Author: N.Z. Bear

Am I the only one who gets a sinking feeling whenever CNN or MSNBC shows one of their (few remaining) correspondents reporting live from Baghdad?
Folks, let me be clear. If by any chance any of you intrepid journalists are reading this humble blog: get the hell out of there. I can do without the live video and headshots of you bravely silhouetted against the night sky filled with tracer rounds, honest.
And more to the point: I can also do without the shot of you, haggard and terrified, a week from now on a shaky videotape released by the last Special Republican Guard units remaining loyal who have holed up in a mosque with you as their hostages.
This is not Gulf War I. This is real, and nobody is screwing around.
Get. Out. Now.

It would seem that today will be the day.
I can’t help thinking of this conflict less as a war, in the traditional sense, and more as a hostage rescue. The lunatic has holed up, armed to the teeth and surrounded by innocent bystanders who were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. His henchmen stand by his side; some rabidly willing to die for the Great Man; others who long ago took what they thought was the path of least resistance, hoping against hope that it would never lead to this moment here. And many, many more who were dragged into the fight; told to place their body in front of his, else they and those they love would lose everything.
The lunatic continues ranting and raving, threatening to wreak havok if his own worldview is not confirmed as the only true one; if his demands are not met and his whims are not indulged.
The question is not whether the lunatic wins; it never is. The question is how many innocents die when the law finally comes to take him down.
Today, or very soon, we’ll begin to learn the answer to that question.
My best thoughts and wishes go out to the men and women of our military, those of our allies, and the innocent people of Iraq. And yes, in that order. And I fix my hopes on the remote possibility that, against all logic, we will not see reprisal attacks against innocents here at home and around the world — and if not, that they may be limited, and that the loss of life and property be small.
I have no prayers to give, but on days like these, sometimes I wish that were not so. But it is, and so to all those confronting the lunatic for this last time, I can say only: good luck to you.
PS – To those of you who are about to add a comment saying that my description applies better to George Bush: don’t bother. You’re just embarassing yourselves.
Update: Simberg agrees…

Please welcome Babylonian Musings to the TTLB adstrip. It’s been a while since we’ve had an actual paying customer, and I’m pleased that Marduk has chosen to sign up, given his illustrious mission statement. He describes his blog as:
“An examination of anti-semitism on the web, particularly in its disguise as anti-zionism”
Amen to that!
But there’s still plenty of room on the adstrip, so by all means, if you’re interested in supporting the site, sign yourself up. Or, alternatively, you can buy some spiffy TTLB stuff.
I don’t have a tip jar, and have no intention of going on a ‘pledge drive’ anytime soon, but hey, every little bit is nice.

Folks –
I’ve been accused of being an idea bear, and here I go with another one. But I’m not at all convinced I’ve got the time to deal with it myself, so I’m throwing it open for feedback and volunteers.
I’d like to see an Iraq Timeline blog, set up something like this:
– Each day the editor posts a brief paragraph summarizing key events in the conflict.
– The day’s post is then made available for TrackBack pings
– Any blogger who is TrackBack-enabled and is writing on Iraq that day can ping the day’s post
– Ideally, the editor(s) could also then sweep the blogs and manually add links to non-Trackback-enabled bloggers (and could also get them sent to them via email)
I’m picturing a very simple layout; something that looks literally like a timeline. Just the date, a brief summary paragraph, and then a list of links for each day’s entry. I think it would be a very useful tool both in the coming days — to be able to quickly review the Blogosphere’s reactions to the latest events — and, frankly, as a historical record years from now.
Anyway, I’ve got way too much going on, so I don’t think I can drive this. But I’m asking folks to:
a) Tell me if they find this interesting
b) Tell me if they would be willing to participate by either regularly pinging such a blog or sending their links via email
c) Tell me if they’d be willing to help out as an ‘editor’ if I set up such a page
d) Tell me if they’d be interested in driving the whole darned thing on their own blog
And oh, Michele: in answer to question: I think we’re going to war. And it is not a good thing. But it is less bad than all the other alternatives I can see.

Did some significant rearchitecting on the Ecosystem scripts today, both to improve performance and squash some nasty bugs that were preventing the scans from actually hitting all blogs every day.
The major change is that now the process is multi-threaded: ecoscan.php executes a loop which grabs one weblog at a time and spawns an instance of scanblog.php to actually grab the data. It also monitors itself to ensure it never has too many processes running (currently set to ten) so it doesn’t crush the server.
This improves performance by parallelizing the main work, of course, but also minimizes the impact of an issue where the scan routine just hangs trying to open some blogs on occasion (it still hangs, but now you only lose one thread of many).
Anyway, data quality should be improved today, and hopefully will continue to trend upwards. release of the relevant files is available at SourceForge.

Don’t forget — International Eat an Animal for PETA Day!
Updates to follow on the particular critters this bear chooses to consume on this fine day….

Folks –
I’ve opened a project for WMDI, and have uploaded the .PHP files for the Ecosystem as well as the .SQL files necessary to create the appropriate database schema. So, for those of you interested in seeing just how bad my coding is, here’s your big chance!
So, this is the beginning of the real open source phase of WMDI. I am very much hoping that folks will be interested in helping evolve my current crummy code into a robust and stable “WMDI Server”. I need to go figure out what the appropriate open source licensing legal mumbo-jumbo is, but basically, I’d like folks to go ahead and hack away at the code and feel free to use it however they like, but would prefer that any improvements/fixes be likewise freely released back to the community.
If you’re interested in participating, drop me a line and/or register at SourceForge. And happy hacking!

As a reader pointed out, Alterman was reaping the benefits of the entire MSNBC domain in the last few runs of the Ecosystem — his host was ‘msnbc.com’, which meant his count was way off, including (ironically) links to Glenn Reynolds’ and even George Will’s work there.
Alterman already had a correct entry that only used his http://altercation.msnbc.com URL, so I deleted the bad one. This is an imperfect solution, as many folks link to the temporary URL for each of his posts, so now he’s being undercounted. But given that there is no rhyme or reason to those URLs, there’s no way for me to definitively test whether they go to him or Glenn or somebody else doing work at MSNBC. So, oh well.
I also did a few other obvious corrections where folks were getting overcounted, so you’ll see some other adjustments. Keep the feedback coming…

OK folks, I just finished getting through my queue of e-mail requests from those of you who saw problems with your Ecosystem listings. I replied directly via email to each of you, so, if you had an issue and haven’t heard back from me — apologies, I missed you, so please resend…
-NZB

Long day at work, kids, and an early meeting tomorrow. So if you emailed me with an Ecosystem question/request: patience, please. It’s going to be a day or so….
-NZB

Ok folks, you asked for it, you got it. Well, some of you asked for it, anyway.
Last night I directly loaded the blogrolls of MaxSpeak, and The Rittenhouse Review into the Ecosystem. (Thanks to Josh — who can have a link here if he tells me what his weblog URL is — for doing the major work of pulling those lists and sending them to me in the right format).
What this means is that the Ecosystem has gone from about 450 blogs to now over 1,000. I must admit, I was a bit nervous to see if it would hold up under the strain: but somewhat to my surprise, it seems to have worked reasonably well.
So now, you’ll see major lefty Bloggers showing up high in the rankings, counterbalancing some of the warmongering righties that we all know and love.
Now, I was sure there were errors in the Ecosystem yesterday, and I’m twice as sure today. So I ask again for your help, and your patience: if you see a blog that looks wrong, by all means, let me know, and give me as much specific information as you can. But be aware that most of my heavy investigation time will come on the weekends, as I am doing the whole real-job thing.
And on that subject: I am going to be opening up the Ecosystem to be more of an open-source effort (tied directly in with WMDI) in the near future. So hopefully, I can get some help from folks interested in improving the code base, and adding features like “self-service” capabilities for people to fix their own data.
Anyway, that’s all for now: hope all you lefties are happy now! [And remember: nothing says “thank you” like a blogroll link! 🙂 ]
-NZB
Oh, and by the way: I’m thinking about revamping the subcategories. Having over 75% of the weblogs on the list be classified as Insignificant Microbes seems a bit, well, cold. Thoughts? I’m thinking a percentage-scheme might make the most sense, so it expands as the list does. Top 0.1 percent = Higher Beings, Top 0.5 percent = Mortal Humans, something like that…

Well, the Ecosystem seems to be just as popular as the old one — perhaps even more so! I don’t have an exact count, but I’ve been flooded by requests for additions. Looks like about a hundred in our first day in production! Very cool.
A few notes / updates:
First, there have been some complaints about the source of the original list (which came from Instapundit, Vodkapundit, and DailyPundit‘s blogrolls) — namely that it neglects liberal bloggers. (See MaxSpeak here, and Matthew Yglesias here). Max himself actually suggested that I incorporate his own blogroll and someone like Atrios’s to provide greater balance to the list.
I think this is a great idea. But, after burning a large chunk of my weekend on the release, I probably won’t get to doing it myself for at least a few days (I’m back to having a real job, remember).
But, if somebody can help me out by gathering the data, I’d be happy to load it asap. Here’s what I need: a comma-delimited, flat-text file with three columns of data. First column should be the blog’s URL, second column should be the name of the blog, and third column should be the host. Now, the host is the tricky part: see the Add Your Blog page for the rules. And to further help, the file I used for the original load is here — check this to see the formatting I am looking for. (There are many duplicates in this file, as some folks appeared in more than one of the three blogrolls. This is OK, and fine if you send me a file as well — as long as the URL’s are identical the duplicate will be ignored).
If someone could send me a file like that which incorporates the “lefty blogrolls”, I could load it pretty quick. (And actually, if other communities want to do the same, I’ll load them too.)
Next issue: concerns about miscounts and misplacement of blogs on the list. Thus far, there have actually only been a few of these, which is great; hopefully that means the Ecosystem’s accuracy is fairly high. But I do welcome feedback if you think your weblog is being miscounted — just be as specific as you can describing what links you think are being missed and why. It’s usually because of a change in URL, or a host name that isn’t correct.
I will look at each of these issues, and attempt to fix them — but again, it may take a little time, so please be patient.
Which comes to the last point: I do want to implement a method for blog-owners to modify their own data, but haven’t gotten to it yet. This is going to be a higher priority than I had intended, because given the huge response, I do want to make it possible for folks to fix their own problems (else I’ll go nuts). But that probably won’t be until next weekend at least.
Anyway, thanks again to all who have linked and participated, and enjoy…
-NZB

After a long hiatus, the Blogosphere Ecosystem has returned to TTLB. You can find it here, in all its glorious silliness.
This time around, I did it right: it’s fully automated, executing once a day in the early morning using PHP scripts and storing all the results in a MySQL database. And it incorporates some of the basic concepts of the Weblog MetaData Initiative — when it scans a blog, it not only gathers links, but also grabs WMDI tags (if they are there) and allows users browsing the Ecosystem to see them. My hope is that the Ecosystem will encourage interest in WMDI — both from folks willing to add WMDI tags to their weblogs, and from folks interested in directly participating in the development of WMDI standards and tools.
As an homage to the original Ecosystem, I took the list of weblogs from Instapundit and VodkaPundit‘s blogrolls — which was how the original was created. This time around I also added in Bill Quick‘s list, as he’s got a darned comprehensive one himself. This naturally gives the TTLB Ecosystem a very political-blog slant in general, and warblogger slant in particular. Depending on how popular the new version becomes, we may see it branch out into the wider Blogosphere, or perhaps it will remain focused on the political zone. Either is fine by me.
Take a look, sign up to have your weblog scanned if it isn’t being scanned already, and if you want to make a bear really happy, add WMDI tags to your blog.
And remember: the Ecosystem is for amusement purposes only. No wagering!

Well folks, the move is done. I’ve tried to check everything; all seems to be well. But if you notice anything wiggy, please drop me a line and point it out (or just comment on this post).
Special thanks goes to Erica over at for her suggestion on how to change my archiving strategy, and for goading me into making my pages PHP-ready.
-NZB

Seems like most of the world’s DNS servers have got the news that TTLB has moved. Good for them.
I’m a bit occupied with my first week on the new job, so don’t expect any major posting until next week (or perhaps the weekend). (The new job is going very well, I’m happy to say, for those of you who are curious).
But next week, there’ll definitely be some new action around here — or perhaps I should say, [hint]some old action returning…[/hint]

This post is on the new Hosting Matters site
Yup, TTLB is up and moving over to Hosting Matters. (It seems the thing to do these days). So if you observe any odd behavior in the next day or so, that’s probably why.
A question for the peanut gallery: I had to export all of my MT entries and re-import them over on the new site. After some pain, I’ve managed to do that successfully. But, I’ve realized that now all the URLs are different for the posts (MT doesn’t export/import the actual ID of a post).
If there is any way to do the export/import differently, I’d welcome suggestions. But my assumption is that there is not.
So, I’m looking for an easy way to remap selected posts (popular ones I know folks have linked to heavily and the most recent posts) from the old-permalinks to the new ones.
To facilitate this, I’ve put my new archives in an archive directory, whereas the old ones weren’t. So I’d like to be able to create a set of rules that map pairs like this:
http://www.truthlaidbear.com/001726.html
to
http://www.truthlaidbear.com/archives/000959.html
And then have a default rule which, if none of the others applied, would redirect to the front page.
I’d prefer not to have to create a seperate .html file for each redirect, so I’m hoping perhaps there is an elegant way to use a mod re-write rule or other such magic to do this.
Any suggestions on best methods for accomplishing this?

has announced the awards for the first annual Critiquees: check out the links below to see who in the music world is favored by the ‘sinister cabal of superior bloggers’:
Album of the Year
Song of the Year
Songwriter of the Year
Rock Album of the Year
Country-Americana Album of the Year
R&B Album of the Year
Jazz Album of the Year
Electronic Album of the Year
Soundtrack Album of the Year
Reissues and Collections of the Year
Best New Artist