As Gandhi said, “I like your Christ, but I don’t like your Christians very much.”

Second!! Do I actually have to read D’Souza now?

Shorter Dinesh D’Souza: me me me me me me me me me

Dinesh really summed it up pretty well himself:

“D’Souza is a goddamned idiot.” “Odious little toad.” “D’Souza is full of shit.” “A smug, joyless twit.” “Total moron.” “Little turd.” “Two-faced liar.” Etc, etc.

OK, so I finally bit the bullet and registered on this site so I could actually say what I’ve wanted to say since you moved – this SUCKS. Even registering didn’t work until I did a CTRL-F5 refresh of the comments page.

I came to Tbogg over the past 3 years or so to read (as in, start at the top and finish at what was the top last time I was there) a series of well-illustrated posts, not to stare blankly at the collection of unformatted (as in, quote boxes don’t work and the images are missing) snippets with a “Read More..” link below.

It’s a fairly widely recognised rule of acquisition in business that the acquirer generally ends up destroying the value in the acquiree through the process: Big Guy buys Little Guy because Little Guy has Something Special, and during the process Something Special gets lost or crushed under the weight of the Big Guy; this has happened here, and although I’ll be checking in weekly or so to see if the basic formatting and readability issues are fixed, this is really the end of my TBogg journey.

I’ve never been a prolific commenter so there’s nobody to miss me, and no doubt in the scheme of things your readership will grow far beyond what tbogg.blogspot.com was accomplishing but Something Special has been lost, and it’s a crying shame.

Jane et al – likewise, I read FDL daily right back at the start, on blogspot but drifted away as business and “Grand Scheme of Things” started outweighing passion and spontaneity. I think the first redesign was when I really deleted the bookmark and stopped clicking the Atrios heh-indeeds. You have a clunky, annoying site that tries to both aggregator and publisher and ends up being plain annoying.

Gridlock, don’t keep your feelings all bottled up – what do you really think?

As for Diminesh, hasn’t anyone ever told him that when you logroll yourself, it’s just masturbation, and produces nothing but sputum?

If I had some mad skills I’d show you in a more graphic way, but go here:

http://tbogg.blogspot.com/

..and then compare it with this:

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/

Now tell me which is more inviting, readable, aesthetically pleasing and usable? If you say “FDL!” then you need some serious help, and if you say “blogspot” then I feel FDL owes TBogg some hurried coding – however, inevitably the Business Unit of FDL, Inc likes nice high pageviews and depth of visit when setting advertiser rates…

Well, I’d say tbogg.blogspot.com is equally funny, but quite ugly, really.

TBogg:
That READ MORE button needs a blink tag to make the page completely impossible to read or enjoy.
READ MORE

As a longtime reader, and sometimes commenter, I just registered to agree with gridlock. The Read More button is annoying. I like the old blog because I could read everything I needed to read on one page. Is the ad revenue is click-driven or what?

Congrats on the move TBogg, but the old, ugly site was more user friendly.

I use the read more button because I think you guys could really use the exercise of making just one more click. Feel the burn.

One day, you’ll thank me.

Gridlock is right. I will still keep coming for the quality snark, but this format is dry and uninviting. I really think the last couple rounds of “improvement” in blogging sites has not been for the better. Keep it Simple, Son.

By the way, shorter D’Souza for everything he writes: “I’m a fucking asshole.”

The existence of “Read More” isn’t the totality of the problem – you’ve gone from a rich, descriptive blog containing lots of nice YouTubery and very, very nice imagery to a “main” page that looks like the result of an SQL query and a cheap-ass CSS template.

And it’s not “one click”, it’s gone from:

1) Click TBogg in favourites
2) Read

To:

1) Click TBogg in favourites
2) Find last post I read
3) Click “Read More” on the post above
4) Wait for page to load
5) Read
6) Click “back”
7) Wait for home page to load, and browser to jump back to last position
Scroll up slightly
9) Repeat steps 3 to 8 until I’m all up to date.

I’ll pass your complaints on to management.

Thank you for flying Tbogg-airlines.

Seriously, I’ll see what I can do. I’m not having any problems with loadtimes and formatting or whatever, and I’ve tried it on four different computers, my laptop, and the L&T Casey’s MacBook, so I’m not really sure what people problems are. I agree that the design isn’t the cleanest on the tubes, but it’s still a work in progress.

Somehow we’ll make it more user friendly.

Well, this kind of annoyed me when Sadly, No! started doing the “more” thing. After much contemplation, I believe what actually was annoying me was that I have to go back to the main page to get to the post before this one which I haven’t read, and the one before that which I haven’t read, etc. Could you arrange something similar to their “click for previous post”/”click for next post” solution after we hit the “read more” button? Just in the interests of us not missing posts buried between ones we’ve just read and ones we’ve read earlier.

That, I think, would solve all my problems, though I’d still appreciate a larger font so I don’t have to play with my keyboard when I get here and when I leave here. I’m not going to stop reading until/unless either is fixed, but I have missed a couple of bits because they’re small items buried between other small items.

I may not be explaining this well, and if everybody had to live in such a way that it’d make my life easier you’d all have killed me years ago.

I’m grateful the comments threads have shaken themselves out, though. You deserve greater readership, but I dunno how many people who posted on the first couple of threads had actually bothered to read or how many were just regarding your new thread as an empty lot in which to play baseball.

Shakesville has a feature that let’s you open the article and still continue without closing. It’s more linear. There are too many clicks to read in this format, and that is without going to a link.

I’m not having any speed or loading problems, and it all seems fairly efficient to me. I know change is hard sometimes, but (1) Mr. Bogg says things will evolve, and (2) this is a free source of entertainment, so I’m not as likely to start swatting at the golden goose that fabricates this gold than I am at say, something I am actually paying for.

Things will shake out as needed, have a little faith, or at least temper the slagging on TBogg; he isn’t forcing you to come here. It’s a bit like the wingers going insane over sex on teevee, they can turn it off or find another channel if they are so offended; draw any parallels at your own (free) will. Can’t we all just chill a bit, let time work its magic, and just be happy that Tbogg didn’t hang up the keyboard all together?

To clarify, I wasn’t being all ungrateful and “fix this free service NOW!” but I feel strongly about the old design and the new lack-of-design.

Keep up the good work..

Things will shake out as needed, have a little faith, or at least temper the slagging on TBogg; he isn’t forcing you to come here.

Gah, stop using the Fox News Playbook – criticism of FDL’s slapdash design is hardly “not supportin’ the troops”

I don’t mind having the click through to read the whole thing, but I think you lose a lot by not having the pictures on the front page. Part of what made Tbogg Classic such a joy was your inspired choice of photos (and captions–remember Jesus forgetting the safe word?) to accompany the text. The front page would work a whole lot better if those photos weren’t hidden.

From the atheists you hear statements like this: “D’Souza is a goddamned idiot.” “Odious little toad.” “D’Souza is full of s**t.” “A smug, joyless twit.” “Total moron.” “Little turd.” “Two-faced liar.”

Thus demonstrating that they are the reality-based group.

Yes, TomHilton. It’s the loss of the pictures I dislike most. You would open the page and start laughing (or at least chortling). Now I have to work for my free laughs. In the immortal words of the immortally immortal Maynard G. Krebs: “WOOOOOOOOOOOOORK??????????????????????”

Where’s the techie here? This is the message I get on Firefox when it crashes (almost as soon as I open the site):

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: getProxyXonfigURL

Then nothing. Can’t even click ”OK.” I have to force-quit Firefox and restart it.

BUT. TBogg works fine on Netscape 7.2.

I (still) use an iBook G4, OSX 3.9. Maybe that’s my problem.

I have to agree with those who say we need the marvelous pix+captions on the front page, even if we have to have the ”Read More” button for the full text.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I’m going to get in big trouble for putting in my two sense, but jeez…give it some time. It’s been really hard on Tom that you guys are upset. The only reason he blogs is to make people laugh…IT’S NOT ABOUT MONEY AND IT NEVER WILL BE. As another understanding commenter said, he deserves a wider audience and this is the way he chose to make that happen. We do understand the frustration…the site isn’t perfect and lots of work is going on behind the scenes to make things better. Just remember why you read Tbogg in the first place…the snark, the music, the bassets, the chuckles and the coffee-coming-out -of -your-nose laughs. It’s all still here…..just in a different package.

I hit the “read more” button and a boxing glove loaded on a spring popped out of my computer and punched me in the face and then my computer told me I was ugly and stupid (It didn’t actually say that but told me that I remind it of Dinesh, which is pretty much the same thing). I like the old site better because this one is mean.

But Mrs Tbogg, it is a bad package. I miss hardware stores where you can pick out the number of fasteners you need, without plastic packaging. The old format was better. This one sucks.

Don’t EVEN let me get started on blisterpacks.

Oh great. Now my wife feels like she has to defend me. If my mom shows up you guys are gonna be in soooooo much trouble.

It hasn’t been that hard on me. Ive reached the point where I only weep continuously while I’m awake. I still have sleep and death to look forward to.

That’s it, hide behind a woman’s coulotte. I should have expected that from a flaming liberal America hater, like YOU.

Okay it’s been hard on me. He’s actually crying in his sleep, along with the snoring. He just doesn’t want you all to feel bad…..

OK, let’s get back to what’s-his-name. I frankly don’t believe anything in his article, given the history of lies from him and other defenders of the faith. I don’t believe all those “atheists” posting at Dawkins’s site saying how what’s-his-name demolished their guys. And I don’t believe all those nice Christians feeling so sorry for them.

I’m computer illiterate, and I had very little problem with the registering and posting. The complaints above seem petty and besides, you know TBogg is worth it. Feel better Mrs. TBogg?

I use Opera (both on a Mac and Windows) and I really don’t mind the new format. Compared to the old FDL, which gave me all the flashing ads/slow loads/locked browser problems people are complaining of, this version is smooth and painless to me. Opera has the zoom text feature and several ways to use it, and also a “fit to width” button so you can zoom without having to side-scroll. If that is an issue for you, check Opera out. The biggest thing for me is that the links are different-colored than the text: the old FDL didn’t do that, and I turn off link-underlining.

Okay, so this iteration is better than the old FDL. What about Tbogg?

Once I got the hang of clicking the “Read More” button for every post, as opposed to, say, “Sadly, No!”, where it is an occasional thing, it is no more painful than having to click on the Comments link and resize the resulting window (for *every* post!), it actually is some more readable for me. A “newer/older post” link would be awesome, though (not next/previous, because that confuses me temporally).

steverino

I do…thank you.

Oh man, now I feel bad.

I’m just sitting here in my comfortable basement enjoying a faux cheese snack waiting for the free entertainment while TBogg is scraping his knuckles tuning the intertubes.

My apologies.

Anyway, with the exception of the format complaints, for the record, the site does work in Safari on OSX.

I’m happy TBogg is getting a wider audience, but at the same time I’ll miss the coziness, peeling wallpaper, and dingy ceiling at the old place. The same thing happened when Drum went to Washington Monthly and Kos sold his soul to the devil (back in the day, a long comment thread was 50).

In other news, I found that my personal hell is being stuck on small commuter plane with a dead iPod and having to listen to a “military contractor” lecture a fellow passenger how Iraq is going great; Clinton deployed 7 times the troops to 5 times the places as Bush; Germans pay a 57% income tax to wait 2 years for routine doctor’s appointments; and everyone on CNN is out to destroy the American way of life, except that great American Glenn Beck.

Don’t cry please; it doesn’t become you, and the holidays are upon us, and you guys should be doing something more fun than commenting to each other on a user-un-friendly blog. I think the new blog sucks needs some work, but I really like the spiffy buttons in the comment box, which make it easier to do the tags for the really important stuff such as links to good dogs and other stuff:

. . . along with the snoring.

Fascinating.

Please fix it so the pictures, which are a big part of your thing, appear on the main page.

Merry Christmas! I hope your holidays, no matter what god or not you holiday about, are sweet with lots of things and stuff.

The old place was fun. Hopefully the new place will be just as fun. It kind of reminds me of a computer upgrade – “This new one is so clunky & hard to use. Why, I remember on the old system, all you had to do was…” I a few months, you forget the old ways. My only fear is not being able to read all the comments (without stopping for an hour or two). The snark in the comments is almost as good as the snark from the master on the front page!
It does my psyche good to have a place to stop & giggle at the idjits out there. Thanks!

ps: Dinesh is a pathetic tool. Pretty soon, a useless tool.

FWIW, I’m not all that happy with the new format, either, and I’ve been hanging around the place for quite a while. Surfing from my MacBook, I can use Command-click to open each “Read More” link in a new Camino or Safari tab, which makes it a little easier. Not much different than getting an RSS feed. But the page itself is…well, I hate to use a term like “fugly,” but that’s not far off the mark. Too busy for my taste.

Speaking of feeds, the RSS feed doesn’t seem to be operational.

My God, it sometimes feels SO good to be technically ignorant!! My computer apparently knows I couldn’t possibly comprehend these complex glitches that are irritating everybody else, so it just shows me the site! I click “read more” and there it all is! I didn’t even know I was supposed to be whining about this. TBogg, turn to saintly Satchmo for an example of patient fortitude. You’ll get it right.

I’m computer illiterate, and I had very little problem with the registering and posting. The complaints above seem petty and besides, you know TBogg is worth it. Feel better Mrs. TBogg?

As another computer illiterate, I second pretty much this entire comment. Hitting read more doesn’t bother me because I read all of Mr. T’s posts anyway. And I do need the exercise. I’m sure all legitimate criticisms are being reviewed by the management.

Sorry to be off topic. Dinesh is still a fuckin’ idiot!

He’s actually crying in his sleep,

If he is keeping the dogs up at night with his whimpering, please make him sleep on the sofa. We don’t want Satchmo and Beckham to suffer. This was obviously not their decision.

Wow, whatta buncha of WATB’s. Seriously, think of all the keystrokes you could have saved by not complaining. At this rate, you’ll never reach the end of the internets. Personally, I like this site a lot better….mainly because I can’t stand the Haloscan comment format. Plus, the site has that modern, breezy, West Coast look and feel. For those that hate change, let me recommend this place: http://www.freerepublic.com Now that’s a place where technology and common sense will never threaten the status quo.

Oh yeah, Dinesh knows how to fiddle for his dinner.

I’m happy TBogg is getting a wider audience, but at the same time I’ll miss the coziness, peeling wallpaper, and dingy ceiling at the old place.

But those water stains up there…sometimes they could be reeeeally scary in the middle of the night. You know, when the branches in the dying maple were scraping against the window and the moonshadows were shifting all over the carpet…

Okay, I’m done whining. I’ll open Netscape to read you, Teeb, but this is the absolute LAST thing I’m going to cut you slack on, hear?

Oh, and I have to say that it is seriously nice to hear so regularly from the lovely and bootalicious MRS. T.

Dinesh D’Souza is an idiot.

Also, I’ve found that clicking on the comments button instead of the READ MORE button results in way faster pageloads for some reason.

Mouse-wheeling up to the top from there is where I get my burn.

Yes, indeed, Dinesh D’Souza is an idiot regardless of format.

Pardon, a FUCKING idiot. There, fixed.

Bogg: The arthritic first joint of my right index finger already hurts all the effin’ time because I spend 16-18 hours a day webbing it up. This is not helping. By the way, most advertisers can visit a site & see why there are so many clicks (or not). It’s like the tee vee networks stunting during sweeps months.

Tbogg, If your mom actually reads this stuff, she deserves some kind of medal. The basset penis is innocuous enough, but even I wouldn’t inflict the Hewitt photo on my mom.

And InnocentBystander, settle down. Most of us are just saying we find the format annoying, which I think we recognize is neither Tbogg’s fault nor even something he has much power let alone time to fix. Jesus, if I bitch about the small print on my ballot, it’s not a sign I hate democracy, okay? It’s an accessibility issue. I like Tbogg enough to enjoy it when he is more accessible to me. I recognize that this is not his problem but mine, and by commenting on it here, helpful people have actually told me how to solve it on my end. Not so much a waste of effort on my part, and it hardly makes me a freeper. And frankly, I’ve personally seen enough fucking disastrous change over the last seven years to fear it a little.

One more thing: I’ve had no technical difficulties w/ my crappy low-memory used institutional devil-box w/ XP & Idiot Exploder 7™ but (especially as I’m guessing the median age here must be in the thirties) you really should make the font larger. ‘Though I’ve just discovered (based on suggestions above) that the “Change Zoom Level” whatsis on the IE7 toolbar (lower right) works, except that everytime a new comment is announced it moves the whole mess to the left. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t work, because it keeps moving back & forth on its own for no apparent reason. (?)

“Bigger font now! Bigger font now!” Keep chanting & we’ll get it.

Oooh, just noticed the links to different items @ the top & bottom of the page, & no newer/older, previous/next problems either (as long as you read left to right).

Now then, does underline work yet? Not in preview.

Ooh! Are those links new or am I an even bigger moron than we all thought? Very pleased, almost to the point of inflicting smilies on the folks here but I know better. Thank you, however. I’m also delighted with the link button, I hate having to sort out the embedded link html, so a belated thank you for that.

MBouffant–

Get Firefox. Just started running it today and it’s incredible.

Mrs. TBogg, please be assured that we are all very grateful that TBogg is willing to spend so much time & thought & energy entertaining us… and that you are gracious enough to put up with him, and with us. (Although if you didn’t want snoring, you should never have chosen to live with bassets.)

On the other hand, I liked it better when the pictures on the front page had entertaining captions, and were not trying to sell me stuff. And while we’re bitching about discussing formatting, I think separating every comment with all that aesthetic white space and dramatic lavendar bars is sucking some of the famous rowdy energy right out of your posters’ brains. It’s hard to get the call-and-response working when you find yourself in an infinite expanse of knee-high gated allotments, each painted to match all its neighbors and carefully labelled with its community-issued registration number. Kind of like moving from a scruffy working-class streetcar suburb to one of those gated communities: You may have just as many nice, funny neighbors but it takes longer to get to know them as individuals.

Shorter Dinesh: “My deity is better than your dev null.”

I don’t suppose it ever occurred to D’Souza that the only reason he’s won debates with atheists is because no one with even half a brain would waste their time arguing religion–or lack thereof–with someone who caters to the mouthbreathers. Hark! Did something up in The Covenant just go limp!

Are we actually complaining about free ice cream here? Y’all could just Read Teh Whole Thing™ in a news aggregator with no clunky page load issues or ads (shhh, don’t tell Jane!). You miss the comments, unless you click through, of course. But all the Tbogg snark is there.

and the links to the previous and next post are conveniently located at the bottom of each page for your pleasure. Read a page, go to the next, simple as that.

Gah, now I’ve gone and got Mrs TBogg all mad – we only get upset because of all the love there is for Mr TBogg, and I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision to climb on up out of your comfortable rut and haul ass across to Jane’s place – so while there are minor design issues on the whole I’m grateful that (presumably) this gig offers a better chance of continuing to support The Bassetts.

As I said, keep up the good work

Ruthie, he did not “win” any debates, except in his own mind (and the other numbskulls’). Daniel Dennett has much more than half a brain, believe me. There is absolutely no way a sophist like what’s-his-name could out-debate him on any topic. No offense, though. We’re on the same side.

As one of tbogg’s real old-timer’s (hey remember when I sorted your blog roll for ya?) I have to agree with pretty much everything gridlock says.

And the “more” button is just fucking stoopid. All it does is clog up the intertubes and wear out my mouse.

Of course, it does increase a site’s click counts/page views, which is all that really matters, right Jane?

But, tbogg, sigh, I luvs ya too much to go away, so I’ll just have put up with it.

yeah, yeah, “old-timers” should not be a possessive.

I would also prefer a simpler, “flatter” format and larger fonts. Just make it more basset-friendly and that should make it almost simple enough for me.

I just registered to say that regardless of the unfriendliness of the new blog, as long as the TBOGG generated content is of the same high quality, I don’t give a shit what it looks like. I’d read TBOGG if it were a black background with white writing, and that shit gives me a migraine.

Ten reasons why beer is better than jesus :

10. No one will kill you for not drinking Beer.

9. Beer doesn’t tell you how to have sex.

8. Beer has never caused a major war.

7. They don’t force Beer on minors who can’t think for themselves.

6. When you have a Beer, you don’t knock on people’s doors trying to give it away.

5. Nobody’s ever been burned at the stake, hanged, or tortured over his brand of Beer.

4. You don’t have to wait 2000+ years for a second Beer.

3. There are laws saying Beer labels can’t lie to you.

2. You can prove you have a Beer.

1. If you’ve devoted your life to Beer, there are groups to help you stop.