Pie Palace

For the past couple of weeks, Blogawa has been misbehaving. It’s been quietly ignoring posts from Perspective Ottawa. I use FeedWordPress to aggregate posts from around town, so this weekend I looked into it a little more seriously.

After I upgraded to the latest FeedWordPress, I started seeing errors like:

WP HTTP Error: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 48,382 bytes received

when I manually refreshed Perspective Ottawa’s feed. With a bit of digging, I discovered that there’s a default timeout of 10 seconds in the library FWP uses to download and parse RSS feeds. I’ve pinged the author about it, but in case you’re having a similar problem, here’s my fix:

1. Edit your-wordpress-directory/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php.
2. Search for function fetch. You should find the function near line 1407 (for FWP version 2010.0905).
3. Under the line $feed = new SimplePie();, add: $feed->set_timeout(25);.
4. When you’re done, your code should look something like:
   
5. Go to your blog’s Syndication admin page, and update your feeds. If you get PHP syntax errors, you made a mistake.

With that fix, FeedWordPress and I are now BFFs again.

I’d like to welcome a bunch of new bloggers to Blogawa! In chronological order:

First among equals is GJ Hagenaars‘ now ex-campaign blog. He’s no longer in the Bay Ward municipal race for all the right reasons. It sounds like he intends to keep his blog updated with his thoughts on the future of our city.

Keeping in the electoral vein is Municipalities Out Of Control – sort of a Girls Gone Wild for city politics, but with finances instead of sex and city councillors instead of drunk/stoned/payed teenagers. (Mr. O’Malley, I apologize if you don’t like the simile, but the name of the blog was too good to pass up)¹

Blogawa also welcomes its first online magazine, in the form of UnFolding. The whole thing looks pretty snazzy, particularly the previews section.

iKEN is an excellent photoblog by a Korean exchange student visiting Ottawa. The photos of Korea are particularly cool.

We also get to welcome ThumbShift a cycling blog. Fellow cyclists are always welcome, especially those who post pictures of street art.

1. Mr. Francis, you really don’t deserve this simile. Best of luck on your legal battles. I encourage you to consider joining a religion. Like Scientology. (back)

I’m back. My wrists aren’t 100%, but they’re much better than they were. To prove it, I’ve squeezed another feature into Blogawa: events. Our friendly events robot reads OttawaEvents.org daily, randomly picks some upcoming events, and posts them to Blogawa.

The events are currently jumbled together, regardless of category, but that may change with time.

The Slaughter Daughters (née Bytowne Blackhearts) have joined Blogawa. Welcome aboard ladies.

And what do you mean there isn’t a league game until May 30? Awww…

As alluded to last week, Blogawa is undergoing a reskinning. The new site will be pretty much the same in terms of functionality, except that it should look a bit nicer. The only major change will be the use of Gravatars to provide avatars for authors.

The URL for the RSS feed will change. I should be able to set up a forward to send your RSS reader to the appropriate place, but I may not. So if you find that your feed reader breaks, come back to blogawa and resubscribe.

Aaaany day now…

Blogawa is ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. So I’m redesigning the look. As part of the redesign, I’m putting together a wordmark that will be shown on the mast head. Here are some of the possibilities:

(The source HTML is available as well)

What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Constructive criticism?

I’ve added Ken Yam’s blog to Blogawa. I’m starting to wonder about the mix of blogs that I’m feeding from. If one extrapolates the population of Ottawa from Blogawa’s contributors, there would be something like 400,000 transit officianados in our city. I think I’m going to have to go on another recruiting binge.

Triple Beaver winning (and donut eating) blogger Zoom has joined Blogawa! If you would like to join Blogawa, fill out an application.

I’ve added two new contributors to Blogawa: Jen Gilbert and Transit Ottawa. Welcome aboard! If you want to get your blog added to Blogawa, hit the add form.

This is a very long response to XUP’s post (seen on Blogawa) about stripping titled Peelers and Peelees:

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I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned the other side of the degradation equation. What about the customers?

My one noteworthy stripper experience was in Gatineau at a fairly classy club. Being young and foolish, I payed for a lap dance.

Before and after the dance, we chatted. The young woman told me a little about herself, and I told her generalities about my life. When I said I was a software developer she told me how much she loved staying in and playing video games when she was growing up. When I said I had just finished university, she told me that she was saving up to go to school. Funny coincidences, but I didn’t think much of it until after I paid her for the dance – she hugged me, kissed my neck, and told me her “real” name, and said to come back the next time she was working.

I’m not sure if I have a “solid sense of self” (or had one at the time), but that rattled me for a good week or so. Who wouldn’t be interested in a member of the opposite sex who sits in your lap, has a good uh, sense of rhythm, and hangs on your every word? I knew she was tapping me as a repeat customer, but I still wanted to go back. She’d done the equivalent of putting a smiley face on the bill, and I was willing to open up my wallet.

My sweetie tells me that it’s the same story in clubs with male dancers. The dancer treats the clients well, wooing them for cash.

If you want to talk about degradation, remember that the knife cuts both ways. I’m sure some patrons can walk into a club, enjoy the experience, and walk out. But I suspect that a fair number of the regulars are coming back compulsively. They’re being played directly by the dancers and indirectly by the club owners.

As to the question of degradation of the dancers, I can’t help but notice that 100% of our non-scientific sample of ex-strippers enjoyed peeling. I doubt that’s true of all dancers, but to say that “I don’t believe for an instant that a woman with a solid sense of self would choose to [dance] for a living” seems to be painting women with a pretty broad brush. Take a few minutes to skim http://lettersfromworkinggirls.blogspot.com. They aren’t strippers, and it sounds like most of them don’t work on Gladstone, but they sound like the enjoy their work.