A very Happy New Year from the staff at Shadowscope’s Sick Crimes. Here’s to hoping your’s will be relatively crime free and you just get your fix here!

Now that I am back to writing on a semi-regular basis I hope to make a few changes during the coming year. I’ve recently disabled several of the plugins on the site since it seemed to really be causing a drag on things. I don’t know about anyone else but it seems to be loading very slowly for me since I started visiting the site again. Also the featured posts carousel wasn’t working properly either so I have set it to only show the most recent post up there and the rest below.

If you have any suggestions for the site feel free to send them my way. I’ll feel free to either incorporate them or not.

I do plan on attempting much tighter integration between my Facebook and Twitter accounts, hopefully I can get the comments integration working. It’s supposed to be able to pull comments in from my Facebook page on each corresponding story but isn’t working and I have no f’ing clue as to how to get it going. Also I would like to get automatic posting of stories into my Google+ account as well as I have with FB and Twitter.

The basic design I plan on leaving alone as it seems to work well. I have also grown to like using the Disqus commenting system as well and will be leaving it up.

As you can tell I’ve started writing again on a semi-regular basis. There most likely won’t be much new over the next few days though. Christmas is the busiest time at work for me all year culminating with the big day itself. I will end up working 18-20 hours on Christmas day some what little time I do have off will be spent with my family or sleeping. Here’s top hoping everyone has a wonderful holiday and I’ll see you next year most likely.

I am currently using Shadowscope as the site of my lifestream, which includes links to sites I have saved, my tweets and all sorts of other bullshit. I am also using it to repost news stories that are not complete. Sometimes just to other sites because I don’t currently have the time to write about it but might like to at some other point.

Anyway, if you end up seeing a story linked to there it may end up here eventually. Usually after I have the perp’s mug shot and more of the story.

I have to say it’s been a hell of a year.

I moved the site here from my old one shortly before 2010 started last year due to various reasons, changing from Movabletype to WordPress in the process and bringing along all my old posts from the last ten years or so. While I am still only getting about 10% of the traffic I was generating at my old site I still think it was the right decision. Some of the lack of traffic over the last six months has more to do with my personal life anyway.

My father passed away back at the end of July and my activity on the site has been hit and miss ever since. I want to thank everyone here, particularly Deena who has posted several stories in my absence as well as those of you who send me links to stories and keep visiting daily. You too April! Keep ‘em coming. I know I don’t always get them up in a timely manner but one of my resolutions for the new year is to at least start posting more regularly even if I can’t get quite as many stories up. While I have had a few days where I have managed to write several stories, the last six months have mostly consisted of me ignoring the site entirely. For that I am apologize, some days I just didn’t give a shit. Hell, I don’t even get on Facebook or Twitter very often anymore. I have two Facebook accounts, one a personal account and another for this site. I don’t think I have even logged into my Shell Scott account since the end of July. I am sure I have a couple thousand messages there I probably need to check and answer.

Anyway, here are a few stats and stories from the last year if you are interested.

By far the busiest day here at Sick Crimes was July 30th, the day prior to my father’s death. That’s a weird coincidence I hadn’t noticed before now. Anyway that was the day after Marcy Elliott was found murdered in Carrollton, GA. It was a local story for me and one I wouldn’t think would get that kind of traffic.

As far as the busiest posts for the year here are a couple of them:

Patrick Poteat Brutally Strangled his Wife. This was the busiest post this year both in traffic as well as in the comments. Emotions flared quite often and I still occasionally get comments on this post an entire year after I put it up.

Colondra Hamilton Was Really Autoerotic. Not a huge story but it was sort of weird and all over the Internet.

There are quite a few more stories that we posted throughout the year, you can find them in the archives. Heavily trafficked posts which got nary a comment as well as those that didn’t garner much traffic but obviously affected the emotions of those who stopped by and comments.

Here’s to hoping you all have a wonderful New Year and are able to accomplish everything you attempt for yourself.

I know I’ve been pretty apathetic on the site over the last six weeks or so and while I would like to say I am on it, I’m not. That’s not to say I won’t be posting but right now I just don’t seem to have the “want to”.

Perhaps with someone else here putting up the occasional post that will spur me on. Only time will tell.

There will most likely be no posts today. I have to work until 9pm tonight so unless I get a 3rd wind or something I’ll post tomorrow which is my only day off this week.

Thank goodness for the backups my web host keeps. I had a somewhat older backup of my database and the site but unfortunately something I did with a plugin completely hosed the site, thus the downtime overnight.

I’m not one to plug companies here but I’ve got to tell you, if you are looking for a great web host, check out LivingDot. I’ve been with them for several years now and they are nothing if not helpful. I’ve had very little downtime and anytime I have had to put a ticket in they are right on it.

I apologize for the downtime but luckily didn’t lose anything and since I use Windows Live Writer to write my posts the few that weren’t saved I have been able to repost.

Which one do you folks prefer, or does it matter?

I started back to work on Friday after a nice, albeit too short, vacation. I came down with a pretty bad cold or something else the last couple days of my vacation as well and it seemed to hit me pretty hard on Friday. The entire weekend has pretty much just been shit.

In addition to all of the above I also quit smoking. I had my last one Thursday night. I’ve smoked 2-3 packs a day for the last thirty years and this has been the hardest 96 hours I have ever had.

Roll all of that crap up and I am having a hard time stringing two words together, much less forming a cohesive post. I feel like shit, haven’t slept more than two hours since last week, my face hurts where I’ve been blowing my nose and basically I just want to beat the crap out of everyone.

Perhaps now you can see why I have been keeping a low profile over the last few days. I do feel a little better this evening and I may be able to even manage a couple of posts before the night is out.

I may get a few posts up between now and Friday morning, it just depends on how work goes tomorrow. Have to go dump the curtain climbers at my brother’s house in Anniston tomorrow night so I may not be back home until late. Three days with no children! That happens at the Obvious casa about once every two or three years. A true rarity.

Feel free to send me crime links though and stories though. The wife has to be back at work on Monday so I will have three or four days to devote to writing here prior to going back to work next Friday!

Eventually I’ll have the rest of the stuff back online. Most of this is old news now but quite a few of the cases are still pending.

My existing comments are still here but since they haven’t imported yet they aren’t showing up.

While Disqus will allow for comments from non-members, if you want to access the forums or the social networking stuff you’ll still want to sign up for an account here.

I will try it out for a few days and see what I think. I may end up going back to the normal WP commenting system.

Update – Scratch all of the above. I tried three times to get Disqus to import my comments and it errored out each time. I will have to come up with some other option to get twitter and facebook working properly. I may enable commenting for everyone but only members get their’s approved automatically.

Update II – Facebook login for posting comments seems to be working OK now. Provided I don’t start getting a ton of comment spam I’ll leave it as is. Now to find some way to use Twitter Oauth for comments.

Update III – Twitter authorization is working now as well, although it seems to throw the comments into my spam folder. I’ll have to work on that as well as the placement of the button.

One thing I haven’t been able to do quite so well is to integrate Twitter and Facebook as well as I would have liked, so now that I am successfully running I think I want to be able to do more with it.

If you have already signed up for the site hopefully I will be able to translate the user accounts over, that we will just have to wait and see.

Schools and businesses close, everyone rushes to the store to buy up all the bread and milk even if they are lactose intolerant, and when that’s done they go to the only restaurant in town that’s going to be open which of course is where I come in.

If it does snow and schools are closed tomorrow posting may be light, both tonight and tomorrow. Not only will I be 3x as busy as normal but I will also have employees calling in, which means working even harder for those of us who do show up.

Feel free to stop in and leave some posts in the forum and I’ll be sure to get them on the site when it’s a bit less busy.

If you haven’t had the chance yet, check out the forums as well while you are here. Any registered member can post topics here. Ideas for posts for even complete ones for that matter.

I am also using it to post incomplete stories, perhaps ones I haven’t had the time to research yet or felt would be better served in the forums rather than on the site.

I will also be posting site updates there as well as the site blog and you can use the forum to make suggestions for the site as well as to contact me.

Oh, by the way, I am aware that the font is too small. I am working on getting rid of the side bar so that they show up properly.

• The forums are now active. No content yet but feel free to add to it. The login is integrated with the site here so no need for two sets of credentials. I know the type is somewhat small, but once I figure out how to remove the sidebar widgets I will get rid of it.
• We are back to registration only for commenting and participating in the forums and other stuff here on the site.
• Sort of a “social media” aspect. You can edit your profile and upload your own avatar if you don’t already use Gravatar. If you do use Gravatar the site will automatically pull it in as long as you are using the correct email address. You can friend other users, and some other nifty stuff. Check out the profile links up top for more info.
• I still need to add a contact form. For the time being just send me an email at the link on the contact page.

Although I have used WordPress in the past it was not for very long and I am far from being an expert with it as I have used Movabletype for the last seven years. If you come across weird shit please let me know.

While Movabletype is a much more powerful CMS platform I needed something that I could just “use out of the box” and configure easily.

Let me know if you run into any problems.

There are very few professional themes out there. I do like the one I am currently using but it’s buggy and updates by the guy who ported it to MT are few and far between.

In order to actually have the site do some of the things I want either I will have to learn more javascript than I want, or continue paying someone to do the upgrades, which is what I have recently done. While they did an OK job I am not at all impressed.

What I really want is something that is very extensible but easy to use, therefore over the next 24 hours we will most likely be moving to WordPress unless some other easy solution presents itself.

If you have already created an account to comment, you will have to recreate it, however that is an easy process and if you already have a Gravatar it will automatically use those.

I will update this as needed. Thanks!

If you are reading this content anywhere besides sickcrimes.us or your RSS reader it might be stolen. Please let me know at captain.obvious@sickcrimes.us]]> http://www.sickcrimes.us/2010/01/major-site-updates-198/feed 0 http://www.sickcrimes.us/2009/12/happy-holidays-172 http://www.sickcrimes.us/2009/12/happy-holidays-172#comments Fri, 25 Dec 2009 13:47:27 +0000 admin http://www.sickcrimes.us/wordpress/2009/12/happy-holidays-172 As I mentioned last week, I am pretty busy during the holidays and this will most likely be my only post until tomorrow. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone from Captain Obvious!

I should be able to have a couple of posts up each day between now and the end of the year when it will get back to normal, except for Christmas Day. That is usually about a 20 hour day at work for me so it is unlikely that I will even bother checking my email on the 25th, much less get on the web.

This means that comments are now working in all browsers, or should be anyway. I am still going to be requiring registration in order to authenticate users but I will be adding Facebook and Twitter authentication soon so that you can just log into those and comment without leaving your information here.

The other changes planned still have not been implemented yet either, hopefully those will be in place shortly as well. I have emailed the developer a couple of times this week and haven’t received a reply.

I will be in meetings at work until around 8 p.m. this evening so if you attempt to contact me it will be late tonight or possibly tomorrow before I return your email.

I may or may not get any more posts up until tonight or tomorrow. I have to work until about 9 this evening, although I may get a break to come home for a while this afternoon. My brother is flying in from Baltimore to interview with my company and he should be here around tenish this evening. Somewhere in between I have to pick up the girls (the wife has class on Thursdays), take them to have their pictures taken with Santa and get a gift. Unfortunately that’s at work so they are stuck with me until we get it all cleaned up and the RV packed back up. Each year we make a list of all the employees with children and bring Santa out for them to receive a gift and get their picture taken. It’s a small gesture but it’s a very important one for them.

I still haven’t heard back from the theme developer or the guy that was going to work on my site, I am sure they are just as busy as I am with Christmas approaching so fast. I have done a bit of research and suffice it to say I can’t fix the problem on my own. I’m not a developer, I know just enough to get me in trouble so it’s better to leave the comments broken for the time being. If I mess with it too much I’ll break something worse. Besides, Internet Exploder sucks anyway and while I like Safari and Chrome to some extent Firefox and Flock have been my browsers of choice for the last couple of years.

As soon as I hear something I’ll give you folks an update.

You should be OK if you are using Firefox or one of the browsers built on firefox technology such as Flock (which is what I have been using and why I wasn’t aware of it before).

If you email me give me a couple of days to respond. I don’t have Internet access at work and while I do get email on my Crackberry I don’t always have the time to respond.

In other news, it looks as if the commenting upgrade will finally take place today. If the system acts weird today just bear that in mind.

Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s to hoping you all have a wonderful holiday.

If you have tried to access the RSS feeds or pages for any of the subcategories they apparently haven’t been working. I wasn’t aware of the fact until this morning that the pages that are supposed to be built in the background so as not to slow down the site weren’t running. I forgot to set permissions on the run-periodic-tasks file in my Moveabletype installation. That has now been taken care of and background rebuilds should start taking place every fifteen minutes. This includes each of the subcategories, RSS feeds, my site map and the archived pages. ooops.

If you are on Facebook, please head over to the link in the sidebar and fan our page. Also if ou will click the one of the Networked Blogs links from the fan page I need some more folks to “follow” the feed as well as to confirm that I am the author. Once enough people have confirmed me it will start running the feed on a regular basis.

While these posts won’t show up on the main page you can always find this blog-within-a-blog by clicking on the ‘Site News’ link at the top of the page. I will post updates and planned changes here every once in a while. As a matter of fact tomorrow (Tuesday) the site may act funny for a while during the day when some upgrades and changes are made within the commenting system thanks to Mihai over at Pro IT Services.

About the commenting system. In order to post comments on this site you must be a member. Sign up is easy. Just click the ‘Sign In’ link on any post here (I will add a sign up link to the top of the page eventually), fill out a short form and wait for the confirmation email. Easy as pie. It’s not that I want to cut down anonymous posting but I do want to cut down on the number of spammers, haters and racists out there that have nothing better to do than waste my time and foment trouble. The user profiles are pretty bare at the moment. There is a system in place to allow you to have your own profile page and link your social networking pages on it as well but there is a bug that’s throwing an error right now so I have left these unlinked. Once I get it fixed I will post links to the pages. The error has something to do with profile pictures. For the time being if you want a profile pic feel free to email your picture to me at captain.obvious@sickcrimes.us or captain.obvious.crimeblogger@gmail.com and I will attach it to your profile for you.

Some things that will be coming soon include upgrading the comment system so that you never have to leave the page when you submit (tomorrow), inline replies to other commenters (also tomorrow), nested comments (replies under the comment they are replying to), a working forum using the same user profile accounts here, mini-blogs on your profile that will allow you to write your own posts which might be included on the main page and more which I can’t think of since my train of thought has now been derailed for the evening.

Feel free to contact me using the links at the top of the page with your suggestions and bug reports.

Hope you folks have a safe, crime-free week!

THE MAD ONES: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld (Weinstein Books; May 5, 2009) is a powerful collision of true crime and pop culture, telling the family tale of the notorious Gallo brothers, Crazy Joe, Larry, and Kid Blast, and bringing to life one of the most vibrant antiheros in American history. Joey is steeped in legend from Bob Dylan’s eleven-minute ballad “Joey” to fictionalizations central to The Godfather trilogy and Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Robert Kennedy called Joey a “Hollywood Grade B Gangster.”

Truth behind the fiction Coinciding with this year’s 40th anniversary of the publication of The Godfather, in The Mad Ones, author Tom Folsom brings to life the real life events that inspired Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola’s opus. “Sleeps with the fishes?” “Going to the mattresses?” These famous terms originated with the Gallos, once called the toughest gang in New York by the NYPD, hailing from the rough Red Hook neighborhood on the Brooklyn waterfront, now home to IKEA.

Hollywood-worthy ending Here, for the first time, is the complete story of the Gallos’ war against the powerful Cosa Nostra, an epic crime saga that culminates in Crazy Joe’s murder on the streets of Little Italy, where he was gunned down mid-bite into a forkful of spaghetti in 1972. To this day, it is the one of the great, unsolved mob killings.

Not your typical mob book What does the summer of love have to do with gangsters? Capturing the revolutionary spirit of the sixties so popular with the Obama generation from recent Broadway revivals of West Side Story and Hair, Joey aspired to be more than a common hood and immersed himself among the Beatniks and bohemians of the Village. Yearning to live the life of an artist, Joey wrote poetry, painted, and got his kicks devouring existential philosophy. Celebrated as the “king of the streets” by Dylan, Joey was embraced by the nation’s leading cultural figures.

The Mad Ones is a wildly satisfying entertainment and a significant work of cultural history, now the subject of an upcoming major motion picture by Weinstein Films.  Folsom is available to take reporters and film crews around the key sites of The Mad Ones, including Umberto’s Clam House and Elaine’s, where Joey made the rounds of high society with actor Jerry Orbach.

TOM FOLSOM is a writer, director, and producer of television documentaries for A&E and Showtime, and the co-author of Mr. Untouchable, written with its subject, drug-kingpin Nicky Barnes, portrayed in the film American Gangster. Folsom lives in New York City.