Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a *fraudulent* bond!

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Be a traveling stable for those who can’t find room at the inn.

“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

You are here: Home / z-Retired Categories / Previous Site Maintenance / Balloon Juice Site Redesign Fundraiser

Balloon Juice Site Redesign Fundraiser

by | 117 Comments

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As you know, we are working on a new website, and a crew of longtime members of the blogetariat have been helping me see things through the eyes of the reader and coordinating the redesign. They have put together a comprehensive list of what we want from the “new” site, and are currently in the process of reaching out to web developers for bids. Thus, I have been informed that now is the time for the site fundraiser.

We will let this run for two weeks (and then again in January), with another updated post every day or so. As always, the paypal thing is always to the right, and should you do your Christmas shopping on Amazon, click through the link to the right and the website cuts a minute commission. Should you choose to not want to use paypal, email me and I will send you a snail mail address.

In what I consider the best news of the year, CafePress is once again doing calendars, so the BJ calendar will be available for purchase that way instead of having to go through the sheer hell we went through last year.

In other good news, the Balloon Man is coming back.

Reader Interactions

117Comments

  1. 1.

    geg6

    Yay for Balloon Man! I ♥️ him!

    And as soon as I can, donation will be on its way. Tomorrow if I remember.

  3. 3.

    Gin & Tonic

    In other good news, the Balloon Man is coming back.

    Now *that* is good news indeed. You know how to shake the money out of the customer pockets.

  5. 5.

    Ohio Mom

    I’ll be glad to see the balloon man again, and it goes without saying that I am tired of entering my nym and email.

    Just don’t make the print smaller, my eyes are older than the rest of me.

  6. 6.

    geg6

    @debbie:

    On my phone, there is no “right.” But thanks! I’ll take care of it tomorrow or Thursday. Now that I know where to send them. Gotta get our new girl, Cleo, immortalized for posterity.

  13. 13.

    debbie

    And now I’ll spend an hour trying to find my password for Paypal which I haven’t used in millennia.

  19. 19.

    dmsilev

    they have put together a comprehensive list of what we want from the “new” site,

    I trust the list includes threaded comments, an automatic emailing to Cole of any imagined problems, all comments are purely in emojis, animated GIFs, and the old HTML blink tag. And, of course, WordPress database errors.

    Did I miss anything?

  23. 23.

    dnfree

    Once you get a target cost, it would be cool to have one of those thermometer things showing progress toward the goal.

  33. 33.

    Anotherlurker

    In for $10.00. All I can do, for now. More next month.
    This is a wonderful place with wonderful, knowledgeable people!
    Still, a like button would be nice….. just kidding….don’t hate me…..

  38. 38.

    jeffreyw

    One thing that has always bothered me about the site is that when I click on a link it does not automatically open in a new tab. I wish it would do so, and yeah, yeah, do not tell me to right click and then go for the open in a new tab in the context menu. There could be repercussions!

  43. 43.

    Kristine

    If possible, I’d like notification that someone responded to a comment. Threads age so quickly around here that mini-discussions in older posts get lost.

  48. 48.

    Mike J

    @jeffreyw: Hold control while clicking. Easier than right clicking.

    They added that once but did it in an incredibly stupid way (replacing all href s with javascript so that no links worked at all with javascript turned off.) If a site as dead simple as this doesn’t even function without javascript, it’s broken. Everything should work in lynx or links, even if it’s not pretty.
    https://i.imgur.com/seFwK1B.png

  49. 49.

    Mandalay

    @jeffreyw:

    when I click on a link it does not automatically open in a new tab

    If you are using Chrome or Firefox just click the middle mouse button (i.e. the scroll wheel).

  51. 51.

    Aleta

    We can also buy ornaments made of high quality porcelain (available in Rosie/ Lily/ Tunch/ the balloon/ or the attractive CAAR logo) and notebooks and everything except tattoos.
    At the FEED button under Pet Home & Office.
    (All profits go to the MARC to improve the lives of animals in Marion County TN, not to site development.)

  53. 53.

    Michael Cain

    @Ohio Mom: To go wildly off topic, a few years ago I got so ticked off about various ugly sites and blank name/email text boxes that I wrote a chunk of JavaScript that runs on almost every page I download. It does its best to convert everything to only a couple of fonts, in a small number of sizes, all of which are big enough for me to read. For places where I comment regularly, it fills in the text boxes. The web can be a more readable place, but it’s a lot of work.

  54. 54.

    A Ghost To Most

    @Yutsano: It’s not you we have to worry about. For the record, I agree with JC. I like the layout; the JavaScript CPU burns that eat the crappy battery in my Pixel, not so much.

  55. 55.

    WaterGirl

    @Yarrow: The avatars! A Sunday that will live in ignominy! At least I think it was a Sunday; maybe a Saturday. They didn’t even last the whole day. :-)

  58. 58.

    Platonailedit

    Instead of throwing good money after bad ‘web developers’ year after year, how about using standard and simple wordpress free offerings? I post in fywp hosted blogs which are photos and videos intensive and they all work smoothly without a hitch.

  60. 60.

    Steeplejack

    @zhena gogolia, @debbie:

    The “Contact a Front-Pager” thing is awful, in my experience. You don’t get an address; you get a form to fill out that may or may not launch an e-mail to the target.

    In my notes I have “JCole at balloon-juice.com” as an address. Try that (suitably encoded with the at symbol).

  61. 61.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    What is Cole’s email address? I sent him an email a few days ago through the Contact a Front Pager and haven’t gotten a response yet? I was trying to confirm if my pet pictures for next year were received or not through the email address we’re supposed to send them to.

    I don’t understand how this works.

  62. 62.

    Yarrow

    @WaterGirl: They were the worst! Whose idea was that anyway?

    @NotMax: Oh, I’d forgotten about that. John still has his color for his comments. All the other FPers lost theirs.

  63. 63.

    A Ghost To Most

    @NotMax: Apparently, the web has passed me by. I had to look that up.

    I did my part in getting the networks functional, and in sorting out Oracle RAC on Windows. I’m glad I don’t have to figure out the essential BJ functionality.

  67. 67.

    Steeplejack

    @zhena gogolia:

    Well, hang onto that address and use it next time. The other thing I don’t like about the form is that it’s not as convenient as using Gmail or Outlook directly. Grumble, grumble.

  68. 68.

    NotMax

    @Yarrow

    All the other FPers lost theirs.

    Thankfully, and quickly. Made some pages look as if Messrs. Binney and Smith both threw up.

  69. 69.

    TenguPhule

    @Platonailedit:

    Instead of throwing good money after bad ‘web developers’ year after year, how about using standard and simple wordpress free offerings? I post in fywp hosted blogs which are photos and videos intensive and they all work smoothly without a hitch.

    Those are not secure and JC is pretty firm about protecting us from ourselves.

  76. 76.

    JGabriel

    @WaterGirl:

    The avatars! A Sunday that will live in ignominy! At least I think it was a Sunday; maybe a Saturday. They didn’t even last the whole day.

    I got assigned an Egg as my avatar. A big, fat, round, white Egg. And all I could think was, “Well, I guess it’s a reasonable likeness. How did they know?”

    Wait, that’s not it. That’s not what I thought at all. That is not it, at all.

  77. 77.

    NotMax

    @Kristine

    That was mostly covered when we had the Recent Comments widget. Which, one can fervently hope, will be making a reappearance.

  78. 78.

    PaulB

    Long-time lurker, infrequent commenter in for a bit.

    If you don’t want to create a PayPal account, PayPal lets you contribute via credit card as a “guest” without the need to have PayPal keep its fingers in your financial system.

  90. 90.

    MisterForkbeard

    @TS (the original): Yep! The Flynn sentencing memo has just been released a few minutes ago. Hopefully we can get Cheryl/Adam/Betty to comment on it later tonight, but it’s so heavily redacted I’m not sure we’ll get anything useful from it.

  94. 94.

    TS (the original)

    Asking for probation only – so the level of information provided seems high.

    Edit: as Yarrow said above

  97. 97.

    MisterForkbeard

    @MisterForkbeard: Not a ton there, from what I can see:

    * Interviewed Flynn 19 times.
    * They note that Flynn’s early co-operation was very helpful, in that he gave them information soon after the events happened and that his cooperation spurred other valuable cooperation.
    * Recommending little jail time. This could be due to the usefulness of his cooperation, but might also be due to the whole “Flynn was a senior Administration official and we tend to go easy on them” thing from the Feds.
    * They say Flynn was helpful on the topic of Russia but don’t say how.

  100. 100.

    Patricia Kayden

    Threw in a few coins and will definitely buy the calendar. Love looking at the cats and dogs during my workday.

  101. 101.

    Aleta

    Some of the replies to:

    Rudy Giuliani @RudyGiuliani
    Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message. The same thing-period no space-occurred later and it didn’t happen. Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers. Time Magazine also may fit that description. FAIRNESS PLEASE

    Norm Eisen @NormEisen
    You dope, you created a viable url with the first typo and not with the second. In Trump World, everyone looks everywhere else to lay blame for mistakes except the one place where the guilty party can be seen: in the mirror.

    SwiftOnSecurity @SwiftOnSecurity
    I run a website popular with security professionals investigating website hijacking.

    You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. Your speech is garbled nonsense indecipherable to even experts.

    Mark Dalton @mdalton323
    His bio says he’s cyber. Hard to imagine these guys overstating their credentials.

    Ryan Hill @RyanHillMI
    It looks like Rudy knows as much about Twitter as Trump does about government!

    Fun Fact: Rudy runs a cybersecurity consultancy:
    “Giuliani Security and Safety”

    Molly Knight @molly_knight
    If you are on speaking terms with your grandchildren perhaps ask them to explain what happened here

    AltScalesOfJustice @AltScalesOfJust
    Oh, how I wish you were trying to be funny on purpose. Sorry, you’ll figure out how hyperlinks work one day. It isn’t a conspiracy. You may be America First, but other countries have Internet domains, too…

    Mike Flacy @mikeflacy
    Hey “cyber czar,” here’s how it worked.
    1. YOU accidentally tweeted a URL that didn’t exist.
    2. Someone bought that URL and sent it to a web page.
    3. YOU left the tweet up.

    Twitter had nothing to do with it. There was no invasion.

  107. 107.

    Stuart Frasier

    @Platonailedit:
    If it turns out he delivered the goods, then I’ll be okay with it. The biggest bummer is that we don’t get to know the details yet.

  108. 108.

    Steeplejack

    @MisterForkbeard:

    Yes. But there was a previous version that, when you selected a front-pager, opened up a blank message in your e-mail client and populated the “To” field with the front-pager’s e-mail address.

  109. 109.

    Amir Khalid

    @Stuart Frasier:
    If I understand how he operates, Mueller will have exacted delivery from Flynn before releasing payment in the form of asking the judge to be lenient in sentencing Flynn. And at that, Mueller’s prosecutors can only ask; if the judge thinks Mueller’s offer is too lenient, he has the authority to really sock it to Flynn.

  110. 110.

    2liberal

    I kicked in $60. I have a request PLEASE give us a better PIE FILTER. One that just blanks out the comment and doesn’t replace it with pie related remarks so I have to waste energy reading enough of the comment to realize it’s been pied. The current one is so bad I haven’t even pied a couple of my most despised long term trolls.

  112. 112.

    J R in WV

    Have been waiting for PayPal to start the enter your financial information phase for the time it took me to read 109 comments here. Sad!

    I’m going to kill that page and start over again. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to Bethany and give John cash money… or something like that!

  113. 113.

    J R in WV

    @J R in WV:

    OK, second time was the charm, if you can call PayPal a charm, ever.

    I’m in now! I’ll encourage lurker wife to also kick in if she doesn’t think my donation was sufficient for the both of us.

    I encourage the new site to be developed using actual coding languages and web development tools rather than a pre-built framework like WordPress or other such devices, which impose their requirements on Your website. There are many late generation tool sets that allow the creation of from scratch web sites with relative ease.

    But you will need an actual coder and a real database for the comments and data/pics/video/addresses etc. As opposed to someone who has learned how to wrestle with WordPress to try to make it do what you want. Not the same at all.

    Not that I’m into that, I retired years ago and did not do more of it for fun, it was work, fun was rocks and building things and such.

    Now off to study LtG Flynn’s potential sentence recommendations. Etc.

  116. 116.

    JGabriel

    @2liberal: IIRC, the current pie filter was a gift contributed to the site by a fellow jackal, Cleek.

    Maybe a simple request for the option to choose a single-word message in the filter, like “Pied!”, would be better than a full critique?

    Just a suggestion, not meant to be judgmental.

Comments are closed.