Dear “News” Media

May 3, 2013 • http://48px.net/dZBJ3

As somewhat of a news junkie, I have one request:

Please get your shit together.

The state of news coverage in this country has been deteriorating for a very long time and only seems to be getting worse. Let me provide some examples.

Things that are not news:

  • Lindsay Lohan.
  • Anything involving any Kardashian. Ever.
  • Anything involving anyone who has been on “Teen Mom” or some other MTV “reality” show.
  • Anything involving the “Octomom”.
  • Anything else about any celebrity unless it’s a death notice.
  • A handful of idiots finding sports team names offensive.
  • Anything involving the Westboro Baptist Church.
  • Anything else that invokes a “no” or “probably not” answer when you ask yourself “should people really give a shit about this?”.

Most everything listed above has one thing in common. THEY ALL CRAVE ATTENTION. If you stop giving these morons a platform and coverage, they will eventually go away because NO ONE WILL BE PAYING ATTENTION TO THEM.

Things that are newsworthy:

  • FACTS (I’m looking at you, Wolf Blitzer and CNN) about stuff like the Boston Marathon bombings or the Sandy Hook shootings or other major catastrophic events that actually affect people’s lives.
  • FACTS about important events around the world.
  • For local news outlets, relevant stories about the surrounding community.

Please note the part about facts. Being the first to spew a story across your airwaves doesn’t do a damn thing but misform the general public and make you look stupid IF WHAT YOU ARE BROADCASTING ISN’T FACTUAL (again, I’m looking at you, Wolf Blitzer and CNN).

I would much rather have accurate coverage of an event that may take a little longer for you to verify than to have coverage that flows immediately from the mouth of your “sources” directly to the TV screen and turns out to be either completely fabricated or wildly inaccurate.

So please, get your shit together before I give up on you entirely.

Apologies for the 404 errors

April 22, 2013 • http://48px.net/IdA9e

This morning I noticed that a lot of you were running into page not found errors when following links to some Espresso-ish pages. In my rush to set up the site, I forgot to set up the redirects I had in place previously (oops!).

Anyway, they are fixed now and any links out there that point to /espresso-ish/coda2/ or /espresso-ish/bbedit/ should work again. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Welcome to the new 48 Pixels

April 19, 2013 • http://48px.net/mfxiv

It’s that time of year again where I decide to scrap what I have and relaunch the site with a new design, new engine, and well… new everything.

Why?

Honestly, why not? Truthfully though, it’s because I got bored with the site. I rarely post, rarely work on the backend, and pretty much just ignore it and leave it to rot.

What about the old posts?

They’re not coming back. I went through the archive and, with the exception of the post about my dad (which I have archived offline), nothing is worth keeping around.

Most of the posts were link posts with now irrelevant commentary attached and I don’t see any need to keep that stuff around anymore. 99% of the traffic I get is to the Espresso-ish page, so I doubt anyone else will miss those other posts either.

What’s changed:

  • Under the Hood

    I’ve dropped Slurm, the static blog engine I wrote, and moved back to WordPress. There are a couple of reasons I chose to do this, but the main one is that I need/want to get back up-to-speed with WordPress development and theming.

  • Design

    In an attempt to keep things focused on the content, I came up with a one-column design that allows for easy reading.

    Photos and other large images are handled a bit differently. They are wider than the text so they can be shown at better quality and higher resolution (for an example, see the screenshots on the Espresso-ish page).

  • Comments

    Against my better judgement, I have turned comments on. I have a feeling I’m going to regret this decision, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

    On a related note, in order to post a comment, you must create an account and be logged in. I know that kind of sucks, but it only takes a few seconds to create the account and I’m hoping that forcing logins will cut down on comment spam a little. Deal with it, or just contact me in another way.

I’m still tweaking a few things here and there, but please let me know if you run into any problems.