Her first birthday without her mother is also the first one she remotely cares about. She’s still only vaguely aware of the significance of Christmas, birthdays, and other milestone events but now she enjoys and anticipates the surrounding pageantry.

OTB is a featured item under the News section and can be accessed directly at http://www.google.com/producer/editions/CAowk0o/outside_the_beltway_mobile_edition.

As one might imagine, my focus on the site is limited at the moment to checking the comments on that post. I expect to return to whatever the new normal in a few days.

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 – August 26, 2008
• 28 Million – July 11, 2008
• 27 Million – May 20, 2008
• 26 Million – April 5, 2008
• 25 Million- February 16, 2008
• 24 Million – December 31, 2007
• 23 Million – November 15, 2007
• 22 Million – October 3, 2007
• 21 Million – August 19, 2007
• 20 Million – July 15, 2007
• 19 Million – June 12, 2007
• 18 Million – April 28, 2007
• 17 Million – March 31, 2007
• 16 Million – March 9, 2007
• 15 Million – February 19, 2007
• 14 Million – January 29, 2007
• 13 Million – January 7, 2007
• 12 Million – December 23, 2006
• 11 Million – December 3, 2006
• 10 Million – November 8, 2006
• 9 Million – September 18, 2006
• 8,000,000 – July 19, 2006
• 7,000,000 – April 28, 2006
• 6,000,000 – January 18, 2006
• 5,000,000 – October 15, 2005
  
• 4,000,000 – June 8, 2005
• 3,000,000 – February 27, 2005
• 2,000,000 – November 8, 2004
• 1,000,000 – June 19, 2004
• 500,000 – May 13, 2004
• 300,000 – February 17, 2004
• 250,000 – January 17, 2004
• 200,000 – November 14, 2003
• 150,000 – October 17, 2003
• 100,000 – August 14, 2003
• 50,000 – May 19, 2003
• 25,000 – March 30, 2003
• 10,000 – March 22, 2003
• 5,000 – March 21, 2003
• 1,000 – March 4, 2003

• Editing: It happens all too often. You compose an insightful, witty bit of prose and hit POST only to discover that the formatting is wrong, you’ve misspelled something, or you left out a word and thus completely changed the meaning. Now, you can go in and fix it within three minutes. After that, the comment will live on to your eternal shame.

• Reply: You can click on the “Reply” link on the lower right of any comment and it automatically puts an @commentername and hyperlinks the comment to which you’re responding. This provides most of the benefit of threaded commenting while retaining a single thread.

• Like or Dislike: I’m skeptical of this one and it may be short-lived. The idea is that other users can signal when your comment is abusive, trollish, or otherwise unhelpful to the discussion. If it works properly, it’s a more immediate and less harsh feedback mechanism than moderator warnings and bans. The concern, of course, is that people will simply vote for commenters they like on ideological grounds and vote down those they disagree with. We’ll see how it goes.

Overall, the tenor of the discussion here has improved vastly since we started cracking down on or most annoying trolls a couple weeks back. Removing just four people from the conversation has been a classic case of addition by subtraction.

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: The number in the box goes up and a checkmark appears indicating that I’ve already “liked” the post. On some posts, however, such as “The Genius of Mitch McConnell,” it’s auto-unliking immediately after the click, with the counter staying at zero (displayed with Like still there rather than a number).

Is this happening for any of you? Any clues as to why?

UPDATE: Oliver Willis, via Twitter, notes that he’s had similar issues. Which would seem to rule out an issue with OTB’s site layout, ads, or the like.

Ellie with Dad in OR after initial cleanup

Our second girl, Elizabeth Webb Joyner,was delivered at 8:35 pm Eastern this evening. She  weighed 8 lbs, 11.4 oz and was 20 inches long.

Mother and baby are doing well. More photos tomorrow.

UPDATE: Thanks for all the well wishes. As promised, additional photos:

Ellie with Dad the morning after

Katie, age 2-1/2, meets her new sister

Ellie not napping in her hospital bassinet

Photos of Ellie with her  mom exist for posterity but have been redacted by the classification authority.

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 the Ploughshares Fund, expert on nonproliferation issues, Washington Nationals fanatic.

Steve Clemons (@SCClemons) — Washington impresario, Atlantic editor, and realist blogger atthe Washington Note.

Andrew Exum (@abumuqawama) — Former Army Ranger, blogger, and counterinsurgency guru at the Center for a New American Security.

Joshua Foust (@joshuafoust) — Irascible former intelligence analyst, blogger, and expert on South and Central Asia; unforgiving media critic.

James Joyner (@drjjoyner) — Managing editor at the Atlantic Council, blogger at Outside the Beltway, Gulf War veteran.

Micah Zenko (@MicahZenko) — Analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations; drone critic.

One of the virtues of blogging as a medium is feedback from readers and the ability for communities to hash out the ideas laid out in a post. The discussion quite often spawns spin-off posts, serving as inspiration for keeping the dialog going. More importantly, it forces the blogger to more critically examine his biases and be less sloppy in relying on assumptions that might not be shared.

At the same time, as has been true on the Internet since long before the advent of blogs, the higher the number of commenters a forum attracts, the less likely the discussion is to be fruitful. A variation of Gresham’s Law sets in, with the most outrageous commenters drawing responses in kind and those most interested in civil discussion being driven off by the toxic environment.

Many of the larger blogs have dispensed with comments altogether. Others have gone to moderated comments, which mostly eliminates bad behavior but breaks up the flow of the discussion. Others go the opposite direction, allowing their comment sections to become free-for-alls, with the top level authors simply ignoring the discussion.

At OTB, we’ve managed to maintain a remarkably civil forum these past eight-and-a-half years by a combination of active engagement with our commenters and light enforcement of our commenting policies. But the last few months, even with more aggressive enforcement, a handful of trolls are beginning to tip the scales.  Rather than allowing them to dominate the discussion and drive out the good, we’re going to start actively banning them from the site.

To reiterate the high points of the commenting policy:

Remember that the people under discussion are human beings. Comments that contain personal attacks about the post author or other commenters will be deleted. Repeated violators will be banned. Challenge the ideas of those with whom you disagree, not their patriotism, decency, or integrity.

The following will almost always get you banned:

• Comments that advocate violence towards posters, commenters, private citizens, government officials, or pretty much anyone not strongly suspected of terrorism, violent crime, or a declared enemy of the United States.
• Comments that contain personal information about others such as home addresses and personal phone numbers.
• Any form of trolling, defined as comments that appear intended to send the discussion in a fruitless direction, including repeated raising of only tangentially related points.

A note about Hate Speech:  We’re open to a broad discussion about race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, culture, and related issues and will generally not delete controversial comments regardless of our own disagreement. Regardless, comments that reach into any of these areas may be deleted and commenters warned or banned:

• Advocacy of violence on racial, gender, or ethnic grounds
• Use of ethnic, racial, or gender slurs
• Trolling on these topics.

To be clear: We’re talking about maybe four or five regular commenters. Our intention is to maintain a vigorous discussion forum and we’re not interested in banning people who disagree with us or passionately put forth their point of view. But 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.

I’ve been reading John’s blog since long before he started contributing at OTB and obviously agree with the selection!

Crossroads Arabia is exactly the sort of thing that catapulted the medium to the forefront of public policy discussion. While most blogs, like most everything else, are complete crap, a handful are better at what they do than any of the slick professional outfits. Crossroads Arabia is a painstakingly curated set of readings on Saudi Arabia and its environs by a retired career Foreign Service Officer with decades of experience. As much talent as, say, the New York Times can collect–for example, the invaluable C.J. Chivers, also on Kenner’s list–they quite literally can’t match that kind of expertise.

In the age before blogging, the most a John Burgess could do was pitch a book and hope someone would publish it. Nowadays, though, someone with a passion and genuine expertise needs simply to self-publish one’s thoughts and hope enough people notice and find it worthwhile.

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 memo?

I mean, gee whiz, Dodd at least has been photographed with a ‘stache and soulpatch:

(And no, this silly post has nothing to do whatsoever with the fact that grading essays sucks).

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 who wish to use raw HTML coding can click the Source button.

Next up: Some sort of preview and/or edit feature.

Let me know what other issues you find.

UPDATE:  The new interface wasn’t playing well with the backend and has therefore been disabled. There’s a backup plan which will be installed this evening.