A group that we'll call "Mountain View Legion of Decency" (MVLD) has decided that at least one of the images that was included in our "Shirtless Hunks" gallery was, well... not what they consider decent.

Their decisions on these matters are final and not something that can be appealed. Unfortunately for us, what they think makes a difference because the outfit has something frightfully close to monopoly control over small web sites like ours. It means they can come awfully close to shutting us down.

We doubt that anything we do will make a difference to MVLD, but -- just in case -- we've decided to do our best to satisfy the MVLD by adulterating pictures that might be deemed offensive by the non-governmental censor. We're calling the process of altering the photos "googeying" to call to mind a 1950s architectural style called "googie". MVLD seems to opporate on and seeks to impose upon the web 1950s mores that were common at the same time "googie" architectural style had become common.

It strikes us as appropriate to use the made-up term "googey" to refer to the censorship we're encouraged to undertake because that architectural style developed at a time of significant semi-official censorship, but the style saw itself as forward-looking and ultra modern.

We've so far googied only one of the pictures in the gallery, but there are several others to which we'll give the treatment during the next few weeks.

We will, however, make the original un-googied versions of the montages available in a new gallery. Images in that gallery will, however, be available after next week only to registered members of this site.

We do it that way only to avoid offending MVLD by having them on a fully public page (which MVLD doesn't like).

Membership to the site is free and easy to set up. Click the Join link in the upper right of this or any page. And don't worry about giving out your email address. We won't trade it, sell it, or use it to send ads to you. In fact, we've never yet used one of those addresses for anything at all except to maintain unique set of users.

Since I don't often hear from visitors to the site, I'm not sure we have many visitors who come back often enough to notice something like this, but if we did then such an imaginary visitor, then that person would probably have noticed that the ads that used to show up on all pages of the site are now turned off.

It turns out that the company -- one which is trying its best to become the non-governmental-organization (NGO) censor of the web in the US -- decided that one of the pictures included in our gallery is "adult or mature" content.

I won't mention the company's name because they don't like to be criticized and are known to respond with even more viscous actions if a site questions the company oft-expressed and self-professed "do-good" nature.

Because of their un-appealable decision, the NGO censor canceled this site's advertising contract. (As they have with several other sites, they waited until the cash in the account technically owed to this site had risen to about $150 before canceling the account -- an action that means they'll probably keep all the accumulated funds owed to the site.)

Since those ads were the only thing that allowed me to pay for the server used for the site, I'll be faced with a tough decision in September when the bill for the server comes due again. But that's the kind of thing that the NGO censor seems to see as its duty. It wants to exercise ever-greater control over the content on the web -- just as the company's partners in the Chinese government exercise that kind of control (with this NGO censor's help) over that country's web sites.

If they reinstate the ad account (which is doubtful, since this obnoxious company doesn't like its tight control to be challenged), I might respond the way the NGO censor expects and alter the offending pictures in a way that would make them acceptable to the censor. I'll call it "googeying" the pictures (just to pick a nonsense word).

I haven't decided yet whether it's worthwhile to googey the pictures, but it's one of the alternatives, I suppose.

The nifty little widget that you see to the right is free, and you can use it on your own blog or social network site. You can even customize it with appropriate border color for your site and adjust its size to fit perfectly in any space you have.

If you're satisfied with this size, then click the "Options" button to get the code that you can copy to your site.

If you'd like to change colors or size, click "Get this widget" at the bottom of the display. You'll be taken to the SpringWidgets site where you can specify any changes you might want to make and then generate the code to copy onto your site.

And even if you don't have your own blog, you could put it on your Windows desktop to get a quickly updated view of the day's gay news.  Click the Options button and choose the first icon on the top left. (You'll have to download and install a small bit of code from SpringWidgets for it to work on your desktop.)

You can see a narrow example of the widget in a different color that displays only the headlines on any of our blog index pages (at the bottom of the right-side column). Just click "Get this widget" and you'll be able to customize it with the appropriate width and color for your site.

See another version of the wider example with both headlines and summaries on our MySpace page. [no music played] (Typical of MySpace, however, the "Get this widget" link doesn't work because it takes users away from NewsCorp/Fox sites to the actual web. Get the wide code here or click the Options button there.)

And yes, you could change the feed to something else, but we hope you'll give Qnews a try.
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Thanks to 'N Touch News Network, a very nice website for an LGBT magazine in Arizona, for picking up the widget. Looks great! By the way, we don't really know where the widget might be, but happened to notice that because a few clicks came our way from there. (And we can tell which site clicks come from most of the time.)

Another step toward getting things where I'd like them to be.

A few weeks ago, I added direct links to the source blogs on blog-specific tag pages, like the tag pages for QTicker World, QTicker Seattle, and GaySeattle.

But there's a different way to access site-wide tags and I couldn't figure out how to do the direct link for technical reasons that I'll explain below. While looking for something else, I found a post on the Community Server forum that tells me exactly how to make those links.

The problem arises because the page showing sitewide tags uses CSControl:IndexPostData instead of CSBlog:WeblogPostData  The trick, as explained by Kevin Harder in the forum post is to check for a property available through IndexPostData.

WeblogPostData (and List, I believe) have a property -- AuthorUrl -- that holds the link to the external source post and also expose the property IsExternal that is true for a mirrored blog. (IndexPostData doesn't expose those properties.)

Those properties allowed me to use this code to point the blog headline directly to the external source blog:

<CSBlog:WeblogPostData ID="WeblogPostData3" runat="server" Property="Subject" LinkTo="Post" Tag="h3" CssClass="BlogPostTitle" >
   <DisplayConditions>
         <CSControl:Conditions ID="Conditions1" Operator="Not" runat="server">
             <CSBlog:WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison ID="WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison1" runat="server" ComparisonProperty="IsExternal" Operator="IsSetOrTrue" />
         </CSControl:Conditions>
     </DisplayConditions>
</CSBlog:WeblogPostData>
<CSBlog:WeblogPostData ID="WeblogPostData2" Property="Subject" LinkTo="AuthorUrl" Tag="h3" CssClass="BlogPostTitle" runat="server" >
     <DisplayConditions>
         <CSBlog:WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison ID="WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison2" runat="server" ComparisonProperty="IsExternal" Operator="IsSetOrTrue" />
     </DisplayConditions>
</CSBlog:WeblogPostData>

That method doesn't work, however, on a sitewide listing that depends on IndexPostData, since the IndexPost methods don't have the IsExternal property.

The elegant (for this kind of thing) offered by Dave is to pull data from WeblogPostData after checking that the listing is, indeed, for a blog post. Harder explains:

Blog Mirroring does however set an extended property called "SubmittedUserName" to the blog post that is the name of the feed that it came from. So if you want to display that instead of the username, we'll need to modify the search results page.

It's a complicated round of checking in the two sets of <DisplayConditions>, but it works like a charm.

This is the code he offers for replacing the default "Anonymous" in the site-wide tagslist with the name of the source blog:

<CSControl:IndexPostData Property="UserName" LinkTo="Author" runat="server">
  <DisplayConditions>
    <CSControl:ControlVisibilityCondition ControlId="BlogSubmittedUserName" ControlVisiblilityEquals="false" runat="server" />
  </DisplayConditions>
</CSControl:IndexPostData>
<CSBlog:WeblogPostData Property="SubmittedUserName" LinkTo="authorUrl" ID="BlogSubmittedUserName" runat="server">
  <DisplayConditions>
    <CSControl:IndexPostPropertyValueComparison ComparisonProperty="ApplicationType" ComparisonValue="Weblog" Operator="EqualTo" runat="server" />
    <CSBlog:WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison ComparisonProperty="SubmittedUserName" Operator="issetortrue" runat="server" />
  </DisplayConditions>
</CSBlog:WeblogPostData>

I used that to do exactly what he's suggesting, but also used it to make a direct link for the post title with this:

<CSControl:IndexPostData runat="server" LinkTo="Post" Property="Title" Tag="H5" CssClass="CommonSearchResultName" >
  <DisplayConditions runat="server">
    <CSControl:ControlVisibilityCondition ControlId="BlogSubmittedUserName1" ControlVisiblilityEquals="false" runat="server" />
  </DisplayConditions>
</CSControl:IndexPostData>
<CSBlog:WeblogPostData Property="Subject" LinkTo="authorUrl" Tag="H5" CssClass="CommonSearchResultName" ID="BlogSubmittedUserName1" runat="server">
  <DisplayConditions>
    <CSControl:IndexPostPropertyValueComparison ComparisonProperty="ApplicationType" ComparisonValue="Weblog" Operator="EqualTo" runat="server" />
    <CSBlog:WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison ComparisonProperty="SubmittedUserName" Operator="issetortrue" runat="server" />
  </DisplayConditions>
</CSBlog:WeblogPostData>

The other great thing about this bit of code is that it shows how to use values from WeblogPostData even when most of the list is running from IndexPostData. The trick is to do the double comparison that verifies WeblogPostData will be used only if the ApplicationType is "weblog".

What surprised me is that it also shows how to use a value -- in this case the controlID "BlogSubmittedUserName1" from a control that appears later on the page as a condition.

Since I was up late doing that (and other things related to the new photo pages), I'm not sure I understand why that works, but it strikes me as somehow significant that it works.

Now, back to working on the photos sidebar.

I guess it was the flu that's had me totally knocked out for most of the past two weeks.

The site has certainly suffered while I wandered through that odd feverish state.

Today, for the first time in almost two weeks, I'm finally starting to feel like getting back to normal is at least possible.

Even now, though, I'm a bit reluctant to post even this note. It's not just physical strength that I have to get back, but also concentration.

I think what you'll see here for the next couple of days is a slow rebuilding of the sections of the site.

And yes... It's all come along far more slowly than I would have liked.

Now that all the move-out/move-in stuff is mostly behind me, I'm able to address a few beta issues that have been on my mind for all-too long.

A change just implemented should give users an easier link to the various "ticker" posts that are included here. On the front page, you'd see them under "Qdo" or "Qticker" showing only a headline that links directly to the source blog.

But a surprisingly large number of folks get directed by search engines to one of our internal pages that are mostly there just to supply the data for those home page headlines. Oddly, the search engines seem to like those internal pages and send users to them.

Unfortunately for the searcher, our pages include only a minor little excerpt from the original post. It used to be tricky to get from our pages to the source post. No longer. The headline above the "ticker" excerpt will now point directly to the source blog whether the user arrives at the single-post page or the post listing page.

This might help increase the click-through rate to the source blog. (Except, of course, users are extraordinarily wary about any kind of clicking and probably just back up to the search engine even the click would be easier.)

And for fellow Community Server geeks interested in implementing the same kind of thing, here's the conditional I use on the postlist.aspx page to make it happen there. (Essentially the same code is used on the "post" page, but without a link attribute added to the "subject" for internal posts.)

<CSBlog:WeblogPostData ID="WeblogPostData1" runat="server" Property="Subject" LinkTo="Post" Tag="h3" CssClass="BlogPostTitle" >
    <DisplayConditions>
        <CSControl:Conditions ID="Conditions1" Operator="Not" runat="server">
            <CSBlog:WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison ID="WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison1" runat="server" ComparisonProperty="IsExternal" Operator="IsSetOrTrue" />
        </CSControl:Conditions>
    </DisplayConditions>
</CSBlog:WeblogPostData>
<CSBlog:WeblogPostData ID="WeblogPostData2" Property="Subject" LinkTo="AuthorUrl" Tag="h3" CssClass="BlogPostTitle" runat="server" >
    <DisplayConditions>
        <CSBlog:WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison ID="WeblogPostPropertyValueComparison2" runat="server" ComparisonProperty="IsExternal" Operator="IsSetOrTrue" />
    </DisplayConditions>
</CSBlog:WeblogPostData>

A note about the delay that close readers of this site might have noticed.

As I hinted in my last post here, I've been going through apartment issues. I essentially had to move out of my apartment in late November and stay away from it through much of December. All that to give the landlord an opportunity to do about four days' worth of work in the place to repair some issues that they'd refused to fix when it happened.

So... In November, with very little notice, I had to move out. I spent the first two weeks of December in Montana. I've been back in Seattle since December 14, but had to do a massive amount of cleaning and rearrangement in the apartment. I was essentially moving into a new place that hadn't been cleaned up beforehand.

But Monday, I was finally able to start the last stage of this odd process. A friend helped me -- in three trips -- to move back into this place all the boxes of stuff that I'd had to oh-so-quickly move to a storage area in November. Because I'd had to move it out so quickly, I didn't have the chance to cull out any of the old papers and old photos that I no longer want. So that's what I'll be doing for the next couple of days, but then it will all be done and I'll be able to devote my full attention to this site.

And so I thank you for your patience with this. And please stick with us as we move to beta 1.1 of this site this weekend, and look toward beta 2.0 by February.

I hope it hasn't been too obvious from the site's contents that I've been busy with things for a couple of weeks that have forced my focus away from this site. Just in case, I posted a cryptic note on the home page:

Notice: Updates to this site will continue to be somewhat sporadic for the next several days because of an unanticipated non-web requirement.

The non-web requirement? After months of negotiation about what the management of the building I've lived in for 23 years was going to do about several items of neglected maintenance (Like, say, big cracks above windows from the Nisqually quake), I was told two weeks ago that they'd fix things in here and I could stay, but only if I removed much of my stuff and put the rest into a small stack in the center of the floor.

I've lived in the building for 23 years. I've lived in this unit for 19 years. And, uhhh... so... I have stuff -- not necessary or even useful stuff. Just stuff. A lot of it.

During the long negotiation, management had told me they'd give me two weeks notice when they decided to come in and fix things.

Two weeks ago Monday, I was given notice -- but not the two weeks notice they'd promised. They told me I had to be out with my stuff by the following Monday. I almost made it.

But not close enough.

The building manager called moments after the work crew left Monday with this pleasant greeting: "Mr. Evans, you'll have to find a new apartment."

She told me that I hadn't done enough to make the work environment (i.e. my apartment) conducive for their crew to fix the problems caused by the structural instability of their building. She went on to explain that since I hadn't gotten enough stuff out of the apartment, the building managers would refuse to fix it until I move out.

Now, of course, there are so many things wrong with this, but I decided to see if we couldn't come to some better solution. I called a negotiator into the situation who knows much more than I about these sorts of things. After a bit of hand-wringing, it was agreed that they'd be able to start work on the following Monday. That has given me the past extra week to shrink everything into a tiny square in the center of my studio apartment.

And now I'm leaving. I won't be here Monday to hear what their new excuse is for why they won't fix what it is their responsibility to fix. I'll be in Montana, visiting family while they (hopefully) work on the unit.

While I'm there, I hope to keep the blogs here up to date. I should even be able to get back to tackling the long-list of technical to-dos that have accumulated. (I've had to completely stop dev. work on the site while working through this mess.)

And on Monday, I'll go hear Montana activists talk as only activists can about a very serious issue -- hate crimes.

So... See you all soon from the cold side of the Cascades.