, not the other stuff on the page so it's still smaller than a page load. They'll be able to avoid your blogads but still see all the content.
Back40, thanks for the clarification. We'll look that up. Meanwhile, we have a move to prepare for... sigh.
Didn't I tell you Hosting Matters in the beginning? Annette is a total goddess, and worth every penny! :)