PDD Shop Talk Posts

Post-PDDX Banners

Back in April we announced that we’d be retiring all of the old banners. Well, the day has come, happy birthday to us, and sayonara to the old banners. Welcome the new, fresh banners. The old banners have been archived on Google Plus.

Proclamation (official and certified)

Whereas, the only logical way to make an official proclamation regarding PDD is to post it on the PDD site, and

Whereas, there is ten years worth of history that is both well-documented and too boring to include in an already too boring proclamation, and

To the OG PDDers

On this 10th anniversary of the first PDD post, I would like to thank the original members of Perfect Duluth Day who were there at the start, helping to transform this site from a mere idea to what it’s become today:

Happy tenth birthday to us

august-harry-potter barrett-chase beverly

The new way to follow PDD comments

As you can see by looking at the left sidebar on this page, the old Recent Comments feature has been removed, and a new link for Recent Comments at the top of the page has been added.

There are three old posts (link, link and link) which detail the problems we had with our old Recent Comments feature. We think this latest fix is our best bet.

So, if you like to follow along with new comments to old posts, click the new Recent Comments link and have at them.

Save the Date — June 29 — PDDX

Trampled by Turtles and Atmosphere play Bayfront Park on June 29. If you are nerdy enough, you also know that is the date Perfect Duluth Day will be ten years old, and we always have a snappy little PDD b-day shindig. So we’re tying them together.

Announcing …

PDDX: Perfect Duluth Day’s Tenth Birthday / Trampled by Turtles & Atmosphere Pre-Concert Party

The ongoing recent comments issue

For about two months PDD has been having problems with its “Recent Comments” feature — the menu item that highlights which posts have new comments you might not have read.

This week we installed a new plugin for Recent Comments that we hoped would be better, but unfortunately it isn’t.

PDD Banners

On June 29 PDD will be awarding $100 to the person who submits the best new banner. Everyone who has submitted one since Jan. 1 will be eligible. Pre-2013 banners will be pulled from rotation on June 29, but will be kept in archival storage and maintained by nice librarians with white cotton gloves at Google Plus. Banners from 2005-2009 can be found here.

We’re also looking for new Homegrown banners. Those submissions will be eligible for the same $100 prize. For full details on banner submissions, click here. The basic info is the image must be 960 pixels wide by 167 pixels high. The Perfect Duluth Day logo will be added by PDD’s art department. Send them to banners @ perfectduluthday.com

Recent comments feature maybe sort of fixed, we hope; PDD mobile version turned off temporarily

The little spot over in the left column that highlights which posts have new comments should be working properly now. Let us know if it’s doing anything funky for you.

We broke it three weeks ago while fixing something else. Now that it’s fixed, the new problem is that it leaves an ugly gap in the left column if you’ve read all the recent comments. We’ll fix that soon and then watch what breaks the minute we do.

Also, as those of you who read PDD on your phones or tablets may have noticed, we turned off PDD’s mobile version. This is a temporary measure. The mobile version was whacking out our regular site … yadda yadda … we’ll get the geeks on it eventually, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Recent comments feature klunky right now

You may have noticed the little section on the left column that highlights which posts have new comments you haven’t read has been malfunctioning. We know this, and we are working on it. (And when I say “working on it,” I mean going skiing and thinking about it occasionally.)

The problem started over the weekend, when a new plugin was installed to speed up the time it takes to load the homepage. Fix one thing, another one breaks. That’s how it goes.

Calendar Videos

The mad scientists in the Perfect Duluth Day Calendar Labs are continually applying their impressive craniums to just one question, “How can we make our calendar that much cooler?”

Well, pop up videos, that’s how! Starting now, if there’s a video linked to the event, just click on the “Watch Video” link and it will pop up in your browser window. Movie trailers, music videos, game tutorials and more are just a click away! Then you can click away the video and keep browsing events.

Another chance to win $100 by appeasing the PDD marketing weasel

PDDMarketingWeasel89457Every other year or so, Perfect Duluth Day conducts a survey of its readers in an effort to figure out who they are and what their deal is. To make up for the privacy invasion, we offer the chance to win $100 in a drawing, which convinces everyone to proceed without reservation or contempt.

To participate in the survey, you do not need to be logged in or have an account with PDD at all; you just have to be a human being with the ability to click things on the Internet.

This survey has closed; thanks to everyone who participated.

It’s getting drafty around here

Right now there are 47 posts in PDD’s “drafts” folder. Items in the drafts folder are, presumably, posts that people started composing and saved with the intent of finishing later.

But maybe some of you thought you were supposed to create a draft and then the moderators publish it. That’s not how it works. We would have no way of knowing which drafts were ready to post and which were not, except to guess based on how complete we think they look.

So help us out with some almost-Spring cleaning. If you have an old draft for a post, finish it and click the blue “publish” button, or give up on it and click the red “move to trash” option.

Does anyone else miss…

the good old days when you could run the gauntlet on PDD?

We’re feeling used

Perfect Duluth Day hit a seemingly significant, though maybe not legitimately significant, milestone recently when it crossed the threshold of having 2,000 registered users.

Registered users, of course, are the people who have created an account on this site and are able to create posts and comment on posts. (Anyone can read PDD, but in order to be involved in discussions here you must create an account and log in.)

In recognition of 2,000+ users, we present a bunch of yammering, er, useful information, about PDD user accounts. Call it answers to frequently or not-so-frequently asked questions.