The Best Post We Ever Had

Jake posted a story about WMD’s found in Hawaii (frogs.) He was gauranteed some good comments for the following reasons:

1. Jenn is High Priestess of invasive species, and has been mildly amused with our dick jokes, whacky politics and other ramblings, waiting to pounce.

2. Da kine. Anything Hawaii da kine has to comment on. He is our pacific correspondent.

3. kinyahbrutha’s undying hatred of Senator J. Kalani (not a girl’s name) English. While it has been a long time since he has raised that particular punching bag, we all appreciate it when he does.

kinyah of course linked to the original post, I checked it out. During the Textpattern to WordPress comversion, we lost about 100 – 200 posts and around 1,000 comments. Considering the quality of most of the old stories we linked to, I did not become too concerned. But when I saw only 4 comments on what I consider to be our finest post/commenting ever, I knew it had to be fixed.

Luckily when I did the conversion, I created a new database, and restored a backup to it, then ran the conversion. The original textpattern DB is intact. It took quite a bit of searching, but I found all the original comments.

Rather than spend two days figuring out the proper SQL to dump them in the right spot, I exported the name, post time and comment from everyone, then added them as normal, then edited them to the proper name and timestamp. I did not carry over the email addresses and websites. I tired to keep it as close to the original as possible, thought the INSERT statements made it a little difficult. You may see a few extra ‘ around, or a missed /n/r. These are not the posters typos, only my poor redaction skillz.

I am proud of what we had on that day, Febuary 12, 2004. It showed what we were made of. Even in extreme spanking of a public figure, we were not afraid to rightly criticize each other on points. I do not know if I would have had the stones Jake did to show da kine he was wrong on the haole issue. Jake and I both busted on da kine when his written did not come across with the inflection he intended.

We talked about an official, and then we asked their opinion. We posted his response, but showed what a coward he was, not responding again once we had a rough translation.

You all may have have noticed how much shit is gone from the sidebar, et al. No more categories, excessive links, banners for causes. I took them all down. Why? Cause this is not that kind of site. This is not, and will not be an Agitator, an Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Ace of Spades, Andrew Sullivan or even Blahstuff. No one clicks on the category links, no one delves into the archives (unless looking for something specific, and the search box is there for that.) I stopped posting about news stories everyday because the big guns cover them. Unless it fires me up or makes me think of something worth saying, why post it? It’s covered. What difference does my having a banner on the site do? This site isn’t for the untold masses. It’s for us. The Brothers and our family and friends. A stranger may find us from google, but they won’t bookmark us. That’s fine. I am here to be with you, not to get hits. On the sidebar is not the shortened metadata, the most recent comments, which we all love, the most recent Flickr pics, and links to all the brothers, our friends, and selfishly, my daily reads. Why selfishly? They are not there so much as promotion as for me to click on when I am not near my proper bookmarks.

I started using webstat.net on da kine’s page, then this one. I used to use a log analyzer, but it was a pain in the ass, and I never trusted the numbers. Webstats uses a wee tiny javascript to track, and the numbers were smaller, but more trustworthy I think. We average about 50 hits per day. I know for sure where about 10 of those come from. Then someone will tell me they check the site all the time and I am shocked. Family, friends of the family, people we know overseas, etc. I still can’t belive it is 50 a day. Nationalz is averaging almost as high as ours, mostly baseball fans in a virtual webring. da kine did it right. He read all the Nats blogs, picked out the best ones he was going to read, and emailed them: “Yo guy, I like your shit, I am gonna link to you. Check my stuff, if you like it, link, if not, that’s cool, I’m still gonna link to you.” His readership grew from 3 (literally) to high 40’s overnight. Much like Jake has blog interaction with Flopped the Nuts (hands down the best poker blog , maybe all blog, name ever) and other poker blogs. da kine has a readership of people he will never meet. We all know each other.

Everyone is welcome to comment. If you’re reading this, at least one of us knows you. If you have something to say, don’t worry, say it. If needed, I’ll throw a lil introduction on there. (pssst, I am speaking directly at you Axe-Man, master carpenter. We still need to double.)

Again, I’m proud of what we have here. We have fun most times, frustration at times (all of us have spent an hour or two writing what is sure to be a killer post sparking awesome dialogue only to get no comments, more than once a brutha has said they are not posting again from no comments) debate, and best and worst of all, in our darkest hour, we easily communicated, hurt and prayed together. Without picking up a phone, within 12 hours, hundreds of people followed a fallen brother’s plight from all of the states, Ireland, England, Kuwait, and Afghanistan.

Back to my point, while we may not be Instapundit, kinyahbrutha reminded me that one day we were king of them all, even if they didn’t know it.

I urge you all to read again our finest work:

My Governor Can Kick Your Governor’s Ass

~ by kinshay on 2005-07-17.