Don't Stop Thinking About Tamales

Sorry about the lame post on Friday. I realized like 5 minutes before I had to leave for a camping trip that I hadn't done the caption contest results post yet. I went with a group of boys from our church to a place called Spicer Reservoir, which is between Tahoe and Yosemite. Here's a pic of the 4th grade group. Guess which one is Climber.



We had a good time, although I'm happy to be back in the world of showers and flush toilets.


Anyway, HeyJoe won the caption contest. Joe, you may post the In Your Face award.




Sparrow came in second with:

"Diesel, I don't care HOW scared you are, I'm NOT going to 'hold you 'til the fear in you subsides', dammit!"

Dave Crane and CrummyJoel tied for 3rd.

Dave Crane's caption:

With your donation you can help people like Diesel live a normal productive life.

CrummyJoel's caption:

Stop making fun of his big head! You're making him cry!!

And now for some good news and bad news.

The good news is that this coming weekend I'm going to be launching a much improved version of Humor-Blogs.com. I've made a lot of improvements over the past year, but thus far I've just been hacking around with the original code that I wrote back at the beginning of 2007. I never expected the site to take off the way it has, so I didn't spend the time to build it right from the beginning. As a result, the site is buggy, slow, and not very easy to navigate.

I built the new version almost completely from scratch, so it won't have all of those problems. Don't worry -- the basic voting/ranking mechanism won't change, but the site will run a lot more smoothly. Some of the improvements include:

• Support for a broader range of xml feeds (yes, including Typepad)
• Fewer problems with delays in posts showing up
• Easier signup for people who just want to be able to vote
• Easier voting (similar to the way you rate movies on Netflix)
• Blog snapshots instead of banners
• Better search feature
• "New Blogs" and "Latest Posts" features to help less well-known blogs get exposure

And on top of all that, it will load faster, look nicer, and generally work better than the current version.

The bad news is that between work, painting my house, and this Humor-Blogs stuff, I haven't had much time lately to write. So I'm going to have to take a little hiatus while I get caught up. My plan is to start posting regularly again on October 6 -- although that's Mrs. Diesel's birthday, so who knows.

In the meantime, I'll dig up some Best of MP posts for your reading pleasure, starting tomorrow. If you want to throw a few smileys my way so that I don't drop off the HB front page while I'm revamping HB, that would be cool.

I have no idea what the title of this post is supposed to mean, by the way. I just couldn't think of anything else.

Help keep me alive at Humor-Blogs.com!