Mojave Airport Weblog

Posted on June 18, 2005 by David

Want to keep up with the latest in private space travel and experimental flight in general? Check out Alan’s Mojave Airport Weblog.

Welcome to the Mojave Airport Weblog. This is one of the most unique airports in the world, with a huge variety of different aviation and space activities centered here, from flight test to airliner storage, from spacecraft development to antique aircraft restoration. This blog is an attempt to provide a glimpse at some of the more exciting happenings. “

The 2 most recent entries are about a scrubbed X-37 flight and a junior rocketeers event. Most entries have excellent pictures as well. I was a model rocketry geek in my youth and hope my daughter has an interest. 🙂 Of course, I would probably need to take her about 100 miles out from DC so as not to attract the Cessna interceptor squadron.

(Via MAKE Blog.)

Movable Tags

Posted on June 12, 2005 by David

SixApart recently released a plugin that adds tagging to Movable Type.

The tagging is only done by the author of the post so you don’t get the benefits of social tagging like you do on delicious. However, I think it is useful for creating simple categories without having to think much about it. If the tag is already used, it gets associated with other posts. If not, voila!, a new category. Much easier interface and probably meets the needs of most bloggers who are casual about their categories.

Conference Blogging Debrief

Posted on June 9, 2005 by David

Here is a nice debrief on using a blog in conjunction with an association meeting. Note the lessons learned about the pitfalls of sponsorship and starting the blog well before the conference actually launches.

(Via Rich Westerfield.)

Feed Update

Posted on June 4, 2005 by David

I am trying out redirecting my weblog feeds through Feedburner so that I can get an idea of what my traffic is like in some more detail. This should be transparent to all current subscribers although it might make all my recent items flagged as unread. If that happens, sorry for the extra clicks it might cost you!

BTW, if you use WordPress, this feedburner plugin is great for managing the redirect to Feedburner.

Congressional RSS

Posted on June 2, 2005 by David

Plogress.com is a site that blogifies data from the THOMAS, the online database of congressional activity. Using Plogress, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your representatives’ votes. Great tool! I have subscribed to the feeds for my Congressional delegation.

(Via Gadgetopia.)

Yahoo! Blogging Guidelines

Posted on June 1, 2005 by David

Yahoo! has published their employee blogging guidelines.

After a lot of work internally, the Yahoo! Employee Blog Guidelines have been published. Yahoo! employees can find them on Backyard (our corporate Intranet) and the rest of you can get the PDF file by clicking that link.”

Trade Show Blog

Posted on May 28, 2005 by David

Rich Westerfield is working on developing a promotional blog for one of his trade show clients.

…I’m hoping that creating a new blog attached to a specific show and the people behind the scenes at that show will provide a differently compelling story than what Gadling is currently providing.”

I think it is an excellent marketing idea and may even improve the quality of the show itself if the organizers really lower the barrier between themselves and their potential attendees and exhibitors. The way to lower the barrier: the organizers must write authentically and frequently about the show and then listen to the feedback they get from their audience. I’ll be watching this one.

The Technology Powering High Context

Posted on May 25, 2005 by David

Ben asks for more tech content (while comparing me to Darth Vader) and I deliver! 🙂

I made a few changes to the technology and hosting for my site as I re-did the design and content for my consulting biz. Here is an overview of the changes.

Content Management
I am using the latest version of WordPress to power the entire site. Not only can it blog, it can also host static content pages starting with the 1.5 version. I used the static front page plugin to have static introductory text as the home page. I also made a page template that included much of the markup from the main index template in order to move the blog to a /weblog/ subdirectory.

I was a bit torn about moving the blog off the home page but I ultimately decided that it was best to make a clean introduction on the home page for new visitors and regulars could go to the new blog page. This turned out to be a bit tricky to get to work. Drop me a line if you want my code, happy to share it.

Finally, sticking with WP had the added bonus of keeping all my existing RSS feeds in place without a lot of tweaking.

Design
The design for the site is a modified version of the Kubrick template that D. Keith Robinson just slammed today as way too common. I’m crushed but I don’t think I’ll redesign just yet. 🙂 I think it is a very flexible template that can be pretty extensively modified if you want.

The logo was designed by my wife Jennifer. Being married to a graphic designer has its perks.

Hosting
The site is now hosted with Text Drive, a new hosting company that caters to cutting edge open source technology. In fact, when you sign up for an account a significant part of the proceeds go to the open source project of your choice. I dedicated mine to WordPress. As they are a start-up, there are pros and cons. On the pro side they are incredibly responsive and very willing to change and experiment. The con that comes with that is a bit more downtime than usual as they shake out their systems.

So, nothing too extraordinary, except that I was able to rapidly build a new site using open source technology and even an open source design template. If you have comments on the design, content or anything else, please post them to this entry. I’d love to hear the feedback.

NYT Paywall

Posted on May 21, 2005 by David

David Weinberger provides a good analysis of why the New York Times putting its editorial writers behind a paywall is a bad move: Joho the Blog: The NY Times world of pain.

I just heard (!) that the Times is going to start charging $50/year to read its op-ed columnists. (That will also get you access to their archives.) I feel their pain, even as I think it’s the wrong decision.

The Times is watching its value erode. Electronic distribution is only going to become a bigger part of the picture, its readership is exulting in the exposes of the failures of the MSM to provide full and accurate coverage — the real story about the Newsweek brouhaha is why we are so eager to hear about ways the MSM is failing — and the authority of The Times is being challenged by a new news architecture that denies the necessity of having gatekeepers at all. In this face of all this confusion, the Times has made some smart moves, including giving a backdoor to permalinks to its articles and moving towards dynamically building “topic pages” that aggregate info”

MSM stands for main stream media. This issue is relevant to MSAs as well (main stream associations).