Posts Tagged ‘Site Administration’

Updating the Blogroll

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

For some reason, I feel a lot more braindead than usual after a one hour bike ride, so today seems like an excellent day to perform that long-contemplated update of the blogroll.

Today’s additions:

  • Rick Perry vs. the World: You might previously remember Evan from Texas Iconoclast, a local political aggregator until it went into hibernation earlier this year. Now he’s back blogging at this, his original blog. Well worth a look for Texas politics. And speaking of a local political aggregators:
  • Push Junction offers up a forest of Texas political links. Don’t know who runs it, but I’ve grabbed many a link from it.
  • More Lane: National blogger and indefatigable tweeter. He also turns out to share my affection for Peter Gabriel and Ogre (the board game), so he’s obviously a man of taste and discernment…
  • Ann Althouse: Another national blogger I’d frequently read when linked from Instapundit, but one who was absolutely essential for Wisconsin Recall coverage.
  • Michelle Malkin: Still another national blogger I’d read when linked by Instapundit, but more recently she’s not only been a driving force to expose convicted felon Brett Kimberlin, she’s also the Queen of the Conservative Twitterverse, which lead her to launch Twitchy, a Twitter roundup blog, which is also worth checking out.
  • Finally, please note that Blue Dot Blues has moved.

    I Now Have a Twitter Account for BattleSwarm

    Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

    Go to https://twitter.com/#!/BattleSwarmBlog if you want to follow me there. Expect a lot of #txsen posts. I’ll probably also tweet more stuff that’s not worthy of an entire post…

    Blogrolling In Our Times

    Friday, July 8th, 2011

    Today Matt S. Dowling named BattleSwarm his blog of the week. Thanks!

    This inspired me to finally get up off my lazy ass and add two of the three blogs I’d been thinking about adding to my blogroll anyway:

  • Matt S. Dowling (wow, I bet you never saw that coming), who has been doing a lot of good pieces on the Texas senate race (including some of the Tom Leppert-related stories I’ve posted here).
  • Merv at Prairie Pundit, who’s been blogging up a storm from the wilds of Washington, Texas for several years now.
  • And the third blog I was thinking about adding, but won’t right now? That would be The Race to Replace Kay Baily Hutchison, a blog focused on the Texas Senate race that I used to check every day for updates…but there hasn’t been one since June 2. I’d be happy to add it if posts start up again, but a month’s silence isn’t getting the job done…

    The Bots Are Getting Smarter. (And Leon is Getting LARGER!)

    Sunday, November 21st, 2010

    (Sigh) I may have mentioned that I have to clear out a fair amount of comments spam that Akismet catches every day.

    Well, whoever programs bot seemed to have figured out at least that this is a political blog, as I’ve been getting a lot of generic anti-Charlie Rangel comments on threads that have nothing to do with Charlie Rangel. Close, but no cigar bot guys. (Or, to put it in your own bot language, “Your cigar with excellent closeness you fail to reach.”)

    But I can see a day when bot spam may start to mimic at least a semi-competent troll. As usual, there’s an XKCD for that:

    How Not to Post Content Spam

    Sunday, October 24th, 2010

    Like a lot of blogs, BattleSwarm gets a lot of automatically-generated, badly-written content spam, most of which is supposed to flatter you ego without actually addressing anything in the blog post, and many times the posted name attached to the spam is particularly absurd . (Hint: I’m pretty sure no one in the world was born with the name “Forex Robot.”)

    But this one trapped in today’s spam filter was particularly incompetent:

    “I’ve been browsing around #hostname and actually am astounded by the terrific content material here.”

    Well, we here at #hostname attract only the most discerning #spmabots thanks to our truly selective posting of only the finest information on #topicofblogpost…

    Random Site Administration Going On

    Sunday, January 24th, 2010

    I’ve updated this page to the latest WordPress theme, and have been futzing with code and moving a few things around to get it working properly, including deleting a few minor posts. Expect a much more substantial post up later this day.