Dead Cant Rant

I’m pleased as punch to make my first public WordPress plugin available: Rate My Stuff lets you use a ridiculously simple tag syntax in your posts and pages to create star-based (or any image-based) rating systems like this:

I hope someone else will find this useful. Enjoy!

I picked this book up after seeing it on an endcap display at Barnes & Noble for a couple of weeks, alongside several modern-day fantasy vampire novels. I could give a rat’s butt about vampire novels (other than the great Interview With a Vampire), but this one jumped out at me for some unknown reason, [...]

Well, how could this ever have escaped our attention? Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! In celebration, we have installed Dougal Gunter’s Text Filter Suite Pirate plugin, instantly converting all text in all entries and comments to piratese. Enjoy it for the 5 1/2 hours remaining in the day!
(Who says conservatives can’t have [...]

Thanks to Dr. Dave, we are now a certified spam-free blog. I got tired of my own moderation methods, involving a custom PHP script that ruthlessly deleted every comment in the database matching a (continually growing) set of criteria. Anything written with a certain keyword — say, “internet pharmacy” — was purged, even if you [...]

We’re back! Unfortunately, Hurricane Katrina has destroyed New Orleans, and this is truly a terrible time for the many people caught in the storm’s path. Renee and I have lived through many hurricanes, and Renee in fact spent a week in a storm cellar living off soup and crackers in Bermuda after a hurricane came [...]