Hitch in the digital gitalong

May 15, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

WordPress decided to rearrange itself while I slept last night, requiring readers to log in and closing comments on the previous post. Sorry ’bout that. I believe I have the bullshit train back on the tracks, but if you discover otherwise, holler.

• Late update: Checking the back-end, some posts still display as “comments closed.” I don’t know what causes this, but I’ve seen it before. I’ve re-enabled comments on a couple of recent posts, but further research will have to wait, as I’m up to my tits in the Giro right now. So holler via e-mail if you feel stifled. I don’t unplug people with whom I disagree, I tell them to get fucked — in the nicest possible way, of course.

BRAIN damage

February 4, 2009 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

Ho, ho. My colleagues at Bicycle Retailer & Industry News have finally bitten the new-media bullet and launched a blog, in which they mention the likes of Interbike’s Rich Kelly, Masiguy Tim Jackson and BikePortland’s Jonathan Maus — while saying nary a word about your humble narrator, their very own columnist and cartoonist, who has been blogging about this, that and the other since before the millennium.

Hell, I have archived posts dating back to three years before BRAIN wrote its first story on bike-biz bloggery. I’m on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, Blogger and WordPress and Hostcentric. I’m so Web 2.0, I’m virtually digital. Or digitally virtual. And yet I get no respect. Oh, the humanity.

Late update: BRAIN honchette Megan Tompkins feels my pain and responds to my NastyGram® thusly: “Sorry for failing to mention one of our own in our initial post. I didn’t mean to overlook you; indeed I was hoping that we might be able to collaborate between the two blogs. How can we work together to drive traffic to both our blogs?”

This is exactly what BRAIN needs in order to more tightly wrap its sucker-tipped, Cthulhu-like tentacles around the rocklike thighs of cycling trade journalism: regular congress with a minor-league blog whose proprietor says “Fuck” more often than The Dude in “The Big Lebowski.” Naturally, I am happy to oblige, and insist that all of my readers — yes, all three of you — visit the BRAIN Blog at least thrice daily, clicking this and that until your mouse fingers bleed.

So many websites, so little time

November 18, 2008November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Assistant DogSite editor Mia Sopaipilla hard at work in her office.

I broke out the BFH last night and spent the better part of quite some time pounding on the DogSite v2.0 (that would be this site), straightening out dents in this and kinks in that while swearing into a frequently empty wineglass.

So now we have three DogSites up and running, more or less:

The original: www.maddogmedia.com
V2.0: http://www.maddogmedia.com/wordpress
V3.0: www.maddogmedia.wordpress.com

I thought for sure that v3.0 was going to be the way to go, mostly for cost (none) and ease of use (plenty). And then I took a sharper glance around under the hood. Only 3MB of storage, which limits photo uploads, and no video or audio uploads at all without “upgrading.” Sheeyit. I already have a paid site — the original, hosted by Hostcentric — and I can chuck my little digital stones into that vast pond for years before I fill it up. And with WordPress installed there, I can do what you see here.

The downside is, running your own WordPress show requires you to get a little more hands-on behind the scenes. Mama WordPress ain’t there to hold your hand and walk you through kindergarten on things like RSS feeds, header images and other tweaks and sneaks. Hence the wine and swearing.

This morning I think things look more or less OK. Of course, it’s early yet.

O, bugger it

November 17, 2008 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

It appears the free version of WordPress may not work for me (and thee). I can see I’d exceed the upload limitations by, oh, say, Thursday. So we’re back to knocking down walls and laying pipe here at Mad Dog Media.

I like taking a pic now and then, and you never know when I might resume raving into a mic’ or a camera, and seems you just can’t do much of that sort of thing for free. Not at WordPress, anyway. Who knew? I’ll have to have a word with my man Al Gore about this outrage next time we hook up backstage at “SNL” to do belly shots of Chamucos off Tina Fey.

Old dog, new tricks

November 9, 2008 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Thanks for the emails and comments on the latest iteration of the DogSite. Many of you have asked to be able to add a quick comment rather than crank out an email; others have been asking for RSS feeds. Some just want to be able to target an individual post and forward it to someone in hopes of causing a stroke. This WordPress template lets me grant all those wishes.

There are a few things I still don’t like about handing the site over to a template. The biggest is not having a backup copy of whatever I post stashed here on the old hard drive. My buddy Hal at Hardscrabble Times writes all his posts in AppleWorks before sending them into the ether, and maybe I’ll follow his lead using TextEdit, which is a nice, clean little word processor. In the one cut-and-paste I did from The Daily Dog v1.0, I noticed that the post retained the formatting of the original instead of assuming the qualities of this new, bigger-and-better digital world. Lots to learn, lots to learn. And me so long in the tooth, too.