Skorgu writes "I want the gothic Banned-for-life concept that pops up from time to time sooo badly."

Concept schmoncept

On cafepress but no profit for me, no siree
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 7:23 PM on March 19, 2008

A kid is about the same size & weight as a monkey. Monkey tranquillisers aren't that difficult to get hold of. Unfortunately, my strategy has been thwarted thus far by the difficulty in getting a blowpipe though security checks.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:26 PM on February 13, 2008

Yup.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:17 PM on February 3, 2008

I was given this book a couple of months ago and have been studying it daily in preparation for the forthcoming family Christmas. Good job, chap.

Additional text by Stephen Dodson.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 12:59 AM on December 20, 2007

Graham: if I catch you posting in this thread, you're sacked.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 4:05 PM on December 14, 2007

Hey!
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 3:28 PM on October 7, 2007

Very late to the discussion, but I can vouch for Horse being a decent place. You'll need to request that the upstairs bar is opened, though - it's off by default. Also, they can arrange a late licence with a bit of notice.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 6:56 PM on September 21, 2007

metafilter.pastebin.com

Some explanatory text on the posting page may be a good idea.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 6:05 AM on August 14, 2007

I'm at a wedding on the 6th/7th.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 2:22 PM on April 23, 2007

Just tell them you're a Villa fan, you'll get along fine
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 6:14 AM on April 24, 2007

You used my kitten-drowning question. I feel warm and fuzzy.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 12:18 PM on April 1, 2007

Reading Matt's comment, it seems that the missing threads (and therefore the comments you need) are still on the server - it's just the actual mp3 files that got deleted. If you email Matt your mp3, I'm sure he can restore the thread and you'll be able to get your comments back.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:06 AM on March 31, 2007

And the wiki is still going strong...
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 6:25 AM on February 28, 2007

I think we're done here.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 6:47 PM on March 4, 2007

Agreed - is there any way to make the posting page more descriptive? I like the idea of changing the field name to "Summary" rather than "Title"
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 1:42 PM on February 14, 2007

Can't make this Fri - other commitments. Have a good one.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 4:26 AM on February 12, 2007

I signed up for the MeFiSwap and all I received in return were a dozen photographs of myself, taken with a telephoto lens. In each picture there's a red "X" over my mouth and my eyes have been cut out with scissors.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 4:15 PM on February 8, 2007

Awesome. Thanks, Matt.

If people don't like having multiple feeds in their reader, you can use a service like FeedRinse or FeedShake to combine the feeds which interest you into one RSS feed.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:11 PM on February 6, 2007

Yes, thanks ikky. Splendid stuff.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 2:36 AM on February 5, 2007

Sorry, that might have been me. Yesterday I received an email asking me if my "woman" was "disappointed" in my "volume". Not knowing how to react and filled with sexual anxiety omg what if her previous guy could fill a pint glass I forwarded the email onto the entire userbase. If you didn't receive it, check your spam folder.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 4:28 PM on January 25, 2007

I'm in. C'mon, let's go for the record
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:26 PM on January 8, 2007

Aaah, but can you bless it with DaShiv-levels of beautification?
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 6:09 PM on January 9, 2007

You didn't expect to get attacked when you posted your whiney waaah-I'm-getting-this-for-free-and-don't-give-anything-in-return-but-still-want-more MetaTalk question? You really don't come round here much.

Also, what Partial Law said.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 7:27 AM on January 6, 2007

Seconding the request for better sorting / filtering options for the front page and, ideally, the RSS feed.

I really liked the idea that was proposed a few months ago, where the categories in the right-hand sidebar all had checkboxes next to them. Each box was checked by default (showing all posts) but could easily be unchecked if, for instance, you were uninterested in seeing questions in the "Technology" category. Checked/unchecked state would be remembered... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 7:19 AM on January 3, 2007

Mid writes 'Intersting to google up the "campaign ID" tag.'

URLs with the same "campaign_id" have also been posted to Fark, Digg and Furl. He's been a busy chap.

Good spot, Plutor
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 8:11 AM on December 22, 2006

Rhomboid writes 'We already have this. Pay your $5 and get another account.'

Please don't do this.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 3:13 AM on December 21, 2006

I might set up a feed for just those few topics I can answer.

Is this possible? I thought the individual categories didn't have feeds.

Matt, a reminder about that whole "adding the category name to the RSS feed" thing...
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:08 AM on December 12, 2006

fenriq: Yeah, I know about the tag feeds but what I'd really like is for each post to have the question's category included within the feed.

Since I'm British and therefore don't have emotions, the "Human Relationships" category doesn't interest me - I'd like to be able to run the AskMe feed through FeedRinse or similar and strip out anything with labelled with the "Human Relations" category.

Although the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 8:57 AM on December 12, 2006

Sorry I couldn't make it, folks - I was up working through the night :(

Will definitely make the next one, would be great to meet you all
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 9:32 AM on December 10, 2006

It's Skid Row's "Skid Row", isn't it?
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 2:58 PM on December 5, 2006

That looks interesting, cillit - any clues as to who it might be?

I think I'm available on the 8th - still on for the Bricklayers?
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 3:42 PM on November 28, 2006

fishfucker writes: why is it so hard for people to write a working web reader?

I'm not certain that it's the fault of the reader software; the AskMe feed has been screwy in both Bloglines and Google Reader for ages, yet no other feed causes any problems.

I'm convinced that the problem lies with either the feed format or the Mefi server.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 6:07 AM on November 27, 2006

Holy crap, sequential - that's really bloody useful. Didn't know it existed! Many thanks.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 3:20 AM on November 23, 2006

If not, you could use something like co.mments to keep an eye on your threads without having to use RSS. I don't think there's a time limit on that. Or use sequential's RSS facility but have the results emailed to you using something like FeedBlitz.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 2:15 PM on November 23, 2006

Yeah, I'm having the same problem - nothing for a couple of days, then 100+ questions all at once. It's just like The Bloglines Problem, though that now appears to have been solved. It also happens, to a lesser extent, with MeTa - I get 3/4 posts at once, not as they appear on the site.

I'm going to try mirroring the feed and subscribing to that to rule out any server problems as being the cause.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:50 AM on November 16, 2006

In case anyone is still reading this thread: mirroring the feed solved the problem completely. I grab the xml file with curl via cron every 15 minutes and subscribe to the mirrored feed. Everything updates as it should - new AskMe posts arrive in Google Reader in small batches of 3-5, not huge chunks of 50-60.

Since the AskMe XML file works fine from another server, I guess this means the MeFi server is causing (at least part of) the problem?
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 3:51 PM on November 19, 2006

Great stuff, a Christmas knees-up sounds ideal. Either date is fine, with a preference for the 8th.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 4:49 PM on November 5, 2006

done
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 1:34 PM on November 7, 2006

Matt, please reconsider. I've no idea how much work would be required to implement maxwelton's solution, but it seems to be a good compromise.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 2:21 AM on November 7, 2006

Proposing RantFilter as a spin-off site.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 8:23 AM on November 6, 2006

(<5 answers, no best answer marked ) OR "stumped" would work perfectly.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 2:44 AM on November 3, 2006

Good grief. ColdFusion's syntax is pretty 'street'. No wonder I could never get to grips with it.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:02 PM on October 25, 2006

mcwetboy writes 'If anyone can answer your question, including yourself, and any answer is equally valid, it's chatfilter.'

Unless it's relationshipfilter, when it's allowed.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 4:50 AM on October 25, 2006

One more request that the "category" section of the AskMe RSS feed should actually include the question's, you know, category.

Having been away for a few days I've just waded through 250+ questions, over half of which I have no interest in. If the feed included the question's category then I could easily filter out all of the categories I can't help to answer. Please, Matt? Should only require 1 more line in the RSS-generating script.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 4:45 AM on October 25, 2006

"Just lately, someone started obsessing about elephants..."
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 12:54 AM on October 13, 2006

It's a great improvement; fantastic work. A couple of suggestions:

1) Should "unanswered" actually be those posts without a Best Answer? There are plenty of questions with 1 or 2 responses but none which actually answer the question. For example.

2) Filtering by category as per recent examples? With cookies to set your preferred view. Not sure how you'd do this via tabs, though. Maybe use the RH bar?

3) When you... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 5:39 PM on October 12, 2006

OK, but I think you're missing the two really useful features of the C_D mockup:
i) the ability to view the 50 most recent questions without Best Answers, and
ii) the ability to 'drop' certain categories from the front page. For example, you could view all the questions except for those in the "relationships" category. Or just view the "technology", "media" and "computers" categories. You get the idea.
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 12:31 AM on October 13, 2006

I had one favorite fake ID that I'd used for almost every airplane flight, domestic and international, that I'd taken for many years. It says "Laser Safety Officer" and has a photo of me with an eyepatch.

posted to MetaTalk by blag at 7:01 PM on October 4, 2006

For the second time this weekend I'm going to post C_D's suggestion for an improved interface to AskMe. Matt, any thoughts?
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 2:37 PM on October 1, 2006

Sorry, Matt - I wasn't trying to hassle you into commenting; only making sure that you'd seen it. Next time I spot pony potential I'll fire up Outlook.

gsteff: the one feature that C_D's version has over blacklite's is the only display unanswered questions button - this is a hugely useful feature, imo. The "redundant" XMLHttpRequest would disappear if the code was running on the local web server: notice that blacklite's version is using a static copy of AskMe... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by blag at 4:47 PM on October 1, 2006