40 posts in the Site CategoryGoogle Buzz You can follow me on Google buzz. The Media Pundit most read posts from 2009 Here lay the most read posts of 2009, following 2008 and 2007 (links to the other posts included at the bottom of this one.) The Media Pundit most read posts from 2008 After recapping the most read posts from the inaugural year of 2007 yesterday, today I'll go over the most read posts of 2008 -- now expanded to the top 10 posts. The Media Pundit most read posts from 2007 With 2 1/2 years in the books, I'm recapping the most read posts since The Media Pundit launched, beginning with 2007. Top 5 posts for September 2009 The top 5 posts for the month of September, 2009. Stargate Universe, Top 5 Full feeds now Update to the ATOM feed: full posts again. Moving Twitter accounts The Media Pundit website gets a new Twitter account. New SModcast mirror Added a mirror for the Kevin Smith/Scott Mosier podcast (SModcast). Podcasts, SModcast Rejection Has Set Me Free The Media Pundit was rejected for inclusion in the Google News index, and that's probably for the better. Top 5 posts for August 2008 Top 5 new posts for the month of August, 2008. CSI: Miami, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Top 5 New "related posts" feature added Many sites have a "related posts" feature, so I wrote my own! I win. Happy 100,000th visitor...you're fired. What Google giveth, it can taketh away -- 24 hours after celebrating 110,000 visits, a pagerank update cuts our traffic by nearly 70%. Media Pundit hits the big 100k The Media Pundit reaches 100,000 views just before the first year anniversary. MediaPundit.net gets two new features Mediapundit.net gets two new features: new comment notification via email and threaded comments. Top 5 posts for May 2008 Top 5 New posts and overall posts for the month of May, 2008. Top 5 posts for April 2008 Game violence, the future of television and streaming video, and the return of Battlestar Galactica. Media Pundit gets a face lift The Media Pundit gets a face life. Great things coming out of Six Apart Six Apart buys an ad network and releases a fantastic Facebook application. How few years will WordPress have left at this rate? Movabletype, Six Apart We get signal Stargate Continuum is available for pre-order on Amazon; Lost season finale upgraded to two-hours; Jericho may not be dead yet. Jericho, Lost, Stargate Continuum What would you like to see here? I started the Media Pundit back in July of last year for two reasons:1. Focus mattersBack in the day while I was hosted on Blogspot (the blogging service Google bought from Pyra) I made some bad choices. First, the name of the blog ("Bitch What?") generally reflected an attitude rather than a theme. Once I decided to write about what I like and know the most about -- writing of different sorts with a focus on TV -- it was apparent that Bitch What? wasn't where I needed to be. I wanted some distance from that and a second try.2. Room for growthBeing able to manage my own publishing platform (here I use Movabletype, the same software that powers BoingBoing,... Top 5 posts for March 2008 Here is a short list of the top 5 read posts on this site for the month of March, ranked by views. Some of these are up at the top because of being picked up on social networking/voting sites and had 90% of their popularity over the course of just two days, but they were popular none the less and so they make the list. A couple rank highly every month due to awkward yet not unwelcome search engine traffic. If you like this site and haven't read any of these stories, please take a moment and check them out.Best scifi film poll topped by non-scifi flick (1,382 views)The Scifi Channel website ran a poll this month asking their readers... Rain come, me go. Posting to blogs is hard when you rely on a satellite for Internet connectivity, a system extremely prone to lengthy outages when it rains, or lately, when it gets darkly overcast in the southern sky. It kept me pacing the house and swearing furiously at a defenseless blue modem that was trying its best to connect me to the outside, lest I rip the coax cables from the back and sacrifice it in a blazing fire in the back yard in a mad fit of rage.... New Feature - Email This While I ponder a misguided email threat from censorshipbucket photobucket.com, I'll note that I've added a link at the bottom of my posts on this website called "EMail This!" that, as you have correctly deduced, will present you with a page that will email the current post title, part of its summary, and a link with an invitation to your intended victim target to pollute their mind with my rants and ravings.Because such a thing doesn't come with Moveable Type (my publishing platform) I spent the better part of a day writing the code myself. It works well enough and allows you to harass notify up to 10 different people that I have spoken, and should come here thusly and... More commenting stuff Just a quick note that I finally located the real problem that caused a malfunction with the comment system, which has now technically been fixed. I say technically because I'll have to republish the site for the changes to propagate across all pages. I'll do that soon, but before I spend the time, I'd like to tweak a few things here and there, specifically I'd like to fix a few mistakes in the theme that make the site appear a little differently in Internet Explorer than in Firefox.It'd be easier of course if everyone would stop using IE, since it's insecure, non-standards compliant, and Microsoft has proven plainly that they only update the browser when its market share lead is... The Mysterious Case of Comment Breakage Can you tell I've been reading Mark Russinovich too much lately? Yeah, I'm getting kind of annoyed by it too, but anyway..The comments have been broken for almost two months, and only last night did I find out this lovely fact. They are fixed site-wide and you are free to spew forth and enlighten me on the many errors of my ways. If you're wondering what the problem was, and feel really, really bored today, then read on, as I shall explain in truly excruciating detail every thought I had and thing I've done since the day I was born that lead up to this terrible calamity.... Closed for the holidays I got burned out on blogging and believe me, that can happen no matter how much or how little content you write on a daily basis. There hasn't been much strike news and there doesn't figure at least until after the new year. Chances are even then, we're going to be stuck with this one for a while.Other stuff has been building up and what I'd like to do is try to write more original content and also bring in more posts highlighting other original content, and fewer link posts to industry news. I'll try that after Christmas, when I'll be back here with full energy and attention. There's little point to starting that all right now since most people... The 4400, The Dead Zone Broken comments and search I made a change on the back end of the site that should make things a lot faster for leaving comments, and everything I do when I write and manage this site. Unfortunately, somebody left out a step when writing instructions on how to do what I was doing, and it caused the links to the comment and search scripts to break across the entire site.I'm sorry, even though it's entirely not my fault. It would have helped if somebody who had gotten one of the hundreds of errors I see in my log that is normally empty would have used the link on the error page to email me and tell me something was wrong. Please, if something doesn't... Theater Watch and Box Office Booty are probably history I've been thinking about moving my Theater Watch series to Thursdays since most films open on Fridays, and often times I don't get the posts up until well into the day and into the night even. Why preview the new flicks after most people go to see them? It then struck me that I really hate doing them and I wondered if anybody even read them at all.According Google Analytics, the answer is a resounding no. The most read post I have done in that series hasn't even broken 10 page views, while collectively, the total number of posts have amassed fewer than 30 reads.... The state of things I hope everyone enjoyed their long holiday weekend. I didn't bother posting anything since most people were going to be traveling or away from their computers, plus, there wasn't hardly any news to post anyway. Of the things that have happened, I'll catch up you up.I forgot to do the weekend box office preview, I discovered a problem with Yahoo!'s email system that can prevent people from registering accounts for commenting, and Rupert Murdock is still a douchebag intent on indoctrinating not only the United States, but the entire world into the neo-con culture. Still interested?... CBS, Heroes, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, WGA New login options here at The Media Pundit One of my favorite sites to read has begun their upgrade of Movable Type from 3.2 to 4.01. Movable Type is a publishing platform (or a blog+) similar to WordPress, only MT works a little differently on the inside and has features from Six Apart (the people who make and sell it) that make it ideal for enterprise class publishing. I love it to death and launched this site on the back of a beta version of 4.0 and have had few problems with it over the past four months... Back on the Air Mediapundit.net is back on the air after going dark for a day to show this persons support for the Writers Guild of America. It was symbolic, but they deserve the support regardless of the actual results.Here's why I did it.Misconceptions about this strike are running all over the place due mostly to the large multinational corporations that own the studios and broadcast networks also owning many local TV stations and newspapers. It is in their best interests to pressure people from the top on down to put out positive spin that favors the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) which is exactly whats happening right now.... AMPTP, WGA More on Writing With Partners I've thought about this for a bit and while I generally don't think this is even worth the time since this is almost entirely trolling on the part of another party, it's probably worth getting a few words in here to clear the air because loud annoying people..well annoy me. I wrote a post called Writing With Partners on Oct 25th which linked to an article by Patrick Walsh on Cinematical which featured some tips for writing with partners, hence the title.Two items that have become flash points are partnerships and outlines.I don't see the value in writing partners for reasons that matter only to me and are not really subject to debate by others. I am not the only... Rockin, Rollin, and Cryin I had the unfortunate luck to come down with all of the worst symptoms of a head cold all at the same time yesterday, combined with an unfortunate choice of posture sometime on Monday that put my back into holy hell Tuesday. I laid on the floor most of the day blowing my nose and wondering how much more the day could possibly suck than it already did.If that wasn't enough, San Francisco near where my web site is hosted had an earthquake today. What's next? Probably the strike. Joy.... Slight Change in The RSS/Atom Feed I've made a slight change in this site's RSS/Atom feed that you might like to know about. Previously in the feed, every single post said something along the lines of "This is only summary..blah blah..click the title to read the blah blah" at the bottom regardless as to whether or not there was more text. At the time, I didn't know how else to do it other than to place that notice on every single entry by default.I just figured out how to do it though, so now when you see that message (in bold as the last thing you see) then it's really true and you should click through to read the rest. I'm trying not to cut posts... Sketchy Posting Today See I live in a rural area that is criminally under served by broadband access on all levels. There is cable in the form of Time Warner, but not within several miles. Embarq is a local telco formed by sprint for the sole purpose of dumping debt that Sprint acquired by merging with Nextel, a really great business move which is also extremely scummy. Sprint is an extremely pathetic company when it comes to broadband, they don't really care about DSL and just jettisoned their CEO that was going to cover the entire country in a WiMax network.0-25% they say is what my area is served by DSL from these jokers. Immediately to the West probably less than 15 miles... Website Moved to a New Server A bit of good news this weekend, I was having continual problems with other users whom I share a webserver with using more than their fair share of resources that was making it impossible for me to post anything. Because of the way that Movable Type works, pages were serving at what should have been a normal speed with decent responsiveness. After having to complain about people abusing the machine twice in a week, a friend of mine who works at the place I'm hosted with kindly offered to move my site to another server which seems to be a much better suited for what I need.This site doesn't use very much in the way of server resources but the... Downtime My host scheduled some downtime for the entire network early Friday morning (as I'm posting this) and I didn't happen to notice. The site has been down for about two hours and just came back up, though it may go right back down again. My apologies, they are performing maintenance on a piece of networking equipment called a core router, which is something that all network traffic goes through.When that gets shut down or disabled, everything is dead including the hosting providers own website. Hopefully this will be resolved shortly. I doubt it will go much past 4am EDT.... Broken Tags Fixed (Kind of) The links at the bottom of posts that say something along the lines of "find more posts about" have been broken for a day or two, ever since I made an effort to make my sites theme XHTML 1.0 compliant. Rather than pointing to the search script where it exists (in /cgi-bin/) it was pointing to the sites root folder. Sorry, I wouldn't have even known had I know gotten curious and took a peek at my error logs and found all the 404's looking for a script I *knew* existed, but the webserver couldn't find.All those search links will fix themselves when the site republishes itself, which is scheduled for 4:30AM EDT. After that point, everything should be working.Sorry... BlogRush is BlogGone Regular readers have probably noticed a widget I placed on the sidebar called BlogRush, one that is supposed to show posts from websites like this one that are relevant to what I post about here. I put their widget on my site and send traffic out to other people running the widget, and in exchange, I get traffic from my headlines appearing on other peoples widgets.It's a simple concept and one horribly bungled by a startup that has no clue what it's doing. My BlogRush "dashboard" where I can track how many impressions I've given the widget hasn't been functional in over a week. Their excuse is they are making a new, better dashboard, and somehow this means that the... BlogRush Site Hiccups Yesterday afternoon, my host upgraded some server-side scripting packages that MovableType depends on to access the MySQL database. This happened while I was working on the templates to bring them into full compliance with the XHTML and CSS specs. The upgrade went south and didn't get fixed until after 4AM EDT for the server I'm hosted on.The good news is that this site should have remained readable because it is a static-publishing system, meaning rather than generating the page on the fly via scripting when you request it like with WordPress, it generates a fully valid web page after I push 'publish' and it gets saved to disk by the scripting system, along with having the data saved in the... Site |
