...but it's for a good cause. I just now signed up for a candlelit fundraising walk this Saturday, with an ambitious goal of five bucks over the minimum sponsorship. The money goes to the AIDS service center and Elizabeth Glasier pediatric AIDS foundation - and you can sponsor me on the Internet! Which I hear they have on the broadcast spectrum now.

I'm off to the Greater Bay Area tomorrow, to hang out with old friends and meet the people who might end up on my dissertation committee, if all goes well with admissions, and eat turkey. Lots and lots of deep-fried turkey.

Feel free to invite your favorite trolls to the abortion post, and have a happy Thanksgiving! Or a happy but not particularly gratitude-filled week, whatever.

Buncha comment spam today! I put in a quick fix to restrict access to mt-comments.cgi - if you're trying to post and can't, your browser probably isn't sending a referer string, or else I totally screwed up the .htaccess file. One of the two.

So far, the prevention side seems to be working. If you're upset that your comment is unfairly rejected, and you don't want to start sending a proper referer (actually any referer string will do) or don't know how, let me know, we'll work something out.

Bitch Ph.D. is indulging in a metablogging series; Part 1 includes a satisfying rant against the necessity of continually explaining one's fundamental premises to all the ignorant yahoos on the internet, and the genderedness thereof:

When one is not teaching entry-level courses, when one is trying to think something through at a fairly high level of analysis, having to reiterate basic premises is not only irritating (which is why women so often get "shrill" or "angry" when they're interrupted YET AGAIN, and why it is so fucking wrong for men to say patronizing things like, "don't be insulting, or you'll never get anyone over to your side").
[...]
'm willing--as are we all--to occasionally pause and reexamine the opening chapters, to go back over beginning stuff; this is how we learn, after all, and our understanding of things changes over time (which is another element of blogging, by the way). But when I am in the middle of thinking stuff out, it is really frustrating, and disruptive (and, one suspects, sometimes deliberately so), to be interrupted all the time and asked, "sorry, I came late to class. Did I miss anything important?" And it seems to me that this kind of thing happens a lot more to women bloggers than it does to men. And I think that people should think about this.

Skipping over, for the moment, a handful of men I've met who make me ponder polite ways of saying "Hey, you know how you grinned while interrupting me just now? That was just really fucking patriarchal, blaaaargh chomp chomp!" - as I said, skipping those folks over, ahem... feminists have traditionally coped with such disruptive students by creating explicitly female-only or feminism-friendly "safe spaces", with tightly controlled participation: moderated invite-only mailing lists or even physical rooms with heavy doors to close. Blogs don't have such ready barriers against the trolling masses, but nevertheless some are safer spaces than others. Why?

I'm thinkin' 'bout rhetorical strategies for gatekeeping in the absence of actual gates, which we all indulge in to one or more extents. I think I've used, or at least seen, all of these in effect at one place/time or another:

• Inside jokes and internal references.
• Wheedling attention from other people whose readership is uniformly well-reasoned and insightful, while limiting one's interactions with ignorant yahoos even outside your desired safe space, lest they be tempted to follow you home.
• Interweaving "friendly" topics (food, kittens, gardening, office supplies, how other people are rude drivers) with the heavy stuff - I assume this has a gatekeeping function, if only because niche blogs tend to attract larger audiences. Presumably it's an exercise in healthy community bonding as well.
• Writing in crazy moon language idiolect, euphemistically described as "quirky" or "jargony" or "Danish" (og selvfølgelig her snakker jeg ikke om virkelige dansker, men om mig og min "dansk")
• Aiming entries at particular readers, because you like them and you know they'll be interested, or because you hate them and you know they'll be bored to tears.

These are all very generic means of delimiting social groups, and I suppose I've strayed from the gender-issue pasture... but that's okay. I've got a dinner date tonight, and this is a blog fercrippesake so I don't need an excuse to leave my thoughts half-finished anyway, so there.

Anyone want an invite?

UPDATE: If you still want one, you'll have to participate in some kind of Czech chinchilla photo competition. Awwww, chinchillas, fuzzy!

UPDATE UPDATE: Nah, actually, I've still got several. They're a little bit irritating.

I'm currently installing the show/hide sidebar gadgets script, from scriptygoddess. Because I don't want to have the script included on every single bloody page, file, and MT template, I'm hiding it in a layer of includes which have caused a couple problems. The extended entry has the gory details.
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I've fixed the mysteriously-breaks-everything space at the front of the RSS+comments feed. And there's also shiny xml for the photoblog, not that I've taken any pictures lately.

That is all.

It really has been a while since I've done any serious tinkering here; the backlog of utterly frivolous scripts and crap add-ons is just immense. And sometimes you just gotta fix what ain't broken, but I'm tellin' you, it will be pimpin'.

Before such an eventuality can eventuate, I must complete a list of tasks, which I have put in the extended entry. If you're also looking to add doohickeys to your Movable Type weblog, or you've secretly been hoping that I'd implement Doohickey X expressly for your inexplicable selfish pleasure, you might read on; otherwise, it's very very dull.
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FYI, there's a nice discussion on anonymity, and to an intruiguing but insufficient extent the genderedness thereof, happening over at leuschke.org. Me, I rather enjoy not having to defend my chosen level of thin pseudonymity, so I won't weigh in. But it's interesting nonetheless.

1. I'm actually satisfied with the type and quantity of email accountage I possess. But not only do all the cool kids have Gmail accounts, my lame-o coworkers have Gmail accounts. How did I fall so far behind the trend? And is anyone going to help me catch up? Graham Leuschke is my newest and heroest hero!
2. Somewhen, somewhere, there was a trick floating around for managing all the crap that normally appears in a blog sidebar: mini-tabs. Some fancypants script swapped, on demand/click, bio, links, and crappity-crap, so only one was displayed at once while everything was readily accessible without reloading. Anyone know what I'm thinking of here, and where I can see it in use?