April 8, 2008

• Rock Chalk! Jayhawk! KU!

  When the Kansas Jayhawks won the 1988 Men’s NCAA Basketball Championship I was a graduate teaching assistant and debate coach at the University of Kansas. I used to see Danny Manning in the Wescoe Cafeteria almost daily. It had been a very up and down season and the expectations were low by Kansas standards.
  I have [...]

March 3, 2008

• PFDebate Shop Relaunched

  I have finally finished rebuilding the PFDebate Shop. I will be adding the 2008-09 Crossfire Briefs listings in the near future.
  As part of the shop relaunch, I have added a limited print run of 24 PFDebate sweatshirts. The sweatshirts are being sold for $6.95 — the cost of Priority Mail shipping. Limit one sweatshirt per [...]

February 14, 2008

• Happy Valentine’s Day!

  I almost went with scientist Valentines, but I have a soft spot for Ralph Wiggum.

February 12, 2008

• Covered In Ice, But Thinking About Presidential Primaries

  Things have been slow on the site this week because the Ozarks are covered in ice and my home internet connection is down. We still have electricity (and heat) - at least for now. I have taken up sanctuary in my office at the university which is eerily quiet. The university has been closed for [...]

February 3, 2008

• Server Move Postmortem

  PFDebate was successfully moved to the new server on Friday night. It has taken a few days for the DNS changes to fully propagate, but everything appears to be back to normal. I think you will find the new server to be much faster and more reliable.
  The next project is to completely redesign the PFDebate [...]

February 1, 2008

• Maintenance Downtime Reminder

  Don’t forget that the entire PFDebate site will be down for at least 4 hours today beginning at 4:00pm Central time as we move the site to a new server.

January 28, 2008

• Growing Pains

  Traffic at PFDebate has grown substantially since last summer and the site’s reliability and performance has not met my expectations.
  PFDebate has retained the services of a Linux Systems Administrator and we are moving the PFDebate website from Dreamhost to a virtual server account at Slicehost. The move gives us total control over the system configuration [...]

January 21, 2008

• Free T-Shirts!

  I am getting ready to order some new PFDebate gear and I discovered that I still have some of the Boris the Robot “Formidable Opponent” t-shirts stashed away. The above image is printed on light blue shirts.
  I have two t-shirts: one Adult Medium and one Adult Large. I will send them to the first two [...]

January 9, 2008

• PFDebate Forums Get Facelift

  One of my goals for 2008 is the unify the look and feel of all of the sections of the PFDebate website. The PFDebate Forums is the first section to get a makeover.

December 13, 2007

• Blog Problems

  The blog portion of the site has been up and down a couple of times this week with the same problem. I am working with the hosting service to try to figure out what is causing the problem. I apologize for the inconvenience.
  It is working properly at the moment.

September 23, 2007

• DebateSeek Updated

  I have added over 100 new sites to DebateSeek, our speech & debate search engine that is powered by Google. More sites will be added this week.
  If you know a speech or debate website that is not included, including your team’s website, please contact us. You can search the database for your site’s domain (e.g. [...]

September 21, 2007

• Website Changes

  As you may have noticed, we have killed off the “Free Evidence” portion of the site. Since PFDebate’s handbook, Crossfire Briefs, is now comprehensive in scope instead of 30 pieces of evidence, we no longer have stacks of quality evidence laying around.
  We have replaced the “Free Evidence” section on the site’s main page with the [...]

August 16, 2007

• Server Problems. Rrr.

  Our webhost, Dreamhost, has been hit with problems the past two days and this has made our site slow or inaccessible for extended periods of time. We apologize for the inconvenience.
  If things don’t get better quickly, we will be looking for a new hosting service, but we would rather be reading about the Fairness Doctrine.

August 8, 2007

• Pardon the Interruption

  We apologize for yesterday’s downtime. We upgraded from a shared hosting account to our own virtual server. Our hosting service did not mention that there would be some downtime while the domain name server information propagated until after the switch was complete.
  Moving to a virtual server with two dedicated IP addresses should make the site [...]

July 7, 2007

• My Lucky Day: 07-07-07

  The paperwork is finally complete and I now have 100% ownership of PFDebate, LLC.
  The past month has been unexpectedly busy. I have had numerous discussions with debaters, coaches, competing handbook publishers, speech & debate website publishers, web developers, and fellow geeks about PFDebate.com and our new Public Forum Debate handbook, Crossfire Briefs.
  Some conversations are ongoing [...]

June 22, 2007

• Calling The Top 6

  PFDebate would like to congratulate the top 6 teams at NFL Nationals. It is a truly memorable achievement.
  After you get home and catch your breath, send us an email. We would like to chat with you about your experience and make certain that you get the recognition that you deserve.

March 24, 2007

• New Mailing Address

  Please note that we have a new mailing address:
  PFDebate, LLC
  1325 W. Sunshine St. #203
  Springfield, MO 65807-2344
  We also now have the ability to receive faxes. Our fax number is:
  (417) 863-6655.

February 24, 2007

• Planned Power Outage

  Our webhosting company, Dreamhost, has a planned power outage for Sunday morning, February 25, at 12:01am PST. The service outage should last just over 3 hours.
  Hopefully, everyone will just sleep through the outage.

January 22, 2007

• Technical Difficulties

  Our home page in inaccessible because of a DNS problem with pfdebate.com (www.pfdebate.com). Our host has reportedly fixed the problem, but it takes about 24 hours for the new DNS to propagate around the internet. It will likely be down until Tuesday morning.
  The rest of our site is working just fine. We apologize for the [...]

January 21, 2007

• Welcome to PFDebate 3.0!

  Things were a little wonky this weekend as we updated the site. The creation of a new landing page (re: front page) has been on the list of things to do for awhile. Our goal is to make PFDebate.com much more than “Two Guys and a Blog”.
  A few weeks ago Steve Smith from Ordered List [...]