weblogs

I’ve been blogging since around November 2000 (arguably, earlier than that, that’s just when I started using software on the backend); this is for posts generally about blogging.

Electronic Grassroots

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Much has been made over the past few months of how political campaigns are more and more turning to electronic means of communication and organization to connect and interact with voters, usually pointing to the Howard Dean campaign as the leader and trendsetter for this new approach to politicking. But how did Dean’s online juggernaut get kicked into high gear? It all boils down to three essential people and two websites: Jerome Armstrong and Mathew Gross, of MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos.

How did it start? Well, with inadequate political coverage and two political junkies who wrote like sportswriters.

[…]

Armstrong and Kos were both deeply interested in ‘the conventional wisdon’, and how it was formed. What Armstrong liked about Dean was that Dean was a fighter, very early on. As he wrote, “This brings up another point, Dean is the only Democrat who is calling Bush to the mat on his budget-busting tax-cuts.” Armstrong and Kos believed that a candidate needed to stand for something, but, as self-confessed amateurs, held back from making claims about being able to do politics better than the party itself.

The 2002 midterms changed the rules. Because of the intense sports race tenor of the race – and Kos’s proclivity to muse and post on nearly every race – Kos regularly got upwards of 80 comments on each post. The Iraq war later kicked up Kos’s traffic to yet another level, but the midterms were the first hints that a special community was forming. Shortly after the electoral losses, the community started discussing a new slogan for the Democratic Party. The anger at the party that would spark Dean’s rise was evident. Kos mused dejectedly after the losses: “None of us are Democratic Party consultants (as far as I know), but ideas have to start somewhere and this is as good a place as any. God knows whatever focus-group testing the Dems have conducted haven’t given us squat.”

It’s an excellent retrospective of just how all of the current blog-centric political campaigns got their start. Not with pundits sitting in back rooms scheming and grasping at straws, trying to come up with any desperate plan to get their candidate on the news and a household name — but with people who felt strongly that this country was in trouble, could do better, and needed a change, and decided that they had the ability and drive to do something about it.

It’s a wonderful thing we’ve gotten started here.

iTunes: “Kiss, The” by Cure, The from the album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987, 6:14).

Changing my habits

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NetNewsWire grouped

As sloppy as my apartment can get (and believe me, it can get quite sloppy — though it’s usually just “extremely cluttered” as opposed to “disgustingly messy”, a small but important difference), I tend to be extremely organized in many other areas of my life. My occasional rants about metadata and .mp3 tags have probably clued a few people in to this aspect of my personality. I also tend to keep my movies, books, and music alphabetized, files on my computers all in their appropriate places, and so on. Heck, part of my drive to ensure that my web pages validate as clean, standards-compliant code stems from this innate desire for simple categorization and the ability to find things quickly.

To that end, since I started using NetNewsWire to keep up with the various weblogs and news sites that I like to read, I’ve used its grouping function to assign each RSS feed to a specific category — technology, macintosh, personal, and so on.

About a month ago, Rand was asking about RSS reading habits, and after a bit of thought prompted by his post, I’ve been wondering for a bit if this categorization is really the best approach for me to take. As my list of subscribed feeds grows (currently hovering right around 100 or so, give or take a few I’m reading on a trial basis — nowhere near Scoble’s 600+, but still fairly respectable), I’m finding it harder and harder to get through all my feeds on a regular basis. I’ve been doing very well at keeping up with sites that were in the groups at the top of the list (usually Personal and Macintosh), but not so well with groups towards the bottom (usually Links and Political). If I get bored, hungry, or distracted during my reading, the ones at the bottom get fairly regularly neglected.

NetNewsWire ungrouped

So, starting tonight, I’m going to try to vary my reading habits a bit to see what that does. I’ve deleted all the groups I was using before, and instead have all the feeds listed in more-or-less alphabetical order, top to bottom in a single group, ordered by date posted. While the amount of information doesn’t really change, the presentation is different enough that it might make a difference in what I find on any given day. I know I’ve missed a few breaking stories over the past few weeks, especially in the political arena, simply because I wasn’t getting far enough through my reading to see them until they’d already been blogged to death by everyone else on the ‘net.

I’m hoping that this little adjustment will be enough to help me keep up with everything a little bit better. No way to know until I try, of course.

iTunes: “She Cries Your Name” by Orton, Beth from the album Who Will Be Big In ’98? (1997, 4:47).

ecto beta available

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The creator of blogging client Kung-Log has rewritten, updated, and renamed it, and has just relased the first public beta of ecto, which I’m playing with now. While I was never completely pulled in by Kung-Log, ecto so far seem to be fairly impressive. Quick response time, supports about everything I’d want it to (trackback pings, categories, file uploading, etc.), and has a decent number of useful extras (an option to prevent uploading posts that don’t have a category set or a summary written, and a live preview that can even tie into your site’s stylesheet so that it actually looks the way it should once posted), plus some “fun” goodies (like the ability to automatically insert what track iTunes is currently playing).

I’ve gotten so used to just using the web interface that I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be coaxed away from that or not, but I’m always willing to give one of these things a try. We’ll see how it goes.

(via Lane)

iTunes: “Difficult Listening Hour – 02v2” by DJ Wüdi from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2000, 1:04:41).

NYPD cop busted for blogging

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A NYPD police officer is under investigation because of what he wrote on his weblog. However, where when I landed in hot water due to my blog it was due to a single stupid mistake, this guy appears to have been bragging about grossly abusing his position as an officer of the law.

A Brooklyn cop is being investigated for Internet postings in which he brags about beating suspects, writing phony tickets and ignoring calls to his precinct.

The officer, identified by Internal Affairs investigators as a patrol cop who works in the 75th Precinct, uses the pseudonym “Brooklynbacon” and posts his messages on a site accessible through Xanga.com.

Alongside pictures of motorcycle trick riders, naked women, photographs with comical captions and pictures of human oddities, he posts messages supposedly about his job and, in some instances, his own misconduct. Any one of the offenses he describes could cost him his job.

Either the guy is telling the truth (and therefore a disturbing mix of braggart, ass, and idiot), or it’s all a fiction playing off the popular perception of NYPD officers (in which case he’s just an ass and an idiot). Either way, the stories he posted are more than serious enough to warrant landing him in hot water.

(via Say Anything)

TypePad User Group

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It’s plug time!

I’ve been hanging out on the TypePad User Group for a while now. It’s a great little resource for TypePad users — entirely unofficial, but a good place to go as a first resource for figuring out issues with coding and maintaining TypePad weblogs.

We’ve noticed that while there are a lot more TypePad weblogs popping up, it’s lost some of the “community” feel that it had in the beta test days, and it was suggested that…well, I’ll let authenticgeek speak for himself:

I think this forum is an awesome place to get info about TypePad.

>

There is just one small problem, TypePad is growing at such an huge rate and we’re not getting as many new users as we should be. Sure, it’s not a requirement to show up here if you’re on TypePad but I think there are people out there that should know about this place that don’t.

>

Any ideas for how we can better get the word out to new TypePad users? We could even talk to Ben/Mena about possibly getting an official link here from the TypePad site since I’m sure they don’t have the time to answer so many little questions about CSS and whatnot.

>

I’m going to make another post on my blog to remind people (the few who read) about this place. I urge other members (especially people with massive hits ahem djwudi…) to do the same and submit any other means for spreading the word.

See? They just want me for my potential hit-generating ability…;)

All joking aside, it is a good place to go for information, questions and answers. Feel free to drop on by.

BlogDating

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Wandering randomly through the Seattle Weblogs Portal, I stumbled across a wonderful little story. A girl and guy meet, and as they don’t live terribly close together, rather than exchanging phone numbers, they exchange blog addresses. Later on, she has some time to kill…

From reading his blog, I’ve learned my nice guy is a heavy drinking angsty insecure agoraphobic cross-dressing DJ who watches too much television, writes poetry, and wants to be a philosophy professor when he grows up. :) But he is funny, and he did quit smoking.

Reading through that took about as long as your typical first date, but I learned a lot more than I would on the typical first date, during which everyone is on their best behavior. Much more efficient.

I wonder what sort of conclusions he’s currently drawing about me. :)

I like her sense of humor — and the gentleman in question responded quite well in her comments, too.

I have to admit, though, I do think that my favorite part of the whole post may be the comment likening exchanging blog addresses to “intellectually sleeping with one another on the first date.”

Nothing wrong with a little mental nookie!

Amazon linking techniques

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According to onfocus, Amazon has changed the way they link to wishlists, breaking current wishlist links in the process. I believe (after checking my code) that TypePad is using the correct form of link, but you may want to check your code to be sure!

Disclaimer: All link examples in the following quotes have been altered to use my Wishlist ID and Amazon Associates codes.

Public Service Announcement: If you link to your Amazon Wish List on your site, you may need to change that link. I’ve noticed that standard Wish List links are not working lately—but you won’t know whether or not it’s working if you have the Amazon cookie.

[…]

To link directly to your Wish List so others can see it, change wishlist in the URL to registry, like so:

http://amazon.com/o/registry/1P4IU0ESEJFTS

Later in the comments, this interesting tidbit of information was posted:

I stumbled across a post in the AWS discussion boards that basically said this was the officially good way to do a wishlist link (because it also includes your associates tag):

http://amazon.com/o/redirect?tag=[ASSOCIATETAG]&path=registry/[WISHLISTID]

All this reminded me of an important note from Jason Kottke regarding linking to items on Amazon with your Amazon Associates ID from last February:

I’ve noticed lately that when I browse items at Amazon, the URLs now take one of two forms:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/ http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/

The former URL style has been around for some time, but the latter is relatively new. If you’re an Amazon Associate, the proper way of linking to an individual item (per their linking guide) is to append your Associate code (mine is “0sil8”) to the first URL style, like so:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/djwudicom-20

But if you run across an item at Amazon with the second type of URL, this won’t work:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/djwudicom-20

Good tips all, and worth keeping in mind.