Donate to the USSM Dave scholarship
Dave lost out in the internet polling for the $10k fund, which obviously I regard as a pretty huge injustice in the world. If that org wants to award based on clicks though, it’s their money. Still, Dave ran up over 11,500 votes before the last day, when his candidacy got any attention for non-baseball reasons, and I’ve been asked here, elsewhere, and via email, to try and set something up for direct college donations.
I think this is a great idea: Dave is newly married, awesome, the money will make a huge difference, and I have every faith that he’ll do good works with his economics degree, here and elsewhere.
So, I give you the 2008 USSM Scholarship Fund. All contributions go to Dave except what Paypal skims. I’ll match the first $500 myself.
If you want to give Dave some cash directly, email us and we’ll work something out. Contributions are not tax-deductible because I have no idea how to arrange that on short notice.
Updated: hey, it’s a pledgie badge! I have no idea if or how this works, but check it out.
Two things to note: this doesn’t count my $500, which you managed to match in apx ten seconds (brief digression: when that happened, I stared at the monitor with a huge grin of surprise on my face for a good half-minute). And it doesn’t count the not-in-Pledgie donations.
Moderation PSA
I always recommend a glance at the comment guidelines if you want to chime in. I’m sure plenty of people haven’t, and still do just fine because they know how to behave themselves anyway. But should you run afoul of the moderators, give it a read, and if you have questions, email. We do believe civility is compatible with healthy debate. Make arguments, not insults.
One of the things that occasionally trips people up is spelling. Look, we make occasional mistakes and will happily tolerate yours, but there has to be at least a modicum of effort to follow conventions of spelling and punctuation. Comments should be readable, and if we can’t read them, they’ll get moderated.
The spelling thing goes for names too, including the mildly challenging ones. If you’ve got something to say about Rizzs, for example, but can’t be bothered to spell his name right, no thanks. Most of the roster’s pretty easy to spell right now anyway, or has handy nicknames like Yuni or Tui, but historically this has included getting it right on Piniella or Pineiro.
So practice along with me – Zduriencik. Z-d-u-r-i-e-n-c-i-k. Along about the winter meetings at the latest, we’re going to expect people to get it right. If all else fails, you can always go with Jack instead (this assumes he doesn’t hire McKeon as his manager, or trade for the likes of Cust or Wilson).
As a shorthand, Z works fine, one letter shouldn’t be hard to remember. I’d stay away from initials, just because we already have an author who uses initials and has an unusual last name starting with Z. Witty variations are okay, but often they’re not nearly as clever or original as you think they are (I don’t know how many forms of “Richie Sux” we’ve seen). And just so we’re clear, Jay-Z is a rapper, end of story.
Site work
I’ll be catching up on some stuff that piled up while I was out. May be bumpy for a bit.
Two site things
Earlier this week, many people got served an error page instead of the site. I ended up turning off some of the plugins we use, and as near as I can figure it, the issue is that in certain cases (for instance, someone comes in and requests a super-crazy URL, possibly in an attempt to see if there’s a security exploit left unpatched… it’s unclear what causes this) the site refuses to generate the page, throwing an error instead, and that error message gets cached as the current version of USSM… and served out to a ton of other people. We saw this a couple months ago when, under load, it essentially cached and served out a blown version of the home page and I went through this fire drill again.
Now, the why and when I’m still not clear on, or why it seems like it’s far more likely to serve this up to people trying to access www.ussmariner.com instead of ussmariner.com — I have no idea. But I think we’ve got some reasonable solutions worked out, so I’m on that.
The other — I’ve read complaints that the RSS feed sucks since the redesign. I don’t know what the scoop is: I subscribe myself for troubleshooting purposes, and I haven’t seen anything, and the new theme shouldn’t affect the RSS pieces at all. If I had better repro steps, there might be more I could do, but right now I’m trying to pin down the problem.
Thank you content week woooooo!
Last night, I spent a good chunk of time catching up on USSM emails, in particular, writing a ton of thank-yous to people who’ve tossed some money in the tip jar (and I think I caught up). I try to write a note to everyone, and if you didn’t get one, thank you and apologies that it bounced, or got tagged as spam for having a title like (“Re: Payment…”) which happens more often than it should, or, probably most likely, I screwed something up. So I was filled with gratitude and wanted find something to write.
At the same time, I have to admit that I’ve been a little at a loss for ideas for things to write about. Until the season ends and the rumor mill for GM candidates cranks up, there’s not a lot for us to do but watch the season wind down. Even the September call-ups will be a welcome infusion of possibilities and things to watch (including Morrow, Starting Pitcher!).
So here’s the scoop: if you’ve donated, whatever the amount, and there’s something you’d like to see me write about in the next week or so, either drop us an email or comment here. I’ll try and cover as many as we can, but no less than 1/day, for the next week or so. I might batch short questions up or whatever, but we’ll see how it breaks out.
And yes, we’ll be finishing the All-Mariner All-Time series.
I’ve always been sensitive to concerns around having subscriptions, and I’m a little wary of setting a precedent for abusing us as organ-grinder monkeys, but this seems like a cool way to return the good turn many of you have done us. If it turns out to be a bad idea, well, it was worth trying.
And if you haven’t donated and there’s a topic you’d like to see us write about, as always, we’re happy to take suggestions.
Or you could join your peers in supporting the site:
And please keep in mind: I am not Dave. This may affect your suggestions.
USSM redesign request for recs
Hey, I’d really like to spiff up the place and get a nice site design up. Mine is… it’s not cutting it. So — we’re looking for a new WordPress theme, I’ll pay out for it, and rather than put this up on Elance or something, I thought I’d see if the readership had recommendations for design resources.
Random thoughts:
– cheap is good, as our coffers are almost entirely donation-based
– previous WordPress theme work a plus
– Seattle-based a plus
– support in case future WP versions break the layout is extra-good
So please, pointers appreciated.
Live from vacation, we’re up
I’m very tired. That is all.
Blank page issue
I’ve read a couple of reports since ~Friday that USSM in some situations was serving up blank pages. After returning from my annual self-torture, I’ve spent some time looking into it and I’m hoping it’s resolved. We’ll see, of course. And yes, this means I still constitute the whole of USSM’s tech support, and yes, I know that is… less than ideal. I’m doing as best I can. As always, email us with reports of weird site behavior.
Also: we’re still considering our long-term serving situation, and have no updates yet.
Comment guidelines updated
First time in over a year. I was reminded by the Boing Boing debacle. Clarifies some stuff including who’s doing the moderation. Probably could use a nice new reformat to get the sections clearer, easy-to-reference anchors and table of contents, and… maybe a rewrite from scratch, actually. But anyway, I wanted to point out that it’d changed.
Generalized USSM hosting/server/hair-pulling post
Skip on down if you’re not at all interested in this stuff. Which probably limits this to me. Read more