I hate it how, whenever we have a national tragedy, journos just eat it up. The TV stations make logos for it, and slogans like “Massacre at Virginia Tech” that become ominous jingles as the anchors and announcers repeat them as a story unfolds.

We’re watching Dateline NBC now (for the first time ever), and the exploitation of the V Tech tragedy is enraging. Matt Lauer is just getting too much mileage out of it.

They take every aspect of the story and make it into an entertainment event. They interview grief counselors and find out how that works. They pull out footage of previous shootings. They interview paramedics and enlighten us about their work. It’s all for entertainment and to create viewership for the network.

The other people who infuriate me when we have a tragedy is the “expert” morons who get on the tube saying how this could have easily been prevented. Their hindsight is perfect, and they get to promote themselves as experts every time an unpreventable tragedy happens. There’s a guy on Dateline now talking about how they should have sent in a massive anti-terrorism response team after the first two people were shot. Come on. We’re going to send in the ATF or the army or whomever every time there’s a shooting? Ten thousand people are shot to death each year in this country. We can’t treat each incident like an act of terrorism as this guy is suggesting.

The other thing I hate about the “if only” experts is that they implicitly blame everyone involved. If only the campus police had done something different. If only the email had gone out sooner warning people to stay in lockdown. None of this was foreseeable - who could have known a campus shooting (like the one that happened in Seattle a few weeks ago) would turn into a massacre?

I say, mourn with those who mourn, and stop exploiting them for publicity and our need to know.

If that weren’t enough, they’re now doing a story about a guy who survived the Columbine massacre but lost his sister, Rachel Scott. Emotional aftermath and all that. Ugh. “Soon, even prayer was no match for the terror…”

I just published the alpha edition of the LogoFriendly theme, which you can see in action at WebbleYou.com.

Major features:

• Widget support
• Easy custom banner insertion
• Options page
• Rounded corners

If you like what you see, I will install it free for my hosting customers, or you can install it on your WordPress-powered site. Enjoy!

Thanks to some great work by Christine Davis, author of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for WordPress, tags are back on Radical Congruency. Click the icon that looks like this to view more tag info for each post:

and a panel will slide down to show you the tags and related posts. You can view all tags used on this site here.

Thanks to a tip from d0ngle over at the WordPress support forums, which I finally found today in my Rojo account, the comment error is gone.

It turns out that the version of Scripturizer Remix I was using was causing the error. I’m not sure why, and I don’t know if future versions of Scripturizer will cause the error, but I’ve deactivated it for now and have notified some others who had the same problem.

I’m glad to have my site working properly again.

Yes, Radical Congruency is back up, after being down for about 18 hours (probably the longest ever). I re-imaged the server this site resides on, because it was being unreliable and not serving webpages like a good little LAMP server should.

I am also moving some of my other sites to this server, to make room for clients on a faster server. A new one is on its way, but will take a while to set up. A few of my other sites are down at the moment, but clients should remain unaffected - I’m only moving my sites.

It took so long to get RC back up because, after nearly three years, this site is huge. Thanks to some videos and podcasts, we’ve got about 300MB of files up here, even after they’re zipped. The database was also huge, thanks to SpamKarma logs and other stuff that builds up over time.

I tried to edit my database backup file using Dreamweaver, but it took forever to open or save it. Initially, the file was about 13MB, and took about 15 minutes to open. Editing was fine, but it took another 15 or 20 minutes to save. I got it down to about 6MB, and pasted the database into PHPMyAdmin in little chunks, since it won’t upload a 6MB file.

Anyone know why Dreamweaver is so slow on huge text files, and if there’s a better text editor that’ll handle code without munging the apostrophes and other crucial characters? It doesn’t make much sense to me, because Fireworks handles a 50MB image with no trouble, and my computer is plenty fast. Why should DW choke on text?

BTW, I hope the title of this post reminds everyone to back up your files and databases, in more than one way if possible. I used one method to back up this site, and the file turned out to be unreadable when I tried to use it to restore the site. If you’re relying on a backup, make sure you have a backup backup. It’s always a good idea.

I just upgraded this site to the 2.0 release of WordPress, which was announced earlier today (though it’s been available for about ten days, without fanfare).

Since WP is a PHP-based system that outputs HTML pages using a template system, readers won’t see any differences (unless something breaks). But some nice changes have been made to the admin interface. My favorites:

• You can create a new category while writing a post (Ajaxed)
• “Import” functions have been integrated more (though it seems like something you’d only use once, so why should it be in the menu permanently?)
• More granular user permissions, which I haven’t used yet
• A WYSIWYG text editor for posting (which I promptly disabled)

Let me know if you see any problems around the site. The comment error, unfortunately, remains a thorn in my side. Still working on it - but your comments will still be saved in the meantime, so comment away.

Update: WP2.0 breaks UltimateTagWarrior 2.8.2, which I was using on this site. Fortunately, Christine Davis is awesome and has already updated the plugin - get version 2.8.9 here.

Update 2: Spam Karma 2 doesn’t work properly - new comments aren’t counted in the “Comments (x)” line below each post. I’m switching to Akismet, which I’ve been wanting to test anyway.

You may have noticed that there is now a “PDF” link in the line of options beneath each post. Theoretically, this will convert the current post into PDF format, for easy printing (along with the current comments). Right now, it’s not working that great, mostly because I tend to cram HTML onto one line when posting, whereas I should let WordPress insert the proper formatting for me. It’s not working on the previous post, for some reason, but I’ve gotten good results on other posts.

This PDFication is brought to you by WP2PDF, an open-source script that converts (you guessed it) your WordPress blog to PDF. The nifty thing is that it accepts querystring parameters. Read on for how to get a PDF of something you might want. (more…)

I spent most of today updating the Radical Congruency 2005 theme, which you can download here.

Fixes and tweaks in this release (2005-12-04):

• Made center column’s width more consistent between Firefox and Internet Explorer; eliminated 20px gap on right side in Firefox
• Made post-title background image wider, to accomodate change in center column width
• Added min-height to blockquotes, so the image doesn’t get cut off for one-line quotes. Also fixed some padding and margin issues with blockquotes
• Clicking on banner now takes you to current site’s home page (used to be hardcoded to RadicalCongruency.com)
• Blog description in page title now uses bloginfo tag, rather than being hardcoded
• Added JavaScript to search box, which clears contents so you can type without erasing “Search this site” manually. Also tweaked size of font and box.
• Made a few changes to footer (though you’ll still need to edit it to include your own copyright/Creative Commons notice and such)
• Moved sidebars into sidebar.php, for compliance with plugin API (sidebars were previously part of the footer)
• Added KICKIN’ JavaScript to convert post/comment timestamp to user’s local timezone (thanks, Aaron!)

This theme is great for several reasons:

• It’s three columns, but the center column is first in the HTML, so your posts (rather than sidebar junk) get more attention from the Googlebot.
• It’s set up for use with great plugins, like Ultimate Tag Warrior - I even included the Ajax add-tag box
• All of the plugin calls are conditionalized, so if you deactivate one, it won’t break the site
• You can click on the banner to go to the home page (amazing how many themes leave that out)
• It’s the only theme in the world that displays post and comment time in the user’s timezone (thanks to Aaron’s fancy JavaScript)
• I support it, and even pre-install it if I host your WordPress-powered site

Check it out, and let me know if you find any bugs. Enjoy.