there may be burps and glitches this morning as i install a few plugins. it shouldn’t affect the feeds.

if you look at the footers here, here and here, you can probably guess what i’m installing, but also to give them credit where credit is due, and probably because i’ll screw up and forget to put them in the footer of this blog….

1. Alex Rabe’s Next Gen Gallery ~ i have some plans for the otherwhirled that may include a gallery format on certain photos, especially as we near the next major elections and there will be plenty of photos of Republican candidates ducking past the White House, etc. and gallery-izing my LOLcons and otherwhirled originals (whenever i put more than two up, lol) is just an option i’d like to have.
2. Andrew Ozz’s Shutter Reloaded ~ i use this on my other blogs to preview images. the code is phenomenally clean and it works much faster than Thickbox or Lightbox (the two more popular versions of this type of thing). but if good photoshoppers such as Tengrain are going to post here occasionally, i want to give them the opportunity of providing higher-resolution versions of their talents, and Shutter Reloaded is a grand way of doing it.
3. Oliver Seidel’s ContactForms II ~ used on my other blogs to replace the wordpress comment mechanism, and i simply would like to have it here for consistency’s sake. to implement this one, i have to edit core wordpress files, hence my reasoning for this post as warning that things might go “boom”. i haven’t screwed up implementing it yet, but there’s always a first time. after it’s installed, commentators will have the option to contribute their comments as an email to the author instead of a regular comment, and will have to prove their humanity. sorry about the latter requirement, but in the past week, i have seen the spam beginning to shift off the original otherwhirled over to here. neat-o!

as a reminder, i still would like others involved here in the otherwhirled. if you’d like another place to share your insight, witticism, and/or anything else talk to me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com.

i finally blogrolled the people i said i would blogroll back on thanksgiving. damn, i’m quick, huh?

aw, hell. since i took so damn long, why not show ‘em all again?

• Life & Times of NotSoccer mom. yes, even though i’m a soccer dad.
• Say What?! signs of the times. funny stuff. i have things from here in Sioux Falls i should obviously be submitting.
• Little Bang Theory. just because you should. good writing and good content.
• The Great Endarkenment. frequently channels our inner sixth grade fuck.
• The Future Was Yesterday. oh, yes it was. weren’t you paying attention?
• Namaste. the tagline is over my head, but the content is superb!

oh, and also this individual, whom some of you might know from this place.

okay, i get it now. wordpress.com statistics being necessarily generalistic, i failed to understand, back when i had the otherwhirled on wordpress.com, just how many of my visitors were really just spam-whores looking for ways to sell their wares. in fact, as i noted over on Jonestown in the comments the other day, spam-whores still visit the now-defunct otherwhirled at a rate of several hundred per day. now that the otherwhirled has been on its own domain for several months, i begin to perceive:

1. that i generally enjoy somewhere between 20-30 actual visitors per day.
2. that in part this is because i haven’t spent a lot of time getting the domain registered with all the search engines.
3. but also that i alone am not really all that funny. i draw this conclusion both from the visitation numbers and the number of comments.
4. especially when my work-load of late has forced me to not be very consistent with the quantity and frequency of my posts.

i think this is also largely because i’m being a one-hit wonder in that all i do is snark on photos. i’m not that eloquent of a writer, and i frankly spend so much of my life in PhotoShop and Adobe Camera Raw that to a large degree, the last thing I want to do in my free time is manipulate someone else’s photographs.

there are some elements of this that i cannot really change. clients and family have to come first, and so do certain other activities (i’m one of our state’s handful of soccer referee instructors, and am just a few months shy of being expected to start teaching TaeKwonDo classes on my own). the thing is, i don’t want to stop doing what i do here, especially with at least another 9 months on the contract for domain services, and i don’t want to mix it with my personal blog. as for the latter matter, i don’t really have a good reason as to “why” i don’t want to mix the two, i just feel it would be better if i didn’t. and because hardly anyone spells my name right and my personal blog is one of the ‘original’ vanity domains (i got the domain back in 1995).

so, i’m wondering something. i had this idea, for what it’s worth, a long time ago, back during the summer when Tengrain and Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein were kind enough to guest-blog for me, in fact. so at the risk of appearing to rip off an idea from Fairlane, if the 20-30 of you are aware of anyone who’d like to help the otherwhirled provide something other than snarkery on photos, please invite them to contact me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com. the types of things i’d like to do here, but lack the time to do consistently myself:

1. Onion-esque rewrites of news articles.
2. Unique snarkographic imagery.
3. Editorials of social, political, religious, and/or other pertinent topics—with the understanding that political and religious matters are generally considered snarky cannon fodder.
4. Snarkery on the entertainment industry and the public’s tendency towards materialism.
5. Pretty much anything else that fits into those modes of thinking.

ultimately, i would really like to have several good bloggers participate here—i don’t currently have an intention on limiting the number of them, provided we can all get along and support each other even when we might share idealogical differences. i am also willing to extend the offer to moderate and conservative bloggers, again, given the caveat that we treat each other respectfully.

thank you for your time and your assistance. and thank you to those few of you who have kept visiting here over the months.

wondering why I haven’t been posting as much recently? wonder no more. i finally have the new fine-art site launched. yippee!

commander other is unpleasantly ill with a strep infection that has refused to behave itself properly and go away. and commander other is peeved with his dentist because he started it. it’s a long story involving an old root canal where the roots are now cracked, and pushing and yanking on the infected tooth when commander other’s allergies had his throat and nasal passages inflamed and more than ready to incubate anything that dripped down the back of commander other’s throat. long story short, this morning was the first decent sleep commander other has had since about last thursday. commander other hopes to resume regular posting tomorrow. bah, humbug.

You may have noticed some slight changes to this here bloggy-place I call “the otherwhirled”.

Maybe. Even though the thingy on the right says only ten of you subscribe to my RSS feed, the server metrics software claims I get over 150 pulls on the standard feed URI daily (even though feedburner is supposed to divert those requests to itself), so it’s quite possible that many of you have no idea what the site looks like at all!

At any rate, I added a Google Gadget to the bottom of the left side-bar on the right (and the left side-bar is on the right almost exclusively so that I could refer to it as the “left side-bar on the right”) because Mrs. Other was somewhat responsible for its creation. Or actually very responsible. And because I think it’s just nice to see a government initiative that is genuinely focused on finding ways to make beneficial use of old satellite data instead finding ways to use it against the citizenry.

I also finally found a decent social bookmarking plugin. I use these things a lot, when they exist on the blogs I read, and I’d like to ask you to do the same in return. More people should be aware of my ineffectual ramblings, after all. The plugin supports something like over fifty social bookmarking networks, so if you don’t see one that you prefer to use, drop me a comment and I’ll add it in.

Yeah, I still can’t bring myself to put GW’s vacant stare on my blog today, sorry. We’ll return to the regular programming later this afternoon.

Having been duly admonished via email by a couple of friends, and thanks to suddenly realizing there was at least one unrequited link to the otherwhirled out there, I decided to update my blogroll this morning. I will probably be adding some more throughout the week, especially to the “Inspirations” category, but I needed to stop for now before I become entirely irresponsible on what is already a shortened day because it’s my son’s first day of school, and I’m the official chauffeur.

(So, yes, for those of you that have been wondering, I do fall into the category of “stay-at-home dad”. However, I manage to also run a relatively successful business from home, and I don’t do windows. Unless I’m told to….Anyway, shut up.)

Added this morning to “Inspirations”:

• Boing Boing
• Crooks and Liars
• The Omnipotent Poobah
• Zen Cabin

And to the “Opinions” category:

• Cat In the Bag
• FranIAm
• I Was Just Wondering (Jess Wundrun)
• Lotsa ‘Splainin’ 2 Do

Read and enjoy. And Jess: thanks for the link, and I’m very sorry I missed it before today!