steve cooley presents

Why it pays to keep old favorites subscribed.. it took me a full 10 seconds to realize this was William Gibson’s, not Bruce Sterling’s blog. Sterling is an excellent and frequent blogger, while, Gibson stopped blogging about a year ago to focus on writing more excellent books, then as he states, his feed lept back to life tonight. They’re two of my favorite writers.

WITH AN ABRUPT LURCH INTO THE POLITICAL: “Why?

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, “At times, to be silent is to lie.”

“

(Via Gibson Blog.)

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Ashcroft: “I don’t think we have a public domain attitude.”: “

Or so he is reported to have said here.

Note to General Ashcroft: We checked. You’re right. You don’t. Nor do you have a privacy attitude, a rule of law attitude, or a free speech attitiude.

So here’s the real question: How can you be Attorney General of the US, if you reject so much of the Constitution’s values? (Public Domain, Article I, 8, 8; Privacy, Amendment 4; Rule of Law: the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, in, say, Rumsfeld v. Padilla; Free Speech: Amendment 1).

Stay tuned: Oral arguments in Kahle v. Ashcroft on the 29th. (Could there be a better case name?)

“

(Via Lessig Blog.)

amplifying…

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Slashdot | How To Build And Maintain A Good FAQ
How To Build And Maintain A Good FAQ
The Internet
Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 06, @01:46PM
from the rare-art dept.
comforteagle writes "FAQs have been around since the beginning of the web & most of them still suck. Most of us who build FAQs rely on handcrafting them, but this really isn't necessary anymore. Sean Kerner has written The FAQs on FAQs as an introduction to getting up to speed fast with a FAQ, letting opensource software do the majority of the work, and allowing the author to concentrate on providing good answers. He shortly reviews a few apps, but settles on phpMyFAQ."

I just installed phpMyFAQ on my laptop. It looks totally awesome. Looks like a lot of functionality has been built in, and best of all, it's freeeeeee….

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TinyMCE is a really cool piece of javascript code that adds somewhat
WYSIWYG / Word style editing tools to any textarea input field. If you're using the bookmarklet link when you log into wordpress, Peter and Jono, you should now have _{some tools} to help ^{you format text.}

here's a quote from me just now:

Tiny MCE is t3h r0x0r3zzzzz… lol!!11!!oneoneone!!!!11

Yep, it's cool!

ok, and, the bookmarklet easily solves the problem of “what program do I post to my blog with?” because it’s HTML based… so it’s only as good as your HTML interchange with your data… but in this case it’s totally custom and it works perfectly every time. And now it has pseudo-wysiwyg editing. So far, Mars Edit has not proven to live up to the claimed WordPress support as of WP1.0. Perhaps if I migrated to 1.2 it might work better, but.. for now we have the bookmarklet.

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I invite you to take advantage of a tool I’ve created to help email the big media to voice your opinions fast.

http://www.earthorbitdesign.com/php/phpwiki/index.php/EMailingTheMedia

of course, take advantage of it on your own server (and dime)… but, enjoy.

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Holy cats, if you want to hear a terrific hour on the state of journalism in light of the dan rather/CBS debacle, Michael Krasny’s Forum tackled this exact topic yesterday. It’s truly awesome.

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Holy crap. Wendy, one of my coworkers who I handed my opml list of feeds to get her started with NetNewsWire asked me about iPodder, and I hadn’t really looked into it. I just did. I think it’ll fit perfectly into the musician netlabel project I’m working on. I have an RSS feed set up for news items, it would be (in theory) trivial to add enclosures. When you post a news item, you could potentially just select a song you want to enclose. Then when your subscriber cycles through for an update, they get pushed your new song. This is going to kick ass.

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One of my highschool classmates, Peter Bowen, has signed up to be an author. Peter and I are currently agreeing to disagree politically, so now the real experiment in publishing begins. Welcome, Peter.

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I was wondering where Tony went…

Well folks, I apologize for my appearant blogging lethargy… but all is not always as it appears. I’ve unfortunately been battling with Blogger for the last couple of weeks.



After successfully moving my blog from the BlogSpot domain to my buzzhit domain, and posting a couple of messages, Blogger started generating a 550 (FTP relay error, permission denied for intended action) message for an existing Blogger index file. (For whatever reason, Blogger writes its files as ‘root’ vs the FTP user name I gave it, leaving me unable to modify its files.)



Blogger customer support has been unresponsive; I’m sure they’re simply saturated. As a workaround, I’m posting this as possibly my one and only “September” post.



And here I thought blogging was supposed to make web publishing easier…

[Tony Gentile | BuzzHit Blog - Technology, Law & Consumer Trends]

…YGWYPF. [musings]

YGWYPF? I’m getting a fantastic experience with WordPress, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants a nice, free, extendable blogging platform. If you don’t have a server at your disposal, you can find $5 a month PHP hosting all over the place. Heck, I’ll host your site for $5 a month.

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wow! Wikipedia is SO COOL!! Between what I’ve elsewhere read, this is an excellent addition to my understanding of the movement that is Rastafarianism

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Ray Bradbury has ripped into Michael Moore, calling him an “asshole” for “stealing” the title for Fahrenheit 9/11 from Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. Yeesh. You’d think that someone who’s worked all his life in a genre where practically everyone has written a book or story called “Nightfall” would have figured out by now that there’s no copyright in title, period, end of story. God, I hate it when my literary heroes turn out to have feet of clay. This is even worse than the time that he dismissed the Internet as a scam and compared MMOs to pinball machines.

“[Moore] is a horrible human being – horrible human!”

When asked if he agrees with Moore’s political positions, Bradbury replied, “That has nothing to do with it. He copied my title; that is what happened. That has nothing to do with my political opinions.”

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

deeje and I went to go hear him speak at DeAnza college about 6 years ago… right after I’d moved up to the bay area. He dismissed the internet then, too. And he sounded like a crotchety monolith then, too. Think about this guy: a story about the evils of minimizing the printed page. I also know people who still regularly listen to Guns and Roses’ 1989 album Appetite for Destruction… and I bring this up to illustrate that some people have their glory days in an era and never want to leave even though the world didn’t stop changing around them. Bradbury, unfortunately, showed the signs of giving the finger to technology, and.. well.. that’s stupid.

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Wow! I get a lot of hits to this page now! Hmm, where are people coming from? Hmm, oh. Lotta bots. Maybe I should try looking at the number of hits to this page without the bots.

SELECT * FROM `my_counter_table` WHERE 1 AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%bot%’ AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%borg%’ AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%slurp%’ AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%scout%’ AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%creep%’ AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%crawler%’ AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%spider%’ AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%jeeves%’ AND `HTTP_USER_AGENT` not like ‘%teoma%’

Ah, hmm. Almost 40% of my traffic has been in the form of a bot of some sort.

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CNN.com

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs.

Of those, only about 10 percent update them daily, the majority doing so only once a week or less often.

Are you?

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lulu.com appears to be an interesting way to do what everyone says you should do with your spectacular snapshots: sell them as stock photos. check it:

Their 20% commission is pretttty good if you ask me. 16 out of 20 bucks coming back to you per sale is good money.. now all you have to do is market the heck out of your stuff… always the hard part.

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I just had this crazy ficticious idea about the day when Steve jobs announces the ultimate ipod easter egg and enables color changing cases… Man, that’d be awesome.

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