PDD Shop Talk
Happy ninth birthday to us
Perfect Duluth Day is nine years old today – Friday, June 29, 2012. We’ll be celebrating tonight at Tycoons Alehouse and Eatery (in the board room upstairs) starting at 8 p.m. There will be cake and an array of door prizes. Come on out and share in the merriment.
PDD Calendar entry | Facebook invite
What started as a fun little experiment for Barrett Chase and Scott “Starfire” Lunt in 2003 has grown into a hideous beast containing well over 10,000 posts about everything from wood ticks to roller derby. Thanks for all the support, whether you are a PDD user, lurker or just someone searching Google for karaoke photos.
PDD Tee
Perfect Duluth Day T-Shirts are available at the Laughingstock/Happyspace store, 324 W. Superior St. Shirts are $15, $17 for XXL.
Get yours today to wear to the PDD 9th Anniversary Party at Tycoons Friday night. Or you can wait and hope to be one of the lucky few that might win a PDD shirt or another fabulous prize Friday. Prizemaster Lundgren is still compiling the list of fabulous prizes, but rest assured, it’s a fabulous list of prizes.
Duluth’s job growth continues as Perfect Duluth Day adds half a position
As if recent news about AAR and Cirrus creating hundreds of jobs in Duluth’s aviation sector wasn’t enough, Perfect Duluth Day has announced the creation of one-half of a job in the important selling-square-boxes-on-the-right-column-of-websites sector. Yes, the Internet giant has launched a search for a part-time media sales representative.
Mayor Don Ness’ press conference regarding this major development is apparently still in the planning stages.
PDD Corporate President Paul Lundgren said the addition of this half job should put to rest any rumors that the popular website is considering leaving Duluth to take advantage of incentives offered by Hermantown and Esko.
“After months of working with city leaders, DEDA, APEX, the Duluth Area Chamber of Commerce, the West Duluth Business Club and for some reason the Duluth Amateur Hockey Association, we feel confident Duluth is the place to grow our business and add one half of a job,” Lundgren said, noting also that “interested candidates for the position can read a serious job description through the link embedded in this very sentence.”
The general public had no comment on the matter, because comments to this post are closed.
The PDD Calendar Transition Team
Left to right in our photo are outgoing editor Abigail Schoenecker, intrepid intern Emily Haavik and … announcing the new PDD Calendar editor – Lawrence Lee.
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PDD Calendar Editor Version 2.0 Wanted
Miss Abigail Schoenecker, editor of the PDD Calendar since September, is leaving at the end of March to pursue opportunities in the Twin Cities. The Perfect Duluth Day family wishes her well and will miss her talents — so much so that we will resist the urge to make disparaging comments about the Twin Cities to reinforce our Duluth exceptionalism.
Abby’s departure, of course, means there’s a job opening. If you are interested, follow the link and the instructions therein. Don’t fear the potential rejection; we’re pretty nice about it.
PDD user account registration problem fixed
Anyone trying to create a user account for Perfect Duluth Day from Saturday night to this morning, probably saw this:
The problem is fixed, and creating an account should work now. We apologize to those who were frustrated by this.
PDD transferring to new server
Server Migration
Here is what monitors look like when one spends his Saturday night migrating Perfect Duluth Day to a new VPS server. The amount of data currently used by PDD is 3.4GB, needless to say that takes a little while to transfer and reconfigure.
Oh, side-note, the old server was in Canada the new one is in the USA. I feel so patriotic right now!
Isn’t today just the perfect Duluth day?
Ain’t they all, Mr. Mayor?
PDD Background Color Change
As most of you have probably noticed, Perfect Duluth Day has changed its background colors. The changeover started several days ago, and there have been some issues with the old colors popping up in a few spots …
… but we think we’ve taken care of all of those issues now. Please let us know if you see the old colors popping up anywhere.
Also, let us know if you love or hate the change. If you love the change it will make us feel good. If you hate the change we will get all defensive and accuse you of having poor taste.
PDD Sightings
Perfect Duluth Day sighting at Mount Rushmore
This summer I took the folks out west to visit family and began what I hope may become a growing gallery on PDD. Shots of the PDD sticker/logo and where it has traveled (or been spotted). (more…)
Perfect Duluth Day’s 10,001st Post
Last night’s “Lost Grey Cat in Lincoln Park” post was the 10,000th post on Perfect Duluth Day. We didn’t realize it at the time, and forgot to drop balloons from the ceiling.
Quantity is no substitute for quality, so let’s celebrate by linking to favorite posts from the past. Dig into those archives and find your favorites. And find that lost grey cat, too.
PDD Calendar Launch on Monday, Sept. 12
Here’s the short version of things you need to know about the big changes at Perfect Duluth Day:
1) The PDD Calendar, which has been available in test mode for two months, will be launching full scale on Monday.
2) The editor of the calendar is Abigail Schoenecker, who can be reached at calendar @ perfectduluthday.com.
3) Effective immediately, PDD’s Blog Policies are changing a bit to discourage posting about events on the blog.
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Poll: Should the PDD Calendar display or hide event descriptions?
Two weeks ago we launched the new PDD Calendar (in test mode) and asked you for feedback. Although we received good feedback in general, there was one specific area we asked about as an afterthought in the comments and didn’t get much response on, so we’ll ask again in a more obvious and simple-to-respond-to way (though it still requires some degree of explanation):
How would you like the entries on any given day to look? (more…)
Introducing PDD Calendar Beta Test +
Perfect Duluth Day is launching an events calendar, and for the next month or so you can preview it at it’s permanent URL:
We have created this calendar because a majority of posts to the PDD Blog are about events, but the format of a blog is not a practical way to organize that type of information. If you wanted to know what’s happening today based on PDD posts, you’d have to select the “events” category and skim through weeks of random items looking for today’s date. That is lame.
So today our calendar is born. It doesn’t have a ton of events in it yet, and it probably has some technical issues left to be fixed, but the general format is set and it has seemed to be working well during our initial testing phase.
Check it out and tell us what you think with a comment to this post or an e-mail to calendar @ perfectduluthday.com.
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Happy eighth birthday to us
Perfect Duluth Day is eight years old today – Wednesday, June 29. We’ll be celebrating tonight at Burrito Union around 8:30ish. Stop on by. There will be a weird cake and an array of door prizes. (We’ll probably be out on the deck — space and weather permitting — so look there first. Find the people with cake on their lips.)
Also, yours truly (Paul Lundgren) will be a guest today on “The Local” with Christine Dean the Radio Queen, celebrating PDD’s birthday by playing songs with “Duluth” in the lyrics or title. That’s at 5 p.m. on 103.3 FM KUMD.
Thanks to Barrett and Starfire for starting this thing and to all you bloggers, cloggers and corn doggers who keep it going. We’re on a pace to hit 10,000 posts before the end of the year. That’s kind of something.
PDD Gravatar Poll Championship
[poll id=”8″]
This poll is now closed. The results were:
Don Ness — 49.2 percent
Bev — 19.7 percent
TimK — 16.6 percent
Hot Shot — 14.4
PDD Gravatar Poll, Fourth Bracket
[poll id=”7″]
This poll is now closed. The results were:
Hot Shot — 54.1 percent
Tamara — 15.3 percent
Ethan — 11.8 percent
Mary — 9.4 percent
Edgeways — 9.4 percent
Eighth Birthday Party Announcement and Other PDD-related Matters
Next Wednesday, June 29, is Perfect Duluth Day’s eighth birthday. As usual, we are having a little get-together, and as usual we are inviting you all, as frightening as that might seem.
So swing on by the Burrito Union next Wednesday in the vague window of 8:30 to 10 p.m. or so. There will be no program or live music or plan to get people drunk and sell them condos; it’s just our annual opportunity to meet in person and shoot the breeze with the folks who put the P in our double-D.
In addition, yours truly will be a guest on “The Local” with Christine Dean next week, celebrating PDD’s birthday by playing songs with “Duluth” in the lyrics or title. That’s Wednesday, June 29, 5 p.m., on 103.3 FM KUMD.
By the way, we should probably let you all know what’s up with some of the technical weirdness PDD intermittently experienced in recent weeks. Here are the boring details:
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PDD Disinfected. Resume blogging.
Sorry about the little Malware problem earlier today.
I’d tell you what happened, but then I’d have to ask the tech guy and he’d have to explain it to me and, well … it’s a nice day and the problem is solved.
1,000 Perfect Duluth Day Users
Perfect Duluth Day hit a milestone today at 4:28 p.m. when the user “emmajoru” created an account and made the post below about the Low concert. PDD now has 1,000 contributors.
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You could win $100! Yes, it’s time once again to feed the PDD marketing weasel by taking a privacy-invading survey
Every 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.
The survey is now closed.
Why do PDD’s powers-that-be ignore their natural Minnesota Lutheran shame and prod you to disclose information that is none of their business? Because that’s how the vicious gears of capitalism work, you silly goose.
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PDD’s little upgrade and the glitch with the Smart Unread Comments plugin
If you’re one of those compulsive people who likes to read every single comment on Perfect Duluth Day, the past few days have been a challenge for you.
The “Comments” column on the left is supposed to show which posts have new comments you haven’t read, but it hasn’t been working since PDD upgraded to WordPress 3.0.4 on Dec. 31.
In the meantime, if you’re noticing anything else not functioning properly since the upgrade, let us know. The comment thing is the only thing we’ve noticed.
UPDATE: The problem was fixed on Jan. 3, so there should be no more issues.