Excelsior!

by

by liberal japonicus

Hi and welcome (or welcome back) to the Obsidian Wings blog. If you didn’t know, Typepad will shut down 30 Sept, 2025, so what we have done is made an archive site (at https://archive.obsidianwings.blog/) which has the previous posts and comments. I’ll be working on it over the next while to try and make close to the old site, but here, we will be carrying on.

There are still a lot of decisions to make. The theme I’m using (GeneratePress) is responsive, so in theory, it can adapt to any screen size, but in trying to get it to look like the old site, it may run into some difficulties and at some point, we should go with a new look. The commenting infrastructure at WordPress is rather different from Typepad, but as a start, we are going to leave comments open, but we are going to require a name and email address. You can list a handle/nickname and the email address is not visible. Right now, we aren’t going to require you register/subscribe, but there is a setting that requires that the commenter has one previously approved comment, so there will be a bit of a bump at the start as you get your first comment approved. Please drop a comment here to get that sorted. [ed: if you posted in the previous thread, it seems you are good to go!]

We’d also love to expand the number of people posting. I know that folks may feel a bit of anxiety about posting (I know I do), but we could do with people making a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly open thread or something about whatever has caught your fancy. ObWi has always been a site that has discussed politics and culture, so we aren’t trying to make the site confine itself to stamp collecting and needlepoint, but if you have an interest that you’d like to share, you are invited to make a regular or occasional post.

To try and separate things out, this post will to get folks pre-approved for comments and the future direction of the site. I’ll make a second post about politics but drop a note here if you could. Here’s a list of things that probably need doing

  • -posting rules
  • -what else needs to be brought over from the old site
  • -commenting access and privacy settings/assurances

Thanks!

NB. The illustration is the first panel from James Thurber’s illustrations of Longfellow’s post Excelsior, which appears in his book Thurber’s Carnival. The illustrations are here.

29 thoughts on “Excelsior!”

  1. Hi, lj!

    I just got your email with the links to the archive and this new site.

    Many, many – oh, a googolplex! – of thanks for preserving and continuing ObWi!

  2. Hi!

    Fortunately lj still had my email adress.

    I noticed that in the archive the post on proving citizenship when faced with ICE seems to be missing.
    I wanted to post this from maddowblog there but found all comments sections closed before thw whole site got reduced to just the blog header.

    * A U.S. citizen detained by ICE for three days tells his story: “George Retes is a 25-year-old U.S. Army veteran who served a tour in Iraq. On July 10, while on his way to work as a security guard at a Southern California cannabis farm, he was detained by federal immigration agents, despite telling them that he is an American citizen and that his wallet and identification were in his nearby car, Retes told me. While arresting him, the agents knelt on his back and his neck, he said, making it difficult for him to breathe. Held in a jail cell for three days and nights, he was not allowed to make a phone call, see an attorney, appear before a judge, or take a shower to wash off pepper spray and tear gas that the agents had used, according to the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm that is representing Retes.”

    Btw, how do tags work here? Still >/>?

  4. I have a couple of suggestions regarding the commenting infrastructure.
    First of all, I would like to see ongoing support for cuneiform, just like the good old days.
    Also, having a requirement for comments to be sent with SASE could give the stamp collecting subject matter a big boost.
    DaveC

  5. Iirc it was the post right before “What to do?” but the wayback machine’s last entry is for Aug 23, and it was later than that

  6. In trying to work out how to navigate the archive site, I clicked on the Andrew Olmsted stuff. A couple of things (this is not a complaint – God knows that would be ridiculous from someone as clueless as me), just feedback about stuff you may already know about:
    1. Both “hilzoy’s Final Post” and “Andrew’s final post” seem to go to the same post, called “Remembering Andy Olmsted”.
    2. Since I couldn’t find the long thread of the comments, I went into the calendar archive, and as far as I could see none of the posts include the threads of comments. Am I missing something obvious, is this the new normal, or is this going to change?

  7. I can’t say enough to express my gratitude, lj. When I saw your email I actually whooped with delight. Haven’t looked at the archive site yet, but infinite thanks to Michael Cain for it.

    FWIW, my name and email seem to have carried over from the old site. No preview button that I can see, which will keep us on our toes 🙂

    Thanks again,
    –TP

  10. Morning all,
    Hartmut, if it happened then, I think that post was lost.

    GftNC, it looks like the comments are showing for posts up until Sept 2004. The comments are in the database, but aren’t appearing. I’ll work on fixing that this week.

    DaveC, about the SASE, I’m worried that the new Trump tariffs are going to disrupt that, so I think we may have to go back to smoke signals.

  11. Iirc it was the post right before “What to do?” but the wayback machine’s last entry is for Aug 23, and it was later than that

    Right after “What to do?” I have it w/o any comments in a different file and will send that to lj. By the time I tried extracting it with comments, Typepad had gone into partial failure mode. I’ll keep checking from time to time in hopes that they get it running properly for a few more days before the final shutdown.

  12. lj, I imagine this has taken and is taking you huge amounts of time and effort, when you do have a day job! I hope it’s clear that any comments of mine about the new site are purely for the sake of alerting you (and everyone) about any glitches, or changes from the status quo ante (like the possibility that posts with links are delayed for moderation, as on the Charlie Kirk piece. Eeek, does that mean you are going to have to spend time doing the moderation as well??).

  13. No worries, the setting is that once people are approved, they are good to go and it transferred people who were already in the comments. Unfortunately, because we made the archive site, people who haven’t commented here have to get approved, so it shouldn’t be too onerous.

    I’m working my way through getting the comments back in, which is tedious, but I am glancing at old posts and names so it’s nostalgic at the same time. It’s pretty astonishing to me that a simply text file contains all this, and when it is parsed, all these conversations spring up. Though (and it may be fatigue) I thought that I saw a post in the text file with one author, but appeared with another author on the blog, so I’ll do some checks to make sure that authorship is correct.

  14. Spoke too soon, the comment approval thing does not work as I thought it did. I’m reminded of my favorite joke in Friends. Rachel just discovered a typo on her resume after making 1000 photocopies and getting the gang to stuff them in envelopes and she says ‘oh god, do you think it is on all of them?’ and Joey replies ‘nah, I’m sure the xerox caught a few’.

  15. OK, I think comments are back at the archive, please poke around and let me know if there are other things. Next task is to link up with Andrew’s stuff, still not sure about how comment approval works, so please feel free to comment to help me figure it out.

  17. Ha! Since you ask, I am going to link something I wouldn’t assume is for ObWi, since it relates purely to a rather controversial piece of legislation which is currently trying to make its way through parliament on assisted dying, and which some of my friends are involved in. So this is by way of a test, to see if posts with links automatically go into moderation:

    https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/09/the-lords-must-fix-the-dangerous-assisted-dying-bill

  18. I found us. We are here. The rumors of my expulsion being greatly exaggerated. Nice work.

    I will add that the scrolling through all the comments to get to the bottom will become tedious with the number that a typical post might have. If there was a shortcut I didn’t find it on my admittedly cursory look.

  19. So this is by way of a test, to see if posts with links automatically go into moderation:

    WordPress has a stock filter that puts comments with more than n links into moderation automatically. Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.

  21. Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.

    It’s currently set at 2, let me know if you think that should be raised.

    I’m not sure how automatic comment approval is working, it looks like you have to log in to your profile. I’m going to explore this on Thursday and will try and make a post explaining the system.

  22. My Charlie Kirk comment which went into moderation only had 2 links, one from the NYT and one from the Guardian. I must say I think one should easily be able to post 2 or 3 links (or even more) without the need for moderation. But the thing is, wonkie’s comment on Charlie Kirk which went into moderation didn’t have any links in it at all.

  25. Just looked again at the mass “notification” email – some of course are anonymous, and it may just be one email, but I wonder if Donald was notified? I know some of us are very much hoping he will eventually come back!

  27. GftNC, yes he was.

    Charles, a long term redirect isn’t possible, once the servers shut down, it’s gone. A short term might be possible, but I think the url is a typepad domain and I can’t log in to the typepad interface, (and have no way to contact type pad) I can’t imagine how I would do it.

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