Construction at the new bank site looked pretty ugly today, but since I've had some requests, here's week two of what will be a new bank outside my window.

Thanks to The Gap, the parking meters in downtown Denver were free today.

Did anyone notice this in other cities?

Henry Copeland of Blogads tells Volvo what a raw deal it got buying ad space from Microsoft's "Spaces" blogging environment instead of from brand-name bloggers:

As Steve Hall of Adrants notes that most of Spaces blogs are "empty, useless, pointless weblogs." "A quick review of weblogs listed as recently updated on MSN Spaces revealed few, if any, containing more than a post or two. Many simply state, 'There are no entries in this blog.'"

....To expand on Steve's point, Volvo is, at best, paying to appear above MSNSpaces bloggers who are writing about random stuff, blogospheric noise. Spaces bloggers are newbies on the fringes of the blogosphere. MSN may well have promised Volvo 100 million page impressions a month, but these are impression seen by nobody -- or more exactly "nobodies" -- people who are viewed as influentials only by their moms and ex-girlfriends.

We haven't had one of these in a while and I'll be off at court and the jail today. The floor is your's.

We're having technical problems with Internet Explorer and the home page. The site shows fine in Firefox. We hope to get it fixed soon.

Update: Mike Ditto says the problem is fixed now. He had the same problem on his site and it had to do with Sitemeter's javascript.

I've been reading through the submissions for Altercation's blogroll contest, over 250 of them. I try to only read a few at a time so I can get a good sense of each one. A blog by Blaghdaddy got a laugh from me tonight Between the time one of his readers submitted it (March 18) and the time I looked at it (April 10), the guy had quit blogging. Go read his reasons. It's enough to make you hang up your keyboard. Here are some snippets:

There's cat-blogging (see here, here and here), basset blogging, orchid blogging and all sorts of off-topic blogging in the blogosphere on Fridays. Yesterday, a local bank decided to build its new building outside one of my windows. Since I've never watched a building be constructed at such close range, and because I'm trying not to think about how loud or dirty my airspace will become in the next several months, I'm going to focus on the positive. Somewhere, some construction company is taking pride in this four story project.

I will catalog the progress in photos each Friday so you too can watch a building be constructed at close range.

Here's day one, Wednesday, the day the tractor arrived. At 7 am.

bigger version

Atrios explains the importance of tipping continuously updated bloggers . Here's a few snippets:

Look, blogging takes time. And, doing the kind of blog which tries to stay 5 seconds ahead of the news cycle on a consistent basis takes a lot of time.... every moment spent blogging is a moment not spent trying to get work/earn money. Over the long run there may be some self-promotion benefit to blogging, but a very small one.

There's lots of writing going on in the blogosphere.

• Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul on Our Pet Afghans

• Grits for Breakfast just got back from Washington where the right and left joined forces to bash "Byrne grant" programs which finance multijurisdictional drug task forces like the ones in Tulia, Hearne and Palestine, Texas.

• Liberty Street says terrorists likely will be the only ones not deterred by the Administrations' new passport requirements (via Sideshow.)

Say hello to The Grist, a new and free environmental newsletter with a cool design and very progressive content. Grist has taken out an ad on TalkLeft, so I leafed through it and have to say I'm very impressed. Here's an article advising enviromentalists to take a page from civil liberties activists and suffragettes, and never give up.

Bump and Update: The site improvements have been completed. The site loads much faster. The comments are now fixed to remember your name and the shortcut buttons in the comments now work in Internet Explorer and Firefox. The blogrolls now are permanent rather than part of Blogrolling. The extended entry feature (when you click more) now begins with the part you haven't read yet, instead of bringing you back to to the top.

Mike Ditto spent over 12 hours on the site and did it all for free. I'd like to send him some paypal money, so if you're a regular user of the comments feature on TalkLeft, please consider chipping in. I could also use some contributions to help with the cost of renewal of some site-related subscription services that are coming due.

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Original Post:

We've been making some improvements to TalkLeft this week, thanks to Mike Ditto. We're now upgraded to MT 3.15. Mike has also offered to fix our comment template so it remembers your user name and you don't have to retype it every time.

Several subscription services also have come up for renewal. Reader donations help a lot, so if you are able to contribute, we really appreciate it.

• PayPal
• Amazon

During the three days I was gone, the trolls and chatterers have taken advantage. Since I want to return to posting and not have to spend time monitoring comments, I'm liberally using the delete key and banning offending IP addresses. For those who are limited to four comments a day, please know I will be strictly enforcing the limit and deleting excess comments.

Update: Additional description of troll comments appear on Daily Kos today:

"Trolling" refers to the act of intentionally making incendiary or offensive comments, in hopes of provoking an indignant response. The term is also applied to outright attacks on a community that attempt to make it unusable.