I’ve written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT...
Did you go through Casper? Was the wind blowing? (That's a trick question, for those who have not spent time in Casper.) The utilization factor at 80 meters for wind turbines near Casper is 49%. That is very likely the best in world for onshore turbines. Even the old school fossil fuel members of the Wyoming legislature are figuring out the state can derive far more revenue selling wind power to out-of-state customers than they can make burning coal.
6 hours ago
Colorado: sunny weather punctuated by acts of god.
Front Range Colorado summer mornings are glorious. The afternoons are a total crap shoot.
6 hours ago
I’ve noticed that the archive site has nothing June-December 2017. Is it lost, or did it not exist for some reason I’ve forgotten?
None of the archive is lost, except possibly a few things during the transition earlier this year. Feeding it from the Typepad export files into WordPress has to be done in chunks, and is tedious. Kudos to lj for the effort he's put in.
6 hours ago
I have more stories about weird Front Range weather than there is room for. I'll settle for the recurring nice one in winter. When you go to bed, it's 5 °F. In the middle of the night you wake up because the Chinook is howling. When you get up in the morning it's 55.
10 hours ago
I live in MA, where we definitely have winter, but I live pretty near the ocean, which has a mind of it’s own as far as seasonal cycles of warm and cold go.
The northern part of the Front Range urban corridor -- from 20 miles south of Denver to 20 miles north of Fort Collins, and 25 miles east onto the plains -- is a strange little area for weather. At the north end of that is the Cheyenne Ridge, a 2,000 ft high east-west barrier. At the south is the Palmer Divide, a 2,500 ft high east-west barrier. Plus the mountains to the west, of course. Among the weird things that happen is the Denver Cyclone. Broadly speaking, some or all of that area is protected from the worst of the regional weather.
The area was a traditional site for winter camps for Native American tribes, avoiding the much more severe weather in the mountains or more than 20 miles out onto the plains.
11 hours ago
cleek:
also… you might not need ‘!important’ on ObWi’s WP theme.
CharlesWT:
Would adding the following style setting to the head work?
I suspect you're both on the right track, and that adding a bit of CSS for a:visited in the "Additional CSS" section of the site customization would do the job. And that !important wouldn't be necessary.
12 hours ago
it recommends altering the ‘visited’ pseudo-class (one colon, not two as with a pseudo-element)
Yes, pseudo-class. My mistake.
15 hours ago
it’s pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
I visited the site cleek pointed to. Just for the record, the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier. I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user. As I've said in other places, "If there's some aspect of your page's styling that is so critical the user must not be allowed to change it you ought to be using PDF."
1 day ago
Charles's summer version of the picture is surprisingly accurate, less details that are concealed by the snow. The rock/bushes/edging is very much typical of the Front Range Colorado urban corridor; was the AI guessing, or did it have some location information? I wish I saw neighbors' windows lit as much as in the holiday picture. The townhouses' interiors are laid out so that the kitchen and living rooms are away from the front windows.
1 day ago
But we’re heading for no rain for at least the first half of December, and that’s usually the month with the precipitation.
When I moved to Colorado 38 years ago, the two big snow months were November and March. I don't do detailed statistical analyses of the history, but my perception is that has shifted to December and April. Maybe only two-three weeks rather than a full month. Spring rain also seems to be later: the foothills used to be much browner by July 4 than they have been in recent years. The monsoon is all over the place. I actually read technical papers about the North American Monsoon, as (a) it's dependent on enough fine-grain details that the models aren't reliable and (b) it's an important part of how the climate actually changes in the Southwest. The best guesses so far seem to be that it will be slightly stronger and later than now.
1 day ago
In addition to Snarki’s nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it’s distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.
I took the liberty of bumping up the number of comments per page.
At another site, I maintain a WordPress plugin that provides the most comment-centric view of a blog that I've ever seen. The guy who originally wrote it turned it over to that site to do with as they see fit when he abandoned it. Since that turned out to be "Mike keeps it running across new versions of WordPress and PHP", my working assumption is that I am free to install it here. To reassure lj, it doesn't interact with any other settings or plugins, just provides a different view of what's in the database.
1 day ago
[W]ould [ObWi] be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
Please, don't strive to be LGM. Four prolific front-pagers (Loomis*, Campos, Lemieux, and Farley), one not-so-prolific but usually more than once-a-week (Rofer), and some others less frequently. Enough comments that threading (and Disqus) is absolutely mandatory. Gods help them, there are even people commenting there who follow me.
I quit reading BJ because they wouldn't rein in the overuse of Xitter links on the front page. Also, last time I looked, they have enough comments that they really ought to be threading.
* Loomis makes me exhausted. In addition to the political commentary, he does his "Erik visits an American grave" series (more than 2,000 posts), a monthly music post grading new albums and listing what he listened to, an irregular monthly post of his reading list, a weekly college football post during the season, and appears to read every comment that goes up. Plus teaching, book writing, etc.
1 day ago
...and for whatever reason, comment links that one has previously clicked don’t change color...
Visited vs unvisited link color changes are traditionally a browser preference setting. (Keeping track of it server side across logins and sessions and addresses is hard, and doing a lookup for every link included in every generated page is expensive.) In the current version of Firefox on Linux it's buried in Edit/Settings/General/Contrast Control.
I’ve written here before about the one day while working an inventory job across CO, NE, SD, WY, MT...
Did you go through Casper? Was the wind blowing? (That's a trick question, for those who have not spent time in Casper.) The utilization factor at 80 meters for wind turbines near Casper is 49%. That is very likely the best in world for onshore turbines. Even the old school fossil fuel members of the Wyoming legislature are figuring out the state can derive far more revenue selling wind power to out-of-state customers than they can make burning coal.
Colorado: sunny weather punctuated by acts of god.
Front Range Colorado summer mornings are glorious. The afternoons are a total crap shoot.
I’ve noticed that the archive site has nothing June-December 2017. Is it lost, or did it not exist for some reason I’ve forgotten?
None of the archive is lost, except possibly a few things during the transition earlier this year. Feeding it from the Typepad export files into WordPress has to be done in chunks, and is tedious. Kudos to lj for the effort he's put in.
I have more stories about weird Front Range weather than there is room for. I'll settle for the recurring nice one in winter. When you go to bed, it's 5 °F. In the middle of the night you wake up because the Chinook is howling. When you get up in the morning it's 55.
I live in MA, where we definitely have winter, but I live pretty near the ocean, which has a mind of it’s own as far as seasonal cycles of warm and cold go.
The northern part of the Front Range urban corridor -- from 20 miles south of Denver to 20 miles north of Fort Collins, and 25 miles east onto the plains -- is a strange little area for weather. At the north end of that is the Cheyenne Ridge, a 2,000 ft high east-west barrier. At the south is the Palmer Divide, a 2,500 ft high east-west barrier. Plus the mountains to the west, of course. Among the weird things that happen is the Denver Cyclone. Broadly speaking, some or all of that area is protected from the worst of the regional weather.
The area was a traditional site for winter camps for Native American tribes, avoiding the much more severe weather in the mountains or more than 20 miles out onto the plains.
cleek:
also… you might not need ‘!important’ on ObWi’s WP theme.
CharlesWT:
Would adding the following style setting to the head work?
I suspect you're both on the right track, and that adding a bit of CSS for a:visited in the "Additional CSS" section of the site customization would do the job. And that !important wouldn't be necessary.
it recommends altering the ‘visited’ pseudo-class (one colon, not two as with a pseudo-element)
Yes, pseudo-class. My mistake.
it’s pretty simple to add color to visited links in wordpress:
I visited the site cleek pointed to. Just for the record, the CSS it recommends uses both pseudo elements and the !important modifier. I oppose both of those on general principle because they exist outside the JavaScript document model so cannot be modified by the user. As I've said in other places, "If there's some aspect of your page's styling that is so critical the user must not be allowed to change it you ought to be using PDF."
Charles's summer version of the picture is surprisingly accurate, less details that are concealed by the snow. The rock/bushes/edging is very much typical of the Front Range Colorado urban corridor; was the AI guessing, or did it have some location information? I wish I saw neighbors' windows lit as much as in the holiday picture. The townhouses' interiors are laid out so that the kitchen and living rooms are away from the front windows.
But we’re heading for no rain for at least the first half of December, and that’s usually the month with the precipitation.
When I moved to Colorado 38 years ago, the two big snow months were November and March. I don't do detailed statistical analyses of the history, but my perception is that has shifted to December and April. Maybe only two-three weeks rather than a full month. Spring rain also seems to be later: the foothills used to be much browner by July 4 than they have been in recent years. The monsoon is all over the place. I actually read technical papers about the North American Monsoon, as (a) it's dependent on enough fine-grain details that the models aren't reliable and (b) it's an important part of how the climate actually changes in the Southwest. The best guesses so far seem to be that it will be slightly stronger and later than now.
In addition to Snarki’s nitpickery, I would also love it if the actual pages of comments were longer, I think it’s distracting to have to turn the page forward and back so much on occasion.
I took the liberty of bumping up the number of comments per page.
At another site, I maintain a WordPress plugin that provides the most comment-centric view of a blog that I've ever seen. The guy who originally wrote it turned it over to that site to do with as they see fit when he abandoned it. Since that turned out to be "Mike keeps it running across new versions of WordPress and PHP", my working assumption is that I am free to install it here. To reassure lj, it doesn't interact with any other settings or plugins, just provides a different view of what's in the database.
[W]ould [ObWi] be better if there were many more threads, like LGM or BJ?
Please, don't strive to be LGM. Four prolific front-pagers (Loomis*, Campos, Lemieux, and Farley), one not-so-prolific but usually more than once-a-week (Rofer), and some others less frequently. Enough comments that threading (and Disqus) is absolutely mandatory. Gods help them, there are even people commenting there who follow me.
I quit reading BJ because they wouldn't rein in the overuse of Xitter links on the front page. Also, last time I looked, they have enough comments that they really ought to be threading.
* Loomis makes me exhausted. In addition to the political commentary, he does his "Erik visits an American grave" series (more than 2,000 posts), a monthly music post grading new albums and listing what he listened to, an irregular monthly post of his reading list, a weekly college football post during the season, and appears to read every comment that goes up. Plus teaching, book writing, etc.
...and for whatever reason, comment links that one has previously clicked don’t change color...
Visited vs unvisited link color changes are traditionally a browser preference setting. (Keeping track of it server side across logins and sessions and addresses is hard, and doing a lookup for every link included in every generated page is expensive.) In the current version of Firefox on Linux it's buried in Edit/Settings/General/Contrast Control.