The big bloggy news this weekend is that Pajamas Media is shuttering its ad network come March 31st. A number of farm-league conservative bloggers (Protein Wisdom, The Anchoress, Ace of Spades, etc.) are apparently worried that they'll no longer be able to keep up their writing without the revenue.

One the one hand, I'm a little startled -- perhaps I'm naive but I didn't realize that the folks running those blogs were actually making money doing it. Apparently while I was holed up in my software development cave, the online ad market bounced so high that people could support themselves as moderately popular political bloggers. While I don't fault them for being disappointed at the online ad market's collapse, it feels like 1999 all over again.

Still, Pajamas Media isn't exactly steering itself in an inspiring direction. Fronting Joe the Plumber as a war zone correspondent feels a little gimmicky. The Long Tail is getting more treacherous these days, or at least getting squeezed.

Update: Atlas Shrugged has some thoughts on the closing as well; apparently the smaller blogs on its roster never got much of a cut, but her expectations seem to have been a little high to start with...

I was one of the original pajama bloggers. I thought PJM was going to rival AP, UPI, Reuters. Finally, a news portal of citizen bloggers and journalists that would counter the Pali stringers and left wing biased journalists of the news gathering agencies.

Doing actual solid reporting -- as opposed to critiquing and commenting on news stories that other people have written -- is real work that takes time and money. While there are some great examples of it out there, I'm not sure most of the politibloggers on Pajamas ever showed much interest or aptitude for that side of things. An old Internet friend of mine, Adam Tinworth, has a lot of interesting observations from the other side: he wrangles the online efforts for a large traditional media company, and his blog is must read material for anyone interested in the shifting media landscape.

Almost a year ago, I took down my blog and replaced it with a photoshopped Judge Parker cartoon. The plan was to tidy things up and cull out some old Drupal 4.7 code that I still had lying around, but Murphy's Law intervened. After quite a bit of hacking, I'm happy with where it's at -- not perfect, but much nicer than it was. For the Drupal geeks in the house, I thought I'd give a quick tour of the pieces that I'm using and what I'll be adding in the near future.  Continue reading...

A hectic weekend with lots of scrambling, alas. At work, I've been trying to get a long-running series of strange build problems resolved. They seem to trace back to Visual Studio misplacing a few GUIDs during the creation of a project; for reasons unknown, it chose last week to start exploding and complaining about it. I spent several hours this weekend recreating half of our projects form scratch and test-building them one by one, in various combinations, to make sure that everything was working properly.

On the Drupal front, Earl Miles checked in a huge number of patches to the Views project over the weekend. Lots of subtle but important features have been ironed out. For example, the way the module builds argument-based page titles and breadcrumbs has been vastly simplified. I chipped in this afternoon and whipped up a patch that added title-subtsitution in blocks, and the use of arbitrary wildcards in path-based args.

After looking over al of the changes and additions, I started getting the itch and remembered a few of the conversations Earl and I have had about how Views could be used to replace Drupal's current blog module. It can (easily) do all the work of building filtered lists and so on -- it's just a matter of wrapping it all up in a package that smooths the rough edges and does the configuration for users automatically. To that end, I've started tinkering on a new 'blogging' module for Drupal. Rather than providing a specific content type for blogging, it will use Views to create blogs as collections of arbitrary content. It will also leverage Views' existing features to make both single-user and group blogging cleaner. In addition, I'm aiming to enable more complex multi-blogging systems. Letting one users maintain two separate blogs on one site, each with a different emphasis, should be easy once the module's in place. It's geeky but terribly fun.

And speaking of geeky, I changed the icon for my blog from the theme default to... An icon of Goldbug. Goldbug, of course, is the Transformer originally known as Bumblebee. Any fellow children of the eighties should hum the theme song at this point. More than meets the eye, and all that. Thanks.

Catherine and I finished off the weekend with a nice leisurely walk down to the river. When we first moved here, I was uncertain about the area. Catherine said she thought I would love it here, but I'm a creature of habit, and... well... it was new! But over the past almost-year I've grown to really enjoy the neighborhood we're in. My wife, she knows what she's talkin' about.