I wrote my first post for "The Apple Blog" today entitled Will Apple use the “Media Download” Patent?.
Could Apple start receiving a portion of every music download from every online music store, even Microsoft’s new Zune Marketplace?
I've been working on some changes around my domain. First, I created an honest to god real front page at HawkTailDesign.com instead of the pretty lame index listing that I have had there for the last few years.
In doing this I eliminated easy direct links to our photo galleries, so I created Hawk's Eye to store all my galleries. Not all my gallleries are listed there yet, but they will be over time.
Finally, I wasn't totally happy with posting my photos using BetterHTMLExport from iPhoto, so I looked for a better way of creating and managing galleries. Luckily for me, just a few months ago, Douglas Bower (of Stopdesign) released some excellent templates to turn a Movable Type 3 blog into a great photo gallery. I've only added one of my galleries to the new system right now, but I am interested in feedback. Below are the links to my Peru gallery in both the new and old style.
Old Peru Gallery
New Peru Gallery
Last week Friendster started offering blogs as part of its mostly useless social networking website. This makes Friendster infinitely more useful while making their business model equally confounding. The good news is that it gives my favorite public art/friend Portlandia a chance to write her own blog.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the Weblog's place in the larger context of Media. Is the blog a media watchdog as seen in the CBS documents, administration paid journalist and Jeff Gannon/James Guckert scandles? Or is it just a way for random people to talk about their daily lives and personal happenings? Maybe it is a place for more traditional journalism to find a different kind of audience?
I think the answer is some kind of combination of the three. I believe that the place of the blog is to do what most new media has done. Blogs fill the gap where traditional media has either failed or simply doesn't exist. For example, recently the King of Nepal over through the democratic government and has banned the nepalese media from criticizing him or his government or reporting on any of the activities sorounding the coup. A blog has filled the void, much as they did during the U.S. invasion and current occupation of Iraq. Radio Free Nepal is providing links to non nepalese press and first hand reports about the current conditons in Nepal. This is information that is not available to either the outside world or much of Nepal at this time.
So I decided to put advertisements on my blog, even though I haven't really been keen on the idea. The reason I did it was to help raise money for the South Asia Tsunami relief efforts. I will be giving my advertisement revenue to Northwest Medical Teams as part of the BlogAid project. So if you see a good product advertised on the right, simply click through and a couple more cents will go to the Northwest Medical Teams.
I have already given money to Doctors Without Borders, so I am trying to spread the wealth a bit. I'm not sure how long I will leave the ad up, but even if I don't earn the $100 minimum required for Google to cut me a check, I will still donate a check equal to the amount I earn.
Why did I decide to do this now and not for one of the many other humanitarian crises that we hear about all the time? Well, my aunt lives in Bali, Indonesia and I just went there with on my honeymoon this fall. Thankfully my Aunt is OK and the island of Bali wasn't severely affected by the tsunami, Indonesia was among the hardest hit countries. It is possible that I will keep donating money to Northwest Medical Teams or another charity to support their humanitarian efforts after the crisis in South Asia subsides. Also, the BlogAid project gave me a good way to earn some money for relief efforts.
I did a little maintance on the blog today. Below are the changes I made:
1. Blog name: The blog is now called the "Noah's Weblog" instead of the longer "Noah Brimhall's Weblog".
2. New banner: Since I changed the name, I needed to change the banner. Sometime during the last week it struck me that with the new U2 edition iPod, the colors of my banner matched the colors of the iPods. [old banner]
3. Decaying comments: I installed the Movable Type plugin MTCloseComments so that after a certain amount of time the comments on my posts will close. Hopefully this will slow the comment spammers.
I'm getting married on Saturday, then going on my honeymoon, so I won't be around for a while. I won't have a guest poster, and I won't be posting from my honeymoon, so expect nothing for a couple of weeks. See you in October.
About a year ago I ranted about MacSurfer's "Subscription" request. At the time I felt that in order to earn my $35 per year MacSurfer had to do four things: improve their site design, offer an ad free option, offer a daily news wrap-up, and offer some kind of feedback.
Back then I used John Gruber's Daring Fireball as an example of a site with a simple buy nice looking layout. Now I am happy to report that I can also point to DaringFireball as a site that is ad free, has a daily news wrap-up (rss feed), and is considering some kind of user coments system.
When a t-shirt was offered up as part of the deal, I couldn't pass up the deal and I put my money where my mouth is. For $35 I get to support a great independent journalist, see his suggested links for the day, and t-shirt. Plus, he promises other "member's only" features in the future. Hell, I might even when some fantastic prizes.
MacSurfer could learn a few things from Daring Fireball. I hope that MacSurfer's subscriptions have done well over the last year, but so far they have done nothing (besides continuing to exist) to encourage subscribers to re-up.
If Apple charged an annual subscription fee on Mac OS X with no feature increases, the Mac community would go ape-shit. Publishing software is not the same as publishing a website, but the anology isn't stretched to thin.
Things I'm thinking about this week:
So, I have my first comment troll. Although I think I know who it is, and I don't think they had any kind of malicious intent, I still deleted their comments for being off topic and insulting. I also banned their IP from commenting.
So, I guess this means I should make my anti-troll policy clear. Here is a quick policy that I just wrote up. Does anybody have any problems with this?
Comments will be deleted and the writer's IP address will be banned from this site for the following reasons:
1. Off topic comments: A comment that is not in the remotest way on the topic of the blog posting or subsequent comments.
2. Insulting comments: A comment that is meant to insult authors of blog post or comments.
3. Indecent comments: A comment which contains indecent material.
4. Spam comments: A comment intended to sell a product or a service.
If I delete a comment that you have written or ban your IP, you may appeal the ban directly to me. E-mail me at 
It should be noted that I have already been banning comment spammers, but trolls are a bit of a new idea. I know that this policy may seem a bit extreme, and if you think so, please tell me. I do want my blog's comments to be an open discussion, but I don't want that discussion cluttered by trolls. I'm just trying to find the best way.
A couple of days ago the folks at SixApart announced the release of the newest version of their amazing content management system (AKA blog maker) Moveable Type. A lot of furry exploded through the blog world about this version (3.0 Developer Edition) because of a new license model and price structure. This was especially noticeable in the Trackbacks to a posting on SixApart founder Mena Trott's weblog.
My first reaction to all of the negativity was that it was pretty silly, but I was waiting to hear from someone I felt I could trust on the subject. Who better to trust than the maker of the most useful (and likely most used) MT plugin, MT-Blacklist. Well the creator, Jay Allen put up an excellent post today entitled "The Collective Deep Breath". This post bring the sanity back to the discussion and urges people who are happy with MT 2.6x to stick with it for the time being. He also argues that blog authors shouldn't get there panties in a bunch about this version because it is not for them. As the name implies it is a developers release. Early adopter's have always paid a extra price for doing so (whether in crashes or cash) and MT 3.0 early adopters are no different.
I also agree that if this is purely bitterness on blog authors part about having to pay for the software they should suck it up. The price is low (and for many that means free) and the product is great. I imagine that many of those bitter about price have at least one Microsoft product installed on there computer. If you want to complain about the price of software (especially versus quality) I suggest you march to Redmond, WA.
So will I be upgrading to MT 3.0 Developers Edition? No thank you, I will wait for the next regular release.
Update::Mena put up a new post at the Six Log that should be read by everyone who cares about this issue. Also, Brad Choate has another sane post about MT 3.0 DE. And in case you suspect that the only sane posts come from people who agree with me here is one from Jason Kotte that I don't completely agree with that has this incrediblly sane ending:
"In the meantime, I've got options. My copy of MT (v2.63, for which I donated $45) isn't any less flexible or powerful than it was yesterday. It works just fine for my current needs, it will continue to work well into the foreseeable future, and I remain a satified customer of Six Apart."
I guess it was only a matter of time, and I really don't care that it happened, but a bit more than a week ago I got hit with comment spam. The thing that bothers me is that because I have been lazy about putting up new blog entries, it took me this long to notice. The other good news is that because of Jay Allen's wonderful MT-Blacklist it only took me about 15 min. to get rid of it all and prevent it from happening again. I guess this is bit like knowing you are famous once you start getting death-threats and stalkers.
The other day I killed a post to my blog just before I posted. Basically I was doing some research in other tabs in my browser and I started closing the tabs. I inadvertently closed the tab that contained my posting. This is a real id10t mistake for which I have no one to blame but myself.
So now I am writing all my posts in Word and then copying them to my MT post and saving it, this should save me the headache of having to retype the post. I gave up on retyping the post last time because I was so frustrated. Of course, Word is not the ideal bloging tool, mainly because of those damn smart quotes.
What I would really like to see is MT save my posts even if I close the window by mistake. My hosting provider has SquirrelMail installed and it does something like this. If I leave the Compose page without sending an email, then go back again, it will give me the option of recovering my previous email. It is a plug-in for SquirrelMail that enables this. A quick search of the MT Plugin Directory didn’t turn up anything similar for MT, but I could be missing it. Does anyone know if this exists?
Update: Alan informs me that he picked it up before the Portland Communique. Woops, my bad.
There has been a lot of talk in the Portland blog community lately about decentralized neighborhood bloging. I think it all started with Sam Churchill's article on Daily Wireless. Then Portland Communique wrote about the issue. Then Alan over at Bluehole wrote a quick entry about it (which was the first to get my attention).
At first I didn't think I would have a lot to say about this issue. I think there are some great ideas being discussed and I agree with pretty much everything that is being said. After reading through a few of the articles I ended up at the Personal Telco Project page. This is one of my favorite community projects. These guys are solving that last mile problem and doing it on the cheap. Then I stumbled on a page about localized content and this particular sentence:
“many nodes have local wikis, which can be used as a means of community interaction”
Bingo. The light bulb went on over my head and I saw something. Not just decentralized neighborhood bloging, but WIRLESS decentralized neighborhood bloging. Now I am not the first to think of this, I am sure, but this just hit me like a ton of bricks. Why not have city funded, free wireless access in every neighborhood in the city. Run a wiki or a blog or some kind of decentralized neighborhood content creation thing on those access points, editable only by people attached to that access point. Allow anyone to view the content generated.
The reason I am sure that I am not the first to think of this is because the same Sam Churchill that wrote the article on the Daily Wireless, wrote up an extremely compelling proposal for a University Park Wireless community network.
The first question that I think needs to be answered is how we get wireless cable computers into the hands of those who can’t afford them. I think the answer, in part, lies in the hands of groups like Free Geek. Free Geek will give you a free Linux based PC in exchange for 24 hours of volunteer service. Now imagine equipping these computers with a cheap wireless card. Now you have a super cheap wireless access computer.
I think it is important that the City of Portland think outside the box when they start working on community web pages. It is not enough to think of neighborhood information access as simply an issue of centralized content creation. You must work to involve the community in the creation of the content and you must seek out interesting ways to distribute the content to the community.
Thus begins the second chapter of my blogging. I started out back in January of 2001 with my first entry using Blogger. I liked blogger and what it meant, but after a while I outgrew it's capablilities. That was about last July. Around that time I bought this domain (www.hawktaildesign.com) and downloaded MovableType. I haven't been updating my blog much since then because without good blogging software it just isn't much fun. It has taken me a while to finally install MT and get it up to speed. It really doesn't take that much time, but I honestly just haven't been making the time.
So finally I made the time and here we go. I plan on upgrading my other blog (AllianceWatch) eventually, but I don't know when that will happen. I also plan on putting up my graphic design portfolio at the root of this domain eventually.
Something I did occasionally on this blog in the past was a list of things I like and didn't like about a particular subject. So here it goes for MT.
Things I like about MT:
-Stylesheets
-Easy to use
-Lots of freedom
Things I don't like about MT so much:
-Having to make a creative stylesheet (which I haven't done yet)
-Typing links
-Typing other html
Over at Blue Hole, Big Al is hosting a guest blog event celebrating the 12 days of Christmas. I was asked to do one and ended up getting the 8th day of Christmas, which will fall on Sunday, Dec. 21st. Now as Big Al explained, normally the 12 days of Christmas are celebrated after Christmas, but in this case it is more fun to do them before Christmas.
I was pretty excited a few weeks back when Six Apart anounced that they would start offering a hosting service that featured there wonderful MoveableType software. So when they asked for beta testers I decided to sign up. I am not sure if I will move to Type Pad when the service comes out of Beta, but I think it is very likely that I will start using Moveable Type soon. While I am beta testing, I will duplicate all posts at my TypePad site. Feel free to go over and have a look and leave a comment. I won't be talking much more about TypePad since I am under a non-disclosure agreement, and I wouldn't want to crititisize a product still in beta.
I know this is probably a "bad thing" to do, but what the hell. I need to see if the BlogRolling Update Form is going to work.
So all of the blogspot slowdowns have got me thinking again about registering a couple of domains and finding a decent hosting company to carry my domains. There are a couple I have looked at (including DreamHost and MediaTemple). I am interested to hear what other people use. Feel free to e-mail me with your suggestions.
If you look to the bottom right of my page you will see I have changed all of the buttons. I really like this style of buttons and it gives my page a somewhat cleaner look. I got the Blogger, BookCrossing, GeoURL, and Amazon Buttons from Steal These Buttons (hat tip to MetaFilter). I made the ORBLOGS button using Button Maker, I submitted it to Steal These Buttons, and it was approved!
So I read on Alan's Blog about the new version of Blogger, but I also read about his troubles. So rather than converting one of my existing blogs to the beta version, I created a new blog. It's called Noah's Dano Test. Dano is the codename for the beta version of the new Blogger.
just joined a new blog called Satellite Misters. Head over and read my first entry.
Wow, I forgot to type in an ending double quote in a post on my other blog and all hell brakes loose in Bloggerland. I can't edit my posts (even in safe mode). Finally I find the edit link for the post in the source code of the preview frame and I am able to fix my simple mistake. I guess that will learn me!
I have started a new blog called "Alliance Watch". I have formed this blog to keep track of the Portland Business Alliance. I will mostly be posting links to stories in the media, but I will also try to include some first hand and second hand accounts of the activities of the Alliance. If you don't know what the Portland Business Alliance is, then you should read this article in the Portland Mercury. Also, if you have anything you would like to contribute to Alliance Watch feel free to send it to me. If you are really interested and want to become a regular contributor to the Alliance Watch, let me know.
First, my friend Alan is having a legal fight with Northwest Airlines and he has a little page all about it. It is well worth a read, especially Alan's grammer correction of a letter from a Northwest paralegal. Give 'em hell Alan!
Second, a friend in the library told me that the Portland Public School Board voted to end the Outdoor School program. This program sends 6th graders to camp and learn about science and nature for a week. It also provides an opportunity for high school students to learn leadership skills as camp counselors. I went to outdoor school both as a 6th grader and as a high school counselor and I credit it for both my interest in nature and my interest in education. I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for Outdoor School. Outdoor School involves more than 2,200 6th graders and 1,500 high schoolers. The Outdoor School needs to raise $425,000 in the next month or the program will be cancelled. Call the School Board, call local outdoors companies, call your rich Uncle Moneybags. Give what you can to save this program! Read or watch more at KGW. If you are interested in making a contribution, send it to:
Lincoln High School
1600 SW Salmon
Portland 97205
attn: Outdoor School
Wow, I was so optimistic back in January. Well not so much now. I still think weblogs are a great idea, and I think That I will add one to my personal site if I ever decide to finish it. As far putting one on my mom's wine shop's site, I decided it would just be easier to bribe one of my programer friends with a couple of bottles of wine and have him build a quick self-editing feature. And as far as my girlfriends site, well she broke up with me, so forget that shit. Now I am listening Kid A from Radiohead and trying not to do any real work.
This is my first posting to my Weblog. I am just sitting at my computer at work listening to Pearl Jam's bootleg from Hamburg. I am trying to avoid doing any real work by creating my first Blogger account. I am also thinking of uses for Blogger. I recently built a web site for my mom's wine shop in Chico California and I was trying to come up with a way that she could update the pages on the site easily. It seems that Blogger is the solution. The other use I see is to help my girlfriend create and maintain her website for writing. Anyway, this seems like a great service.
