All new posts will have commenting on the page
If you were wondering why it’s been a little quiet around here this morning it’s because I’ve been working to enable the comments on the site. We’ve used Haloscan for over a year to reduce the load on the server.

We needed to allow for commenting directly on the site in order to have more control over comment spam, and to provide new features like comment editing, smilies, and spam reporting.

Haloscan comments still accessible from within older posts
None of your old discussions have been lost, they’re all accessible and you can still comment using Haloscan for older posts.

I know this is a real inconvenience for current discussions, and I tried several workarounds to no avail. Just open the individual post page, i.e. “CNN reporter Richard Quest wearing rope on genitals when arrested,” and scroll to the bottom to launch the pop-up window.

The “recent comments” display to the lower right of every page will now be for the most recent posts with comments and won’t reflect what’s in the Haloscan system.

Please try out the new comments and provide feedback
I’m very sorry for the inconvenience during this transition, but hopefully the new comment system is easier to use. Please let us know if you would like any changes or additional features. It’s all on a trial basis for now to see how it works.

Now back to the gossip.

Photo credit: manuere on Morguefile.

Agent Bedhead is my BFF blogging friend, and they nominated me for a Weblog Award. We’re a top ten finalist, but are now last in the poll - behind Agent Bedhead. We don’t want them to be last either though, so we’ll ask you to vote for one of us.

It’s a minor letdown to be last, but it’s an honor to be nominated since the site is kinda new considering that I started it back in February of this year. Celebitchy is also up against bloggers who are more prolific and popular.

If you could head over to The Weblog Awards and vote we would appreciate it. You can vote once a day from every computer you own. Yes, this is allowed in the rules and all. Vote for us, or if you like another blog better that’s cool too. We don’t expect to win, we just want some more vote love.

The polls are closing at noon on Friday EST.

The site was down for a while today. You can blame Britney for the meteoric rise in the popularity of gossip blogs. As a stop gap measure I had to add pop-up comments instead of on-page comments for now. None of your comments are lost and if you made comments on the page they will still appear. All discussions will have to be in the pop-up windows using Haloscan for now, though. I’m sorry about that and I personally prefer on-page comments.

There are also just 10 posts on the main page now instead of 18. You can see older posts in the headline view by choosing the page links at the bottom.

I’m going to try to move the site to Drupal as it is supposedly better for high-volume sites than Wordpress. If anyone has any warnings or advice about this, please comment on this post or e-mail me at info at celebitchy.com. Tomorrow, though, I’m just going to focus on the gossip to clear my head.

Header image is adorable cat Farrusko from the Infinite Cat Project. If you’re ever looking for some stress relief just scroll through the cat images there backwards.

The site was really slow yesterday and today, and I just disabled one of the ad programs, which seems to have fixed the problem for now. Thanks for hanging in there!

If it gets slow again I will consider switching over to another blogging platform, with the details below, but let’s hope it doesn’t have to come to that.

Technical info: I guess Wordpress isn’t meant to handle a lot of traffic and this platform Drupal is supposed to be better. I will do my best to move the site over to Drupal if it starts to slow down again. I tried the wp-cache plugin to take the load off the site, but I can’t get it working, even with the suggested fixes online. It always causes the site to blank out. If you are familiar with this, please e-mail me at info -at- celebitchy.com. I tried to disable php-cache because it’s not compatible with wp-cache or something, and applied the suggested code fixes to wp-cache, but nothing works.

It seems the real problem was that ad program, so let’s hope the site performs better now.

Yesterday I moved the site to an entirely new dedicated server at a company that’s nice to their customers, has an actual tech support phone number, and doesn’t treat you like you’re stupid for asking why your expensive server is down half the day.

This was not a simple feat, and I did not have to time to do much more than scramble. So here are the gossip links a bit late. Let me know if anything isn’t working right. Some of the characters in the quoted text are looking strange, and I will fix that shortly. I worked hard to try to preserve all your comments during the move, but the site was bounced around between two different servers before finally settling here so if you left a comment and it’s gone now I’m sorry about that.

Thanks for helping the site grow so quickly and for bearing with us during the outages. I love your comments - keep ‘em up! Props to millie, Jude, Angelika, Chic Mommy, Mr. T, Marines, AgentBedhead, xiaoecho, and everyone else who has been commenting lately. Also thanks for your encouraging e-mails. If you have asked for a link exchange give me a little time to catch up as I was working on this.

If the site is still slow for you, please comment here. I will not hesitate to look into other options if this isn’t working out.

We need writers, so if you have a blog you would like to promote in exchange for some quick content, please e-mail me at info@celebitchy.com. (If that doesn’t go through, keep trying. I just asked to have my mail set up.)

- What the hell are Martin Lawrence, William H. Macy, Tim Allen, and John Travolta doing getting naked together? [Socialite’s Life]
- Lindsay Lohan is looking really beat lately [Mollygood]
- Lindsay Lohan probably didn’t hook up with Keanu Reeves [The Trixie]
- Rosie O’Donnell declares war on heterosexuality by appearing in a sex scene on Nip/Tuck [Agent Bedhead]
- Katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham in Paris. [I’m Not Obsessed]
- Katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham looking like fierce 1950s lesbians. [DListed]
- Rehashing the “Lost” season opener (Spoiler alert) [Celebritology]
- Sienna Miller says “we’re f*cking animals.” Is she talking about herself and Jude Law? Because everyone agrees . [Celebrity Nation]
- Jude Law and Sienna Miller are wasted [Egotastic]
- Victoria Beckham on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar [Celebguru]
- Eva Longoria and Tony Parker’s romance still circling the drain [Celeb News Wire]
- Nick Carter thinks with his man parts [Glitterati]
- Paris Hilton tries to bring leg warmers back [Haute Gossip]
- Ryder Hudson-Robinson rides a horse [Celebrity Baby Scoop]
- Jessica Biel working out. Maybe she should wear pink next time so we know the pictures are new. [Hollywood Tuna]
- Republicans are blaming Clinton for the fact the representative Foley’s pedophilia was ignored for so long [Metadish]
- Hello! magazine to have a spread on celebrity philanthropists like Brangelina [ecorazzi]
- Kevin Federline harasses the paparrazi [ICYDK]
- Jessica Simpson in a see-through top [Jordan is your Homeboy]
- Jessica Simpson is Ashton Kutcher in drag [CityRag]
- Jessica Simpson looks like Edward Scissorhands [IDLYITW]
- Beverly Hills 90210 flashback. [Wampoon]
- Do Eliza Dushku’s droopy eyes make her fug? [Bastardly]
- Prince tries to convert strippers to his Jehovas Witness cult [yeeeah]
- Janet Jackson looks like a half-dressed alien [Gallery of the Absurd]

Cele|bitchy moved to a dedicated server this weekend, which means it should be up most of the time and load relatively quickly. However, we’ve been hosting our photos remotely on Photobucket, which is incredibly slow today for some reason. (It figures.) I’ve moved most of the recent photos to our own server, so the images on the posts for today and yesterday should appear fine. The images on the older posts may load slower or not at all. Please bear with us, and the issue should be resolved soon.

We have a new blogger, Jude, who will be focusing on beauty and fashion. A lot of gossip rags have beauty and fashion advice, so I figure we can branch out a little. Her new post on how to repair damaged hair, Fried Hair 911, includes lots of great advice on protecting your hair and restoring it to glossy health.

Thanks for helping make the site grow so quickly. If you visit the advertisers it does help us out.

Header image taken by Leonard at Photocase.

Cele|bitchy is now run by Wordpress, and sports a lot of new features.
Please test stuff out and let me know if you find any bugs or if you find anything hard to use or confusing.

Cele|bitchy’s New Features:

• You can edit comments up to 30 minutes after they’re made

• You can add a little icon next to your name when you comment using the Gravatar service
• You can subscribe to the comments in a individual post by checking a box when you make a comment
• The last commented posts, latest posts, and most commented stories are now at the bottom of each page
• You can send an e-mail of a post to a friend and it will include the header image and the story excerpt.
• There are lots of other neat features, including easier to navigate categories, more archive options and a weighted tag category view

The Classic View is now the default homepage due to the way Wordpress manages archives, but you can still switch over to Headline View by choosing the navigation link on the top bar. I may add a cookie to make your homepage selection permanent. I’m focusing on customizing the blog as that’s not my forte and might take me a little while. (If you know how to do this easily, e-mail me at info -at- celebitchy.com. I tried to implement it a while ago, but I did it wrong and it was buggy.)

On the technical side, most all of the permalinks, except for the In Brief section, should be converted to the new format. I have left the old pages up for now, so you may find some of them on the migrated posts with picture pages. They will be removed in a week or two.

The feed from FeedBurner has been updated, but if you were pointing to the direct feed from the site, the address has now changed to: http://celebitchy.com/feed/rss2/

Cele|bitchy is just over six months old and has over 1500 posts, so this migration was no small feat. It was a lot of fun getting everything to work though, and I hope it creates a better gossip experience for you!

Let me know what you think, and thanks for visiting and contributing your comments. Cele|bitchy would not exist without you.

Here are some pictures of Rachel Bilson and Adam Brody getting coffee [via] and preparing for Rachel’s 25th birthday [via]

Celebitchy is travelling and going on vacation. This means we will be gone from Friday until either Tuesday or Wednesday depending on when we can get Internet access. Wednesday is probably a safer bet. For those of you that think we’re slackers - you’re right.

Have a great weekend and we’ll bring you all the latest gossip mid-week next week. Here’s what’s going on today:

- Are Brad and Angelina going to adopt another baby NOW? That’s crazy talk! (Faded Youth)
- Mandy Moore and Zach Braff are no more. They kept a low profile though, so who cares really. There aren’t any pictures. (Daily Dish)
- Nicole Kidman looks pregnant (Socialite’s Life)
- George Bush asks a blind guy to remove his sunglasses, but he should know the guy - he’s been in his press corps for years (DListed)
- Having failed to convince Britney of the merits of Kabbalah, Madonna moves on to Lohan (MollyGood)
- Are Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn engaged? (PopSugar)
- Madonna’s “Get Together” video (popbytes)
- Kate Bosworth walks her dog (The Bastardly)
- All of Stephanie Adams’ “fans” that commented on BlogNYC - they were from the same IP address, uh Adams’ computer (BlogNYC)
- Oprah crashes a wedding, royally pisses off a family in Oklahoma (Glitterati)

We are trying to find a solution for hosting high resolution images and wanted to ask your opinion. We have a premium account at PhotoBucket, which is the best ad-free photo host, but PhotoBucket does not automatically resize images to fit your screen. This is not an issue for Firefox users, but most of you are on Internet Explorer and probably prefer that images are resized.

We have been using ImageShack, and it seemed like a great host because it automatically creates thumbnails with image dimensions and the ads are relatively tame. I just noticed that ImageShack launches pop-up windows, though, which are incredibly annoying. (I only noticed this when I moved to a computer that didn’t have an Internet security program and would not have used this image host if I was aware of it. That other computer could also be infected with spyware which might be causing the problem.)

ImageVenue is another solution, but the ads there are pretty racy, which could create a problem for people surfing at work or school. (So could most of the posts on this site, but that’s another issue.)

Would you please compare the photos on the following posts and let us know what you prefer?

Top gossip and fashion blogs are members of the “Glam Network,” a celebrity and fashion site that partners with blogs with the promise of advertising revenue from ad placement. The Glam Network is scamming fashion and gossip bloggers into giving them massive free advertising in exchange for a small link on the Glam website and the promise of ad revenue which never materializes.

The Glam Network lures bloggers with exclusivity and .50 cents a click. After applying to join, your blog might get approved about a month later and you’re sent a lengthy contract that states that Glam will pay you .50 cents a click for third party ads, which they can swap out with ads for Glam.com at their discretion. This sounds like a decent deal and it seems better than the payout for AdSense or CrispAds.

Glam never explains the contract in simple terms, and there are no Terms of Service or FAQs for Glam Network bloggers on their website.

In order to finalize your membership you’re required to place one Glam ad, either 160×600, 300×250, or 728×90 on your site, along with a small Glam membership logo and a 160×200 Glam “Module” which features content from Glam. Most sites choose the large 728×90 vertical banner, assuming they’re getting .50 cents a click.

Here’s the relevant part of the contract:

The thing is - Glam doesn’t give any payout for its own ads, and third party ads are rarely, if ever, seen. It also doesn’t offer any real time statistics or network blog control panel. Get this - you have to e-mail them to request statistics and then take their word on it.

It is incredibly rare to see a third party ad on a Glam Network blog, and the Standard Blog Contract states that Glam can swap out the ads with free Glam ads at their discretion.

Celebitchy was approved for the Glam Network and we signed the contract this week. We got suspicious after we realized that we wouldn’t receive any paying ads for a while, and that there were no statistics available.

Our contact at Glam e-mailed us:

I answered:

When we checked, only one Glam network blog had an ad that wasn’t for Glam.com. We e-mailed with a top gossip blog that gets a huge amount of traffic and they said that they’ve had Glam ads up since April and only saw a third party ad appear occasionally at the beginning of this month, June

No one has ever been paid by Glam that we could verify. That same top gossip site told us that they’ve never seen a dime from Glam despite having their ads up since April.

Two other gossip bloggers told us they assumed they would be receiving .50/click for the huge ads on their site from Glam, and did not realize that there was no payout for Glam.com ads.

Glam is a much worse deal than CrispAds or AdSense because you don’t get paid for every click - you get paid when Glam decides to throw you a bone, but they haven’t paid anyone yet!

Glam might continue to get away with this because bloggers are afraid of being sued. The contract that we signed states that we have to give Glam 90 days notice before removing their ads.

We suggest that everyone who thought they would be receiving .50 a click for Glam ads remove them immediately.

To be fair, they did withdraw our contract without penalty when we requested it a day after signing up.

Once Glam tries to sue us for reporting this, we’ll let you know. We’re not going to take this down if they threaten us.

Update: One blogger claims to have been paid “not much” in March, but another e-mailed us to ask if we’d been paid, and said “Have you gotten paid yet? Not just told how much you’re getting paid, but have you actually gotten paid? I haven’t and it’s been over a month.” We only had Glam ads up for a day, so they’re never going to pay us.