Category: Publishing

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Pretty, Ugly, Layout

To the non feed readers, I threw up a new theme. Looks nice in FF. I haven’t checked in IE anything but James has reported that it looks terrible in IE 7. I’ll have to fix it later.

In other news, WordPress 2.0.6 was just released and claims to be the last batch of security fixes before WordPress 2.1.

Update: Regulus2.0 seems to hold fairly well in FF1.5, FF2.x, IE 6, and IE5.5. So far the only big difference I have seen is that the two columns on the right degrade to a single column in the IEs. IE7 still unchecked.

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Do you dance with the Crazy Frog?

Are you familiar with The Annoying Thing? If not, you should watch the Crazy Frog Axel F video (2m 51s). Noah fell in love with this video a year ago and played it over and over and over. He’d get his boogie on and bounce, smile huge and laugh! Turns out The Annoying Thing has been highly marketed. There are music cds. There are all sizes of stuffed animals and animatronics. There are karoke microphones and radios. There are games and pencils and books. This Crazy Frog is a crazy phenomena.

In 1997, 17-year-old Swede Daniel Malmedahl recorded himself impersonating the sounds produced by internal combustion engines. …
In late-2000, Malmedahl’s fellow Swede Erik Wernquist encountered the sound effect and was inspired to create the 3D animation “The Annoying Thing” to accompany it. …
In 2004, the Germany based Jamba! group (ultimately owned by VeriSign) licensed the animation and sound for distribution as a mobile phone ringtone. …
[Source]

As a parent, toys with noise become evil. Acid leaking batteries abound and are hidden away for years in unsuspecting places. A burning desire for a simple wooden toy or anything that does not have an on/off switch develops and such toys become legend and things of myth. Even puzzles and books squawk, squeak, and talk to you now. Much to my wife’s chagrin, I like to walk through the toy store and simultaneously set off as many as possible of those obnoxious dolls with the tags that plead "try me now!" Nothing brings more pleasure than seeing an whole aisle of bouncing, gibbering furballs. Secretly I know that some parent will thank me when it goes silent just a little sooner than it would have otherwise. What you as a parent may not know, and I only found out a few days ago, is that those toys are (rather could be) operating in "demo" mode and that if you look near the battery compartment under the fur, you may find a switch that really turns the toy on for more fun, longer and varied annoying noises.

I can see my kids producing a video like these guys! There are some tasteless people out there in those comments. Online people should seriously follow the rule of "if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all."

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Blogger – the gateway to WordPress

Blogger with its minimal barrier to entering the world of self-publishing helps people understand the pleasures of blogging. Then it frustrates us with service outages, bad customer service, and the inability to backup data and years of work. Then we discover there is a world of highly configurable, open source content management systems freely available. We learn about a wiki and that they too abound in open source but wikis serve a different a purpose than CMS.

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] [1]) is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. …

WikiWikiWeb was the first such software to be called a wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called “Wiki Wiki” Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport’s terminals. According to Cunningham, “I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for ‘quick’ and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.” “Wiki Wiki” is a reduplication of “wiki”, a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for “what I know is”, which describes the knowledge contribution, storage, and the exchange function.

[Source]

A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to websites.

[Source]

I am a WordPress fan. WordPress has a shared solution similar to Blogger at WordPress.com and provides an open source solution at WordPress.org. The open source solution will give you more control but you will need to have a place to put your website which means paying for some hosting (which is cheap these days!).

On January 2nd I mentioned that Latte Man moved to WordPress. I should have also mentioned that Newscoma has moved to WordPress! Update your marks. Find Newscoma at http://newscoma.com/. Jon is still trying to get Katie to make the move away from Blogger.

There are other solutions. For great examples of Drupal installations, look at any of Tim’s sites. Anghus suggests that we take a look at Joomla.

Btw, if you are a programmer writing CMS systems, like I do, then this link to compare wysiwyg editors will be invaluable to you. I personally almost always end up with Xinha.

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John McCain to shutdown blogosphere

The trees thus spoke to the mother wolf, "mother wolf, you must teach your cubs not to be prey." Mother wolf replied to the trees, "But it is your forest, I shall implore the king lion to rule that the trees shall be punished if they do not watch over their own land." The king lion came to the trees, "I have heard mother wolf’s request. I have seen one man do a bad thing therefore I must assume that around every corner lurks a bad man. Mother wolf is too busy napping to watch over her cubs. Since you permit so many bad men to walk your forest, I must make you responsible for her cubs. Every time you let a bad man into your forest, I shall cut down a tree until you are a forest no more."

And John McCain thus spoke for in the name of fear and the safety of the children, any law shall be passed and any law shall be broken. McCain grew tall and his voice boomed, "I need only invoke the words child pornography or terrorism and I become a god!"

  • Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000."
  • Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face "even stiffer penalties" than ISPs.
  • Social networking sites will be forced to take "effective measures" — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is "associated" with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

[Source]

A crafty man so decided to pursue the American dream and thus spent his life savings on a building downtown from where he could deal his trade. Government propaganda encouraged him by describing "The American Way" only to take his profits with fees, penalties, and unusual taxes; and to overwhelm him with paperwork and legalities. Over time he came in earlier and left later. His family supported him but suffered and his trade turned from pleasure to torment. Vandals started painting graffiti on his building. The government explained that these vandals must be registered, and the business owner must file a report whenever a sex offender paints his building. One day the proprietor overslept. That night the vandals had painted his building with obscenities. On the way to work, the government employee saw the vandalism and took everything the proprietor owned then locked him in prison. The judge explained that the proprietor should have taken down the wall. If we give people the opportunity, certainly they will make the crime. We cannot possibly expect people to be responsible for their own actions under such circumstances!

When he introduced his legislation to the Senate, McCain offered no evidence that children are being victimized by people who post comments on blogs. [Source]

I am greatly bothered by how we are evolving into such a prude society.

Update: Apparently I am about 8 hours behind on this story. See comments here.

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The Inheritance Books

Christopher Paolini began writing Eragon when he graduated from high school at the age of 15. Eragon and the second book in the Inheritance series, Eldest, captivated me. I shunned responsibility to absorb chapter after chapter. Book 3 is scheduled to release Summer 2007. That will be a long wait! And I will have to fight Tommy for first read. Eragon the movie is airing its trailer now and will be in theaters on December 15, 2006.

Eragon is an epic story of a farm boy’s travels in a land with dragons, elves, dwarves, and humans ruled by an all powerful overlord complete with allegiances, underground resistances, ancient broken promises, and magic. The book is riveting with unexpected plot twists that wrench at your sympathies. I must balance that statement by pointing out at times I felt the story was somewhat formulaic as attempted to guess its direction; however, it never failed to disappoint. I give it a high recommendation and suggest reading the book before seeing the movie.

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Yellow pages only gets to a few

When I ran my Internet Service Provider business, I spent $12,000 a year on a full page yellow page ad. That ad generated more calls than any other advertising. In the end, all my business came word of mouth.

I learned something yesterday. As I drove out of the neighborhood, many of the houses had their new Yellow Pages directory. But not us. It did not take long to realize that the phone company is mad at us. See, after having the same phone number for 15 years, we decided to cut the umbilical cord and go mobile completely. It was scary because we were so accostumed to having that phone line which would ring throughout the house. We actually had two lines and could conference the calls together. We lost use of our fax machine in the process. Yesterday I would have liked to have received a fax but it was not necessary.

What did we lose in going completely mobile?

  1. We don’t get a phone book anymore.
  2. We are not in 411 directory assistance so it is more difficult to track us down.
  3. Solicitations and bill collection calls dropped significantly (at times Sears would call every 3 days because they are Satan’s spawn).
  4. We don’t pay $80 per month for a desk ornament.
  5. The younger children are having different phone experiences/lessons that the older children did. (But our phone lessons/manners/habits are significantly different that of our children…and think about our parents…I remember a party line but could you imagine your children using a party line?!) Oh, and the younger children do understand phones. Even the 17mth old uses the cell phone proficiently.
  6. It is slightly more difficult to track down a single person and sometimes takes calling multiple numbers to reach someone at the house.
  7. No more long distance bills!

Now, the publisher of the Yellow Pages and the phone company are not one in the same. They are in cahoots but the publisher of the Yellow Pages makes their money from ads and distribution. I think we are getting ready to witness a paradigm shift in the way phone books are distributed. First and foremost, we don’t use it because we either look online or send google a text message from our phone (Text "Borders, Knoxville, TN" to 46645 and watch the phone number and address pop up in seconds). Secondly, the publisher is going to realize that their distributions are dimensioning as the phone company gives them fewer and fewer land line addresses. Their ad selling point is "we deliver x number of books and your ad will be seen by those people." My bet is that before long we will see stacks of Yellow Pages books at the grocery store entrances being distributed for free to anyone that wants one.

I think another service cell phone companies need to offer (and maybe they do) is one number that rings multiple cell phones. That way we could give away a "family number" and when one cell answers all others stop ringing.

I before E except after C unless of course you are spelling proficiently.

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Amanda, re-boomed

I was an Amanda Congdon fan since Sept 27, 2005 (See?). Upon her departure, Rocketboom lost its appeal and I switch ed to watching Ze Frank’s The Show. It appears that Amanda is returning to video blogging! The twist is that she’s gone mainstream media and is on ABC’s online news channel with a 5 minute format.

Congdon, 25, will regularly appear on ABC’s online news channel, ABC News Now, and will host a weekly five-minute video blog appearing on ABC.com. Congdon, who will primarily provide news analysis and commentary through the network’s online channels, says she also expects to occasionally pop up on Good Morning America, Nightline, and other ABC news television programs.
…
She’s working to develop a show for HBO’s on-air and on-demand channels.
[Source]

This should be an interesting development in the video blogging world. I need iMovie!