The Political Animal

A few ideas…
You could start a completely new webpage for politics, maybe http://thepoliticalanimal.dyndns.com/ and just have an obvious link to the page from this site.
(P.S. I looked and that name is not yet taken)
You could have little news clips with area for comments on the side bar and push your links down…of course, that’s what I do. Plus, I think you like hearing yourself type, so that won’t work for your long essays.
You could just keep doing what you’re doing because you don’t have all that much more to say…the closer to the election the more stories you seem to be able to put out, so maybe you should fill this space will political nonsense and esnesnon.

Hey, a blog on politics.
Call it “Cone of Ignorance”.
Wait, that one’s taken.
Actually Mike, unless you are going to post political pieces on a DAILY basis, I wouldn’t make it a separate blog.
But if you do, I’d put a link to it on the left above Wil’s mug. AND THEN each time you post on the political blog, put a one-line post into “cone” pointing to your politics post.

Ah, but that would violate the data duplication principle of good database design. I agree with you, though, that starting a whole other blog is probably inappropriate.
I would plan on posting something pretty much daily. The idea is to provide lots of interesting links without too much discussion. I think Talking Points Memo is a pretty close model of how much text I want to write around the links. I would probably want even less in many circumstances. If I found something really interesting, like the Ron Suskind piece in last Sunday’s NY Times magazine, or something that I wanted to do a little analysis on, I would probably still write a story around it on the front page like I did this time.
That being said, how do I get you guys to check over there often? I could probably write a script that could put, like, an asterisk next to the link or something to indicate if a new story had been published that day. Or, perhaps I could try to do something that would count the number of stories that had been done that day. I imagine it looking like Politics (*) or Politics (2) or something.
Would comments be appropriate? On the stories themselves, would a title even be appropriate? I guess what I’m getting at is a simple way to publish what I want to publish without mucking up the rest of my blog. I can live with using Movable Type to do it, but I don’t want to have to assign a category to every story I write in addition to the politics stories just so I can separate the pages by categories. I guess that’s an architectural question that probably only Derek can help me with.

So are you saying that you want something like this:
http://neuron.blogdns.com:8080/ -News Links
Or something like this:
http://insignifica.org/ -daily links
Or something like this:
http://gominosensei.org/ -fresh fruit for rotting vegetables

Close, but probably just a little bit more text that you and Derek put in your news links.

Here’s what you do, this is perfect.
I was going to do it myself, which means I’m perfect.
Alas blogger isn’t, so I can’t.
Make a ticker across the top, it’s easy, just a simple HTML tag (that I can’t remember) to make a lot of crap scroll by in a small amount of space. Then do your MT, MySQL whatever magic to make the little tidbits and headlines dynamic links.
Everytime you update your political vignette page, it adds it to the beginning of the ticker and knocks off the oldest.
SIMPLE and space efficient.
THen, when you’re done, adapt it so it’ll work for me.

Hey, that’s not a bad idea. I’m almost done crafting the page, so that’s not the way I went, but I’m going to think hard about doing something like that. I instinctively fear moving objects or sound on webpages, but I might be able to find a way to make it work.

You Geeks and your hypertextical markupedness.
Hey, someone show me how do that too.

Okay, the politics section is live. Have a look and let me know what you think.
Don, what would you like to know? If it’s web-related, it’s surprisingly easy.

Mike, I would move the “Arrested Development” piece up the to the Site section. That leaves “log”-genre components in the “Features” section.
Re my flippancy about how naturally web stuff comes to pre-30ers, I’m just not code-literate (anymore), that’s all. I don’t know more than, say, link tags. don’t have a good working knowledge of much else (what’s a “span” tag supposed to do and where is it valid, how do you make a link pop up as a separate window, just dumb stuff like that).
While I can see that web stuff is relatively simple I just don’t swim in that pool, so to speak. My code crunching days are pre html for the most part. Basic, Fortran, Pascal, C, Assembly, I was a stud. Well, I never slept, same thing.
I’m sure this is akin to being fluent in Japanese while not paying enough attention to “get” Pig-Latin.
Or Calculus fluency vs. Geometry proof block.
A question of learning the language through exposure.
Since I get igpay atinlay and I aced Geometry in a nearly supernatural way, I bet I could follow this newfangled web thingy.

I agree that the Arrested Quiz doesn’t quite thematically jive with the other two ‘features,’ but I like it there anyway. I guess it fits thematically as things not having too much to do with me or the site.
You’ll pick up HTML/CSS and whatever else in a pretty big hurry. And, yeah, the most confusing thing about CSS is the arbitrary scope of different element tags. Having class, id, and span seems like overkill.