For about two months PDD has been having problems with its “Recent Comments” feature — the item in the left column that highlights which posts have new comments you might not have read.

This week we installed a new plugin for Recent Comments that we hoped would be better, but unfortunately it isn’t.
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On June 29 PDD will be awarding $100 to the person who submits the best new banner. Everyone who has submitted one since Jan. 1 will be eligible. Pre-2013 banners will be pulled from rotation on June 29, but will be kept in archival storage and maintained by nice librarians with white cotton gloves at Google Plus. Banners from 2005-2009 can be found here.

We’re also looking for new Homegrown banners. Those submissions will be eligible for the same $100 prize. For full details on banner submissions, click here. The basic info is the image must be 960 pixels wide by 167 pixels high. The Perfect Duluth Day logo will be added by PDD’s art department. Send them to banners @ perfectduluthday.com

The little spot over in the left column that highlights which posts have new comments should be working properly now. Let us know if it’s doing anything funky for you.

We broke it three weeks ago while fixing something else. Now that it’s fixed, the new problem is that it leaves an ugly gap in the left column if you’ve read all the recent comments. We’ll fix that soon and then watch what breaks the minute we do.

Also, as those of you who read PDD on your phones or tablets may have noticed, we turned off PDD’s mobile version. This is a temporary measure. The mobile version was whacking out our regular site … yadda yadda … we’ll get the geeks on it eventually, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

You may have noticed the little section on the left column that highlights which posts have new comments you haven’t read has been malfunctioning. We know this, and we are working on it. (And when I say “working on it,” I mean going skiing and thinking about it occasionally.)

The problem started over the weekend, when a new plugin was installed to speed up the time it takes to load the homepage. Fix one thing, another one breaks. That’s how it goes.

The mad scientists in the Perfect Duluth Day Calendar Labs are continually applying their impressive craniums to just one question, “How can we make our calendar that much cooler?”

Well, pop up videos, that’s how! Starting now, if there’s a video linked to the event, just click on the “Watch Video” link and it will pop up in your browser window. Movie trailers, music videos, game tutorials and more are just a click away! Then you can click away the video and keep browsing events.

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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.

To participate in the survey, you do not need to be logged in or have an account with PDD at all; you just have to be a human being with the ability to click things on the Internet.

This survey has closed; thanks to everyone who participated.
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Right now there are 47 posts in PDD’s “drafts” folder. Items in the drafts folder are, presumably, posts that people started composing and saved with the intent of finishing later.

But maybe some of you thought you were supposed to create a draft and then the moderators publish it. That’s not how it works. We would have no way of knowing which drafts were ready to post and which were not, except to guess based on how complete we think they look.

So help us out with some almost-Spring cleaning. If you have an old draft for a post, finish it and click the blue “publish” button, or give up on it and click the red “move to trash” option.

the good old days when you could run the gauntlet on PDD?

Perfect Duluth Day hit a seemingly significant, though maybe not legitimately significant, milestone recently when it crossed the threshold of having 2,000 registered users.

Registered users, of course, are the people who have created an account on this site and are able to create posts and comment on posts. (Anyone can read PDD, but in order to be involved in discussions here you must create an account and log in.)

In recognition of 2,000+ users, we present a bunch of yammering, er, useful information, about PDD user accounts. Call it answers to frequently or not-so-frequently asked questions.
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It’s not likely you noticed it, but on Oct. 1 Perfect Duluth Day stopped mixing in Google-generated advertisements with the other ads that rotate over there on the right side of the page. It’s also not likely you care why, but we will explain nonetheless.
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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.

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.

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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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.

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.

Ain’t they all, Mr. Mayor?

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.

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.

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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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? Should we show the descriptions like below?

* * *

* * *

That’s how we have it now. It means you don’t have to click the event title to get the description, but you have to scroll more to look at all the events.

Or, should we hide the descriptions like below?

* * *

* * *

With the descriptions hidden it’s easier to scroll through and find an event you’re interested in, then click for more info. But you have to click back and forth if there were several events you want info on.

It comes down to more scrolling, less clicking vs. more clicking, less scrolling. Consult your median nerve and vote:

This poll is now closed. The results were:

Show the descriptions — 55.3 percent
Hide the descriptions — 44.7 percent

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If you want to blabber about your answer, the comments are open. If you want to comment about the calendar, but not this specific element of it, please refer to the calendar intro post and comment there.

Some time in August we should have this thing running full throttle. And it probably bears mentioning again that there’s still two weeks to apply for the postion of PDD Calendar editor.