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Tonight I spent an hour redoing links on The Sand Trap because Google (and MSN, and Yahoo) seem to have a bug: they don't recognize the ".golf" extension. The search results you do get (currently) on MSN and Yahoo are either from the forum (.php) or from category archives (i.e. "http://thesandtrap.com/archive/pga/") where the index file […]

Today: adding 4 moderators to about 15 forums. Ideally this could be done in one step. At most, 4. At worst, 15. Instead, it takes 60. Yes - you have to manually add each moderator to each forum. What an absolute pain in the ass. vBulletin has a "moderators" and a "super moderators" group by […]

The Sand Trap.com needs a logo. I'm considering having a design contest - they've worked out well in the past. Ideally, whomever creates a logo would also be able to send it in Illustrator, so that I can quickly make a business card and run to Kinko's to get some cards printed. So, here's the […]

My next wish for ecto: the ability to print nicely! As I continue to work on a group blog at The Sand Trap .com, my needs for printing the preview window (which I've customized to look just like the site) increase daily. Sending raw HTML to people is a bit rough. I've resorted to taking […]

The Sand Trap, a site powered by MovableType, looks somewhat like a blog. It also looks like a very golf-centric news site. We have a former writer for Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Golf World, Golf Week, and Golf for Women on our staff. Another gentleman named Kiran and I have kicked out some good, in-depth […]

I found this interview interesting. It reminded me to check my logs. Apparently I'm doing pretty well for myself with MT-Blacklist. In the past 30 days, I've had some 25,000 spamments blocked. I've had to manually delete only 7 spamments. My blacklist makes liberal use of URL Patterns like "\bdebt\b" and "\bhold-em\b" and it's been […]

One of the things I wanted in the redesign of The Sand Trap was to further promote the golf forum. One of the ways in which this was done was with a small image at the top and some bolder, colored text. I also wanted to put "Hot Forum Topics" in the sidebar. vBulletin offers […]

Looks like it took me two to get out of the bunker. I wasn't happy with the first design at The Sand Trap, so it was re-designed. Now if only the darn site could move up in Google's and Yahoo's rankings a little. Previous entries from this blog show up ahead of that one. Oh […]

Robert Scoble has broached the topic of Copyrighting RSS in his usual bumbleheaded way. Essentially, a man named Martin Schwimmer does not like having his posts republished via Bloglines. Martin summarizes his point succinctly: This website is published under a Creative Commons license that allows for non-commercial use, provided there is attribution. Commercial use and derivative […]

In addition to the Text Factory issue (see the previous entry), I've got a big problem with the number of ways in which MovableType and ecto are both not helpful in transitioning an existing, static site into blog entries. Today I'm going to move three pages (one for each of three months) into MovableType. The […]

I don't like to keep a big blacklist, instead trying to keep things fairly well pruned so that I can glance through my list. As such, I run these scripts now and then. Here are today's: DELETE FROM mt_ext_bl_item WHERE ext_bl_item_type='1' AND ext_bl_item_hits < '10' AND ext_bl_item_created_on < '2004-12-02'; DELETE FROM mt_ext_bl_item WHERE ext_bl_item_type='1' AND […]

Holy mother of $DEITY, editing "styles" (and templates, and so on) in vBulletin is a freakin' bitch! Holy crap, seriously. I have no idea where to find anything, since seemingly everything is a variable. What styling is there is so horribly done it'd be tough to figure out even if it was one file. I […]

I doubt that this is possible, but does anyone have a vBulletin license they don't need (or are willing to get rid of cheaply)? I'd like to consider setting up a forum on the advertising- (and thus income-) free The Sand Trap, and don't really care for the limited features of the free stuff (like […]

Are there more Apple blogs to come? While I was an "Apple blogger," I was threatened with being fired if I didn't cease to comment on any and all things relating to Apple, despite the fact that I also develop software for Mac OS X and never (well, not really) divulged on my blog that […]

The Sand Trap .com is really churning out the articles, baby! Woweee.