Josh Orum

Ugh. I don’t write much here, but I’d like to write more. Might as well write about the Forty-Niners, who just lost to the Giants. This is what I saw as our problems:

1. Special teams turnovers were the biggest factor this game. Their normal returner (Ginn) wasn’t in the game, and the replacement returner turned the ball over twice. A turnover on a kick-off is especially crushing, since you almost automatically give the opposing team amazing field position. In the end, each of these two critical turnovers led directly to scores, and were the largest reason we lost, but not the only reason.

2. Alex Smith. Our offense in general sucked. It couldn’t move the ball at all. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I’m pretty sure we were something like 1-10 on third down conversions. I think we have a number of offensive problems – mediocre receivers, a porous offensive line, but one of our glaring weaknesses is our quarterback. Against the Saints, Alex appeared to redeem himself somewhat, but I don’t think his performance was actually that impressive – he played well, but it’s only impressive because he so rarely plays well. Yes, he got us into the NFC Championship, but by making passes that Tony Romo, Eli Manning, and any number of other decent quarterbacks make every game. The Niners are making a mistake if they view a couple lucky fourth down drives against the Saints as evidence of Alex Smith’s transcendence as a quarterback, and against the Giants, he showed why.

3. The play calling. What was up with the play calling? I wasn’t there, I don’t know the field situation, but it sure seemed like we threw a lot of big passes, ran some, and didn’t throw many short-distance passes. I’m pretty sure we got where we were by running and throwing short passes. What happened? Did Harbaugh suddenly believe the hype that Smith was a good quarterback?

4. The offensive line. I noticed this against the Saints, as well as all season, but for all his faults, Smith gets hit an awful lot. Now, some of that has to lie on him – other QBs scramble around and make plays happen. When rushers are coming at him, Smith does scramble around, and will occasionally run for it (and he’s a decent runner), but rarely makes plays happen, rarely throws it away, and often gets sacked. However, it feels like he never has much time to do anything before the defense closes in. Really, where are his linemen?

The nice thing is that the defense is young, and will be back next year. Hopefully we can make some improvements in the off-season, and have another great season.

I get soo much comment spam, it blows my mind. Seriously my mind is blown. This is not a big blog. I don’t get a ton of traffic, and I rarely post things. But I get thousands of spam comments. So, I’ve done two things. First, I disabled comments on blog posts older than two weeks. That’s pretty much everything. Second, I activated “Akismet”, Automatic’s built-in anti-spam program. We’ll see how it does. If I log back in and don’t have any comments awaiting moderation, I’ll know that it did my job.

While we’re on that note, I’d like to make another note on comment moderation: please leave a comment, but if it’s not germaine, useful, helpful, or interesting, it’ll probably not get through moderation. Not that this matters, since I get about two non-spam comments a year, and they are from me. But the truth is that I’ve seen many other bloggers do this, and people cry out that this is against their free speech! What idiots. Really? Me not providing you a platform where you can spew hate or ignorance is abridging your freedom of speech? Sure, it’s abridging your free speech – that is, your ability to use platforms and tools to spread your ideas for free – but it’s not abridging your freedom of speech – your ability to spread your ideas without going to prison.

Just like the static site, I want to test a live database-driven staging to production process.

We were recently approached about creating a website that could be managed via a CMS, but wanted to keep the files in “portable HTML” – that is, if everything went to hell in a handbasket, the files would still be accessible and readable, without having to recreate the entire environment. Whether this is a feasible strategy is debatable, since even a static website still needs to be configured correctly, but either way, this was the requirement.

I found a plugin for WordPress called “Really Static” that allows you to export your entire WP site to a different server as static files. I’ve tried it out here, and I’m adding this post in an effort to test it. For now (not sure how long this will be the case), http://josh.orum.com hosts a completely static version of this site.

Supporting files had to be copied over by hand (css, js, images), and interactive things like comments don’t work, but in general it worked as expected.

One key to making a compelling Flash movie – or any animation – is to have it feel as natural as possible.