Events

You may not have known that the "Contact Us" page failed in almost all cases to send messages, but it's fixed now. Please don't make me enable Captchas.

Yes, even with a new blog engine, sometimes link happens: A new opera about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is in the works You want this T-shirt Chicago Tribune transportation writer John Hilkevitch has 5 ways to improve O'Hare Do you like Corgis? Of course you do Pentatonix recently performed on the Tonight Show Malcom Gladwell is wrong, this time about school shooters The new blog engine does have one key advantage: putting that list together took about 1/3 the time it used to take.

We have a crystal-clear, crisp October morning, perfect for spending three hours in a rehearsal for the Apollo Chorus...sigh. It's also a good morning to test the new blog engine and posting from my friend's car.

The Daily Parker v3.1 is here. We have officially launched on BlogEngine.NET. And this is the 5,000th post since May 1998 (but only the 4,804th since November 2005, when the blog launched independently of braverman.org.) I've maintained a pretty consistent posting rate since finishing my MBA in December 2010. Posting nearly every day is how you get to 5,000 entries: There are still a number of bugs, but nothing really horrible except for the Production instance not being able to properly respond to old...

It's finally here: the Daily Parker running on BlogEngine.NET 3.1. This is, in fact, the first native post on the new platform, visible (for the time being) only to the select few who know the temporary URL. So why did it take me eight weeks to get the new engine up and running? A few reasons: BlogEngine.NET 3.1 is still in development, with the main open source team making changes almost daily. I've made some serious customizations (outlined below) on my own private fork of the source code. I have a...

A new runway opened at O'Hare this morning, and the Sun-Times can't understand why: At a cost of $516 million, a new O’Hare International Airport runway opens this week with so little predicted use — initially 5 percent of all flights — that some question its bang for the buck. Runway 10R-28L should increase efficiency and arrival capacity when jet traffic moves from west to east — now about 30 percent of the time, officials say. That boost will be especially large during low visibility and critical...

The (new) Daily Parker is code-complete for the first launch. There are a few steps to go, like launching the production site and migrating nearly 5,000 blog entries. But maybe, just maybe, it'll launch tomorrow. (Note that the beta site only has the last six weeks of entries, and doesn't include any since yesterday, because I didn't re-run the migration for the last bits of testing.)

Yesterday I successfully ran a complete import of the entire Daily Parker, all the way back to May 1998, and promptly discovered a couple of problems. First, a recent change broke the app's ability to add or edit blog posts; and second, because BlogEngine.NET reads the entire blog into memory when it starts up, it took nearly five minutes for the home page to load on my debugging machine. That means the beta site will only have a few dozen entries up at any point, so I can actually fix the Javascript...

I'm continuing to test the new blog engine. This evening's tests, which I'm setting up with this post, will involve some of the trickier tasks in the migration: Relative links to posts within the blog itself Links to arbitrary files using absolute paths Links to files with relative paths Links to images (like the one below) with relative paths If you're reading this on the new blog engine, and all the links above work and the image below shows up, then the migration tool is complete. Deploying the new...

Cranky Flier this morning has a note about Southwest Airlines' latest ad campaign. I'll let him explain: [W]hat Southwest is trying to do is distract you from paying attention to the actual total cost of your ticket and instead trying to make you focus just on the fees. It gives examples on the website showing how Spirit can charge you up to $294 in fees while Southwest has none. But the reality is that you probably aren’t paying that much in fees, and you’re starting off a much lower base fare. Even if...