Today is my eldest daughter Katie’s 3rd birthday.

OTB is available on Google Currents.

Thanks to all the kind sentiments on the passing of my wife, Kim. The outpouring from all corners has been gratifying. Alas, it has also put a tremendous strain on the server load for the first time since moving to the current configuration. Ed is working on some technical fixes to mitigate the problem. As [...]

Some recent glitches caused by a security upgrade have been fixed. Most notably, the Like/Dislike buttons on comments should now be working. Let me know if there are other issues.

Sometime in the last week, OTB crossed the 60 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter. As always, thanks to all who read, comment, and link. Previous milestones: 50 Million – October 13, 2010 40 Million – December 21, 2009 35 Million – June 17, 2009 30 Million – October 14, 2008 29 Million – [...]

As some have already noticed, we installed some new commenting plug-ins late yesterday adding some features that many have been requesting

Some of you have presumably noticed the addition of social media buttons, notably the Facebook “Like” button and a Twitter “retweet” button, to the posts some time back. Over the last couple of days, however, I’ve started having trouble with the “Like” button on random posts. On most posts, it works as it’s supposed to: [...]

Our second girl, Elizabeth Webb Joyner,was delivered at 8:35 pm Eastern Tuesday evening.

Foreign Policy‘s annual Twitterati 100 list of “who’s who of the foreign-policy Twitterverse in 2011.” I’ve made the list again under the “Washington Wonks” category. WASHINGTON WONKS Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) — National security correspondent for Wired‘s Danger Room; tweets on everything from Afghanistan policy to comic books to punk rock. Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) — President of [...]

Our patience with those who repeatedly hijack the discussion thread to detract from the topic at hand has ended, effective immediately.

Foreign Policy’s David Kenner has a reading list for President Obama to help him get read for his big speech to recast our relationship with the Arab world. Topping the Persian Gulf section is Crossroads Arabia, by our own John Burgess.

Ok, so it has come to the attention of the powers that be that one of OTB’s regular authors is out of conformity with the others. To wit, we have OTB founder, James Joyner: Steven Taylor: Alex Knapp: Yes, a bit brooding, but bearded. And yet, what about Doug Mataconis?  Did he not get the [...]

We upgraded to the latest stable WordPress release, version 3.1, last night. It seems to have broken a couple of things, notably the Quick Picks and Editor’s Picks features. I’ve got a bug report in but, being Sunday, it could take a while to get a fix in.

Thanks to a suggestion from Mark Jaquith, we appear to have found a more elegant solution for making it easier to do simple HTML coding (bold, italics, strikethrough, blockquote) in comments. And added an optional preview feature as well. As always, let us know if there are quirks.

The WYSIWYG commenting interface is finally compatible with WordPress 3.x, so we’re trying again. In early testing, it seems to do a good job with the standard HTML commands: bold, italics, blockquoting, link insertion, and so forth. Unlike the interface from months ago, however, it won’t automatically convert raw HTML code into readable text. Those [...]

I have banned a couple of serial violators in recent days after various warnings, deletions, and other signals failed to do the trick.

If you’re getting a message saying “Article stolen from OutsideTheBeltway.com” whilst reading our site’s content legitimately, we apologize.  It’s being corrected. Short version:  It’s an attempt to thwart “scraper” sites which steal the content from various blogs via our syndication feeds, posting them as their own.  The coding wasn’t supposed to show on OTB itself, obviously, [...]

For whatever reason, the WYSIWYG commenting tools that we’ve had since moving to WordPress circa 2005 have not worked since moving to WordPress 3.x and the new layout, despite several attempts to fix.   My tech has disabled it again and will try something else soon, hopefully over the weekend.

OTB crossed the 50 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter, sometime overnight. As always, thanks to all who read, comment, and link. Previous milestones: 40 Million – December 21, 2009 35 Million – June 17, 2009 30 Million – October 14, 2008 29 Million – August 26, 2008 28 Million – July 11, [...]

Congrats to OTB’s Alex Knapp, who’s a proud new papa.

Deep in the comment threat on one of my Friday posts, regular commenter Sam gives us a comment that is just pure gold.

We’ve moved OTB to a new server. Let me know if you see anything unusual.

My SiteMeter statistics have suddenly become much less useful. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

I’ve again disabled the comments HTML editing buttons, as they seem not to be working properly and may be causing site sluggishness.  I’ll have Ed take another look into the issue when he returns from vacation.

Some long-awaited cleanup is underway, so please excuse any wonkiness as the work gets done.

For those readers who haven’t warmed up to the magazine layout of the front page, something more akin to the standard blog layout is one click away.

A few long-awaited tweaks to the site design are now in place.

A move to the new WordPress multi-site function over the weekend seems to have really screwed up the site.    We’ve moved back to the old array but, alas, it’s not helping at the moment.   We’re doing all we can to resolve the issues.  We appreciate your continued patience.

Owing to some sluggishness on the backend, several recent posts apparently had comments unintentionally disabled.  I’ve corrected the problem manually. Comments will go down for brief periods — intentionally — over the weekend as some cleaning up and consolidation of the databases is done. Hopefully, the upshot will be increased site performance and an end [...]

It’s been three years since we last did a facelift on the site and the impending release of WordPress 3 and some ongoing code-related performance issues with the site made it time for a new look. We’ve kept much of the branding and coloring but the layout is quite a bit different. It’ll likely take [...]

The site was moved to WordPress 3.0 earlier today and some work is underway in the background on a revised theme that I’m hoping will help with some of the sluggishness issues. I made some posts “sticky” for the purposes of the new theme but, alas, it affected the current site.  I’ve reversed those changes [...]

OTB crossed the 40 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter, earlier today. As always, thanks to all who visit, link, and comment.

I’ve had a grand total of three complaints from regular readers over the last two days, plus an additional one from a co-blogger, about site performance issues.   I haven’t experienced any problems myself and, moreover, Ed Burns, my technical expert, can’t replicate the problem.  Our strong guess is that it’s a sporadic issue caused by [...]

I’ll be appearing on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” from 7:30 to 8:30 Eastern Sunday morning, along with host Pedro Echevarria and fellow guest Adele Stan, AlterNet‘s Washington Bureau Chief.   We’ll be talking about the news of the last few days, likely focusing on topics we’ve written about.   We’ll also be taking calls from whomever’s up that [...]

The Atlantic Council is sending a delegation of us out to the USS Eisenhower for the next couple of days. Barring unforeseen access to a computer, the Internet, and free time that means no posting from me until Saturday morning.  My OTB colleagues will, however, be slavishly posting away as usual if not at a [...]

After long contemplation and discussion with my family, I have decided to continue working.  Further, I will not be attending training camp with the Minnesota Vikings. I had to be careful not to commit for the wrong reasons.  I’m 43 with a lot of time in front of the computer.  The problem with going to [...]

OTB crossed the 35 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter, a few minutes ago. As always, thanks to all who visit, link, and comment.

Via @JonHenke and Rick Klein, I see that OTB is ranked as the 57th most widely referenced political blog for the month of June. Like Henke, I am skeptical of the validity of these things (which are apparently based on links found in RSS feeds.)   I would note, however, that Ross Douthat is ranked [...]

We’re back from vacation and normal blogging should commence shortly.   In addition to barely blogging over the past week, I’ve paid only scant attention to the news. Did I miss anything?

I’ll be on BBC’s “The Takeaway” with John Hockenberry from approximately 7:45 to 7:59 Eastern tomorrow morning discussing my recent New Atlanticist piece “NATO Afghanistan Mission Risks Repeating Russia’s Mistakes.”  BBC analyst Olexiy Solohubenko and Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita, are tentatively scheduled to appear in the segment. You should be able to hear live [...]

UPDATE (April 2 – Bumped to top):  After a little more than 24 hours of testing, it seems that the system has some quirks.  I’m going to disable it for now and either spend time trying to deal with said issues or perhaps look for another plugin. As one who reads most of the comments [...]

Looking for the Colonel Jessup discussion I referenced in my last post, I came across the post “GOOD MOVIE, WRONG LESSON,” written on January 31, 2003 and imported over from the original blogspot site (unfortunately, owing to then-existing vagaries, sans comments).  It was the fourth substantive post and fifth total post ever on the site, [...]

By popular demand, more Katie pictures. These were taken a little more two weeks ago, when Katie was 13 days old. You can see the whole set at Jill Thomas Photography clicking this link and password “joyner.”

Mom and baby were given the all clear this morning and released from the hospital.  Katie has met the rest of the family — dogs Miniver and Molly and cats Henry and Scamp — and has adjusted remarkably well. Don’t worry — this won’t be turning into a Daddy blog.  I’ll ease back into politics [...]

Here are two pictures of Katie, age one day, taken today. Mom and baby are doing great. Katie’s been given the green light to go home but, alas, her mother has not. Kim’s been up and about all day and would have happily gone home this morning if they had let her. With a C-section, [...]

My wife Kimberly woke me a little before 2 yesterday morning to inform me that her water had broken and that it was time to drive her to the hospital. After 12 hours of trying naturally, another 14 of trying with the aid of an inducing drug, and two hours of hard labor, Katharine Webb [...]

I’m in the process of preparing some 2009 predictions, in the hopes of providing a good opportunity for embarrassment. While I was doing that, though, I thought I’d go ahead and look back at my predictions for 2008 and see whether I should even bother. Here are my results: Predictions that came to pass Barack [...]

The fine folks at BlogAds are running their annual survey to assess readership trends around the blogosphere. Please take the Blog Reader Project survey and indicate that you got there from OTB. We’ll publish the aggregate results for OTB readers once the survey has completed. Last year’s results can be viewed here. Let’s just say [...]

OTB crossed the 30 million unique visitor mark, as measured by SiteMeter, overnight. As always, thanks to all who visit, link, and comment.