Back of the Envelope

Today Glenn Reynolds posted about the US military changing the Pakistani launch codes. This was odd, because I could have sworn that I had read about this a long time ago--had, in fact, read about it in the very same Telegraph article that Glenn was referencing. I had even posted about it. It seemed odd to me that Glenn would come on this so late, so I checked my archives and found what I had posted, all the way back in February. (In fact, I originally posted it on my old blog.) And, since I'm pretty good at giving credit to whichever blogger points out an article, I found out from which blog I had gotten this information. I find it hard to believe that Glenn missed it when it was first posted, as I know he frequents this blog. Since I know uberblogger Glenn couldn't have just forgotten, I think the only possible conclusion is that he's stuck in a temporal anomaly. I suggest we gather an international team of world-class physicists, bloggers, and blogging physicists in order to fix this problem as soon as possible.

I've just been looking over the past week and noticing how slow my posting has been. The Storyblogging Carnival was my main project this week, consuming much of the time and energy that might have gone into other posts. It isn't a complete reason, however, and I'm wondering what is. Am I burned out on the whole blogging deal? The Memogate story drew a post from me, but I just haven't found much else interesting to say about it. And there are numerous other stories that I haven't said much about: Darfur, Beslan, Iraq. Well, a slow week isn't the end of the world, or even the blog, and we'll see whether I have more to say next week. At the very least, I have some storyblogging I want to do.

Doc Rampage has noticed that his readership has increased. I don't think this is too surprising. I've noticed that he's been posting a lot more recently, and it's all good stuff. Now, if he would only move to a decent blogging service provider.

A little while ago, I asked Chris Lansdown, who works at Powerblogs and serves as my contact whenever I have a problem (I'm not sure whether he's really my official contact--he's the guy whose e-mail I have), whether they had a way to reference just the number of Trackbacks for a post, so that when I link to the Trackbacks section of the individual post page (rather than the separate page just for trackbacks used by default), it shows "0 Trackbacks" or "2 Trackbacks" rather than just "Trackbacks." This morning he e-mailed me to let me know that he'd added a new variable which just gives you the number of Trackbacks. I've since made use of it, as you'll notice on my posts on the front page.

Now, I don't know that Chris created the variable just because I requested it, but I suspect he did. In other news, Powerblogs has added a categories feature, which is now in my sidebar, although I haven't categorized many of my posts yet.

Seriously, if you're looking for a new host for your blog, consider Powerblogs.