Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

too much on BMG front page (and Open Thread)

By 21 Comments

I don’t want to be a rules nitpicker, but the posts on the front page seem to be getting very long lately before going below the fold.

Can people limit what they put above the fold? I hate scrolling past some of those really long ones.

Minor complaint, yes.

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    • This is my first consistent participation in a blog, and it really helps me to get feedback like this.  I will keep the “above the fold” to a teaser!  Say about a modest paragraph?  A bit longer than this post, say?  Just asking.

      • more than that is fine. there’s got to be enough to tease us into the post.

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        I’m more concerned about the ones the really long ones with block quotes and dozens of lines of text.

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        Again, just a minor way to make things a little easier to navigate. I don’t want o be a hall monitor or anything.

  3. Because here are some thoughts floating in my head, with no place to put them:

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    • Governor Ahnuld is surprisingly cool to the effort to split apart California’s electoral votes in 2008.  The money quote: “In principle, I don’t like to change the rules in the middle of the game.”
    • What happened to Eric Gagne?  Lousy Canadians…
    • I don’t blame Obama for announcing he will only participate in DNC sanctioned debates from here on.  At this point, the debates aren’t about exchanging and revealing ideas as much as getting through the event without committing a dreaded gaffe.
    • Anyone who actually gives a crap over Obama’s three-point shooting is likely the same person who watches Lindsey Lohan movies and calls it film criticism.
    • I heard recently from a political organizer that estimates place pro-casino spending in Middleboro during the run-up to the town meeting at $200,000.  During 2004, people were furious that much was spent on state rep races.  Now, nobody cares.
    • So Reggie Miller won’t be playing with the Celtics.  Dang it.
    • Hearing great things about this movie, all about the rivalry between two would-be claimants for the title best King Kong player ever.
    • Speaking of movies, “Balls of Fire” seems to be proof that Christopher Walken has given up trying to be a serious thespian.  He’s realized what we’ve all known — when he’s in a movie, we just want to see him being him.  Kinda like Jack Nicholson.
    • So far, four Republicans in Congress have announced retirement.  The elephants realize they won’t be getting their paws (hooves) back on real power anytime soon.

    • Bill Richardson: “Our failed policy in Iraq is making us less safe. Our ports are less safe. Our cities are less safe. Our transportation systems are less safe. George Bush is cutting funding to first responders. America’s alliances are in disarray because of this President.”  They screamed at Howard Dean when he said this in 2004.  Now it’s seen as so obvious as to be beneath notice.

  4. From a 2004 speech.  Geo. W has set the stage.  Now Rudolph will make us dance.

    “We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.“

    [ Interruption by someone in the audience. ]

    “You have free speech so I can be heard.”

    [ Another interruption. ]

    Emphasis mine.  Sportin’ Life pointed us to this quote over at Pam’s House Blend, where Pam relates that Rudolph has hired the same PR firm that created the racist ads attacking Harold Ford, Jr. in 2006.  Nice fella.

  5. or at least really small ones please.  Other graphics like charts usually require substantially fewer kBs than photos [which are quite complex mathematically], and for those of us who have slower connections but want a quick browse, the photos don’t add enough value.

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    Like all of these comments, nothing is a hard and fast rule of course.  Just general guidance…

    • …No graphics over 50 KB on the front page, anything above that (including youtube links) under the fold, and warn if a link is to a PDF file. 

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      PDF files can take forever to download on a dial-up connection.  It used to take me hours to download an e-paper copy of Der Spiegel (typically 50-60 MB), and the download oftentimes failed, requiring a re-start.  That’s the main reason we got fiber optic service in the US.

      • attach information in PDFs, rather than putting the same information right in the text of the e-mail?  I so prefer to have my information in the body of the e-mail.  I find it particularly problematic when they take a pdf that was clearly designed to be printed, and then send it by e-mail.

        • …PDFs can be quite useful for page-oriented media.  Such as e-paper.  When we are in the US, we can, over our fast link, download a PDF document of Der Spiegel, that is page for page identical to the print version.  It takes about a half hour The time is extended because of the delay of the Spiegel server; if the server could download it as fast as our computer could receive it would only talke a couple of minutes.

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          The problem with PDFs is that they can oftentimes take a long time to download, take up bandwidth, and sometimes different versions of PDF viewers can’t take the file.  I have tried to install the most recent version of Acrobat Reader here in Munich, but it demands to have certain versions of precursor programs installed here before it will load.  That is idiotic.  If what they need is not on the computer, Adobe (PDF’s manufacturer) should supply them.

        • any or all of the following:

        • laziness
        • to preserve page formatting
        • to make the text unalterable and/or immune to selective copying.
        • it looks slick and professional

          • to preserve page formatting

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            It is not unusual for us to find that stuff printed out from HTML cuts off a line or two between pages.  It is terribly annoying.  PDFs are much better, but they can take a long time to download, particularly if there are pictures in them

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            BTW, it is possible to alter the text of a PDF.  Not with PDF reader, but with the full Acrobat suite, which I have in the US. 

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            As another BTW, I don’t know whether it’s possible to copy text from a PDF file from PDF Reater, but it is possible to do so with the full Acrobat suite.

            • but with acrobat you can copy, alter text, etc, as you mentioned.  i think you can also password protect the doc to prevent others changing it, but i might be misremembering that.  been a while since i had access.

              • …I don’t know about password protecting a doc against alteration, but you can password protect a doc against being opened.  It’s somewhat similar to password-protecting a file in WinZip.

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                With Acrobat, you certainly can copy text from a PDF file into a text file.  I’ve done that many times.  Acrobat, unlike reader, though, is not free.

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