Recently in technology

This little blog has been terribly quiet lately, some parts of it more than others. The writing guide section has been the most neglected, not having seen a new entry in two and a half years. A few of the entries have been fairly active with comments—some related to the entries, some not—but I haven't had any time to respond to the comments or answer questions or do anything else with it. So I shut it down. The entries are still available, but I'm not going to write any more and I'm no longer allowing comments from others.

I'm still debating whether to shut down the word of the day officially or to keep it going with a random new word from time to time as guilt overtakes me.

The site as a whole feels like an old jalopy to me now. Most of it is running on an old, outdated version of a blog publishing platform that hasn't kept up with the times. I'll probably update the software within the next month or two, rather than switch to a snazzier new engine, because I'm afraid I'd lose most of what's already here. Regardless, things will break, even if I stick with the same software and just do a version upgrade. Things always break. Once I have the infrastructure in place, I'll start thinking about a new design. I'd like to say that I'll start posting entries more regularly, too, but I don't want to set unreasonable goals for myself.

In Other News

Lately, when I'm not contemplating the sorry state of this blog, I'm usually immersed in web development work of one form or another, much to the chagrin of my non-technical Facebook Friends who have suffered the onslaught of my esoteric Twitter posts, which are then automatically posted to my Facebook status, where they are invariably mocked, but all in good fun, I'm sure. My buddy Jonathan and I just had the second edition of our book published. The publisher gave it a new title, just to confuse people. It's now called Learning jQuery 1.3. Overall, I'm very pleased with the way it turned out, and I'm quite relieved by the first few reviews of it on amazon.com, which seem just as complimentary as those of the first book. In May I'll be conducting a three-day training workshop on jQuery, which should be fun and stressful.

So much for getting a good night's sleep tonight. If I had a brain, I would have stopped this nonsense hours ago. But I knew if I didn't finish this and post it tonight, it would probably sit in draft mode for another couple months (like the seven or eight other entries I've started but haven't finished). Good night.

This week I took a break from my usual freelance projects to work on a couple web sites that are a little closer to home—one for my wife and the other for a friend. Because they were both rush jobs, I've been getting very little sleep the past few nights. Still, it's always fun to be able to help out people I love.

FOCUS

Sara has been actively involved in a task force for the school association that runs our kids' elementary school. The school system is looking for ways to cut costs as enrollment has declined and debt has increased in recent years. One of the options being considered is to "consolidate" the elementary schools, shutting down all but two of them. However, a number of parents, alumni, and friends of the schools have serious concerns about this option. Sara and others have formed a group called "Friends of Christian Urban Schools" in the hopes that they can collectively persuade the administration to consider other courses of action. In particular, they're encouraging people to sign an online petition to keep Oakdale Christian Elementary School, our kids' school, open.

And that's where I come in. Sara asked me to quickly put together a web site with a copy of the petition so that people can add their names to show their support. The site will soon have more information, but for now, you can check out the petition, and add your name if you wish: FOCUS: Friends of Christian Urban Schools.

Scooter Girl

A lot has changed in Nicole Tieri's life since she was seen in the opening rounds of American Idol a few years ago. After acting in a musical theater production, she moved back to New York City (where she had attended college), got married, and is expecting her first child in June. She also recorded an album that is soon to be released. She'll be performing three of the songs from the album early next week at a conference for the National Eating Disorders Association, so she asked me to whip up a couple web pages for people who want more information about her and the new album. Although it's still in a bit of a rough, early state, you can take a look at it here: Nicole Tieri.

I started to write this entry back in January, thinking that these few web sites could be helpful to people. But it has been languishing in draft mode ever since, because I never knew what to say about them. Well, here they are anyway, with a brief description of each:

• GetHuman: "a consumer movement to improve the quality of phone support in the US. This free website is run by volunteers and is powered by over one million consumers who demand high quality phone support from the companies that they use."
• RetailMeNot: helps you find coupon codes for online stores. I've heard great things about this one, though I haven't used it myself.
• Refund Please: notifies you if the product you purchased at amazon.com shows a price reduction within 30 days (for which amazon.com will offer you a refund). Pug in a product number, date of purchase, and email address; Refund Please does the rest.
• Sorry Gotta Go: a library of sounds for "when you absolutely, positively have to get off the phone." The possibilities are endless.

Maybe you'll find at least one of them useful or amusing or interesting.

It's probably not worth mentioning (how's that for an opening phrase?), but I managed to fix the broken stuff on the English Rules site within a half hour of sending out the entry with the exaggerated title. So, carry on as usual.

Still, I'm wondering if anyone else gets the same feeling that I do sometimes — that everything in your life that can break is broken. The other day my espresso machine stopped working for about the tenth time in recent months after nine, seemingly successful, repairs. Later the same day I found out that a little tooltip plugin that I wrote for web sites had a serious bug in it. When I tried to brush my teeth that evening, my fancy toothbrush was missing one of its magnets, rendering it useless. And I was brushing my teeth in our tiny closet of a bathroom because our main bathroom was torn down to its bare bones after we had discovered that the little grout problem was just one symptom of the overall shoddy work the previous owners had done on the room.

That was a fun day. It reminds me of the time last summer when I decided to save money by switching our cable internet access to DSL and changing both land-line and cell-phone carriers. The DSL connection was terrible, so I had to switch back and then fight the DSL provider for a couple months before they gave me my money back. The land-line phone carrier ended up costing more, though I did get the call waiting upgrade, which I usually ignore. The cell phone service was so wretched that I had to switch to yet another carrier — which was $10/month more expensive than the original — within my 30-day grace period.

Sometimes the rustic life doesn't sound so bad.

If you're trying to look at previous entries on this blog and you're being thwarted at every turn, it's because I broke this site tonight while trying to upgrade it. If you've managed to find a previous entry, but only one of many comments is being displayed, it's because I broke that, too. I should have known better than to try to improve things. Anyway, I'll try to fix the broken stuff as soon as possible.

After seven long months of writing, reading, coding, and learning, learning, learning, I finally have something to show for it. Jonathan Chaffer and I just had our first book published. When we started back in December, the goal was to write a single book of roughly 250 pages. Somewhere along the way, however, we got a little carried away and ended up writing so much that the publisher decided to split it into two books—a 380-page tutorial and an approximately 300-page reference.

The tutorial, titled Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques, was officially published a couple weeks ago and is now available on the Packt Publishing web site and at amazon.com. Because it's such a niche product, I doubt you'll be able to pick it up at your local Barnes & Noble.

The second book has the tentative title, jQuery Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Exploration of the Popular JavaScript Library. We just have to look over the final proofs of a few chapters before it goes to the printer, so we're hopeful that this one will be out sometime in August.

The publisher even let me take a picture for the cover. If you don't know anything about jQuery (and even if you do), you might wonder why I would squander the opportunity for a cover photo on a stack of dumbbell weights in the sand. Well, the weights mirror the shape of the jQuery logo, which is derived from the Devo energy dome. Also, in the book we refer to jQuery "doing the heavy lifting" for certain programming tasks. I took a few shots of the weights in my house, too, but the publisher liked the ones at the Lake Michigan beach better. This photo was taken in Holland, Michigan, right down the steps from my parents-in-law's cottage.

This whole process has been a wonderful learning experience for me, and I'm finally letting myself feel some sense of accomplishment. I must say, though, that it will be very nice to have a little time for other things again. (By the way, my wife, who knows me better than I know myself, laughs at this notion, fully expecting to find me immersed in some new project before too long.)

After three months of laboring in relative silence, I'm able to explain publicly why the activity on this site has diminished so much. I'm writing a book.

Now, before anyone gets too excited, I should specify that I am writing a book on how to use the jQuery JavaScript library to enhance interaction design on websites. The book is an extension of the blog I've been running, Learning jQuery. When a publisher contacted me in November about the possibility of writing a book, I jumped at the chance.

Actually, I told them I would jump if they let me write it with a colleague of mine, Jonathan Chaffer, who is a much more skilled programmer than I am. They said that was fine, so Jonathan and I started writing. It turns out that Jonathan is also a talented technical writer as well.

The writing is progressing well. We're hoping for a publication date sometime this summer. Soon the publisher will have a page on their website with details about date, price, and so on. When they do, I'll post a link to it here, just in case anyone is interested. In the meantime, feel free to read the announcement at jquery.com.

Thanks to my family and close friends who have kept this a secret. Thanks to everyone for being patient while the English Rules site remains dormant.

It was recently brought to my attention that some legitimate comments have been captured by my spam trap and held hostage. Unfortunately, because I had never checked the junk-mail bin on my blogging system until this morning, and comments were being summarily executed after having sat in the bin for more than five days, there is no way to know how many innocent comments were killed without a fair trial.

To those of you who have lost comments here, I wish to express my sincerest apologies for this travesty of justice. I am deeply sorry.

Please be assured that the response to this latest revelation has been swift and fair. I immediately undertook a comprehensive investigation of Spam Control Central (SCC), filed a 254-page report at the Bureau of Website Security, and acted on my two proposals, which can be summarized as follows:

• Increase inter-agency cooperation and information sharing.
• Rescind the death penalty in favor of life imprisonment with the possibility of parole or exoneration upon appeal.

Thank you, and good night.

Over the past month or so I've been having an affair of sorts. No, not that kind of affair. I've just been splitting my time between English Rules and my new techie blog, Learning jQuery. jQuery is a new JavaScript library that lets programming neophytes like me do cool things on web pages. It's what has allowed me to dynamically load "noteworthy articles" and my "blogroll" in the Widescreen Bonus section of my web pages. It made my secret, Harry Potteresque, skeleton-key style switcher pretty easy to accomplish. And it helped me slick up the home page of the David LaGrand for State Senate web site with images that fade in and out and big buttons that reveal forms for ordering bumper stickers and yard signs.

Update: The big buttons aren't on David LaGrand' home page anymore, because the campaign is over.

Learning jQuery chronicles some of the things I've been learning and offers up my discoveries to others who are new to jQuery or JavaScript or web development in general. It's been a lot of fun to be involved in the community of jQuery developers and learn from them and also give back a little bit through the blog.

The only problem with the new blog is that I have no time for it. I mean, I barely have enough time to keep English Rules running, what with work and family and my other little hobbies. I once heard someone suggest to packrats that for every new item they bring into the house, they discard two — whether they sell them on eBay or donate them to Goodwill or throw them in the trash. As a hobby packrat, I'm beginning to wonder if I should drop two interests for every new one that I pursue. It's so hard to let things go, though. Know what I mean?

I'm not sure what this says about me, but one of my favorite techie blogs lately has been Popgadget, which is all about "personal tech and innovative lifestyle for women." Last week they featured one of the coolest gadgets I have seen in a long time — so cool in fact that they make the Segway look dorky. Well, I suppose the Segway makes the Segway look dorky. Anyway, according to Popgadget, Powerisers jumping stilts let you "leap up to almost 6 feet high and … run up to 20 miles an hour without having to grow wings."

To really get a sense of what these things can do, though, you need to see them in action. Check out these videos of people doing flips down the street and hopping down stairs and jumping over cars on YouTube. Absolutely crazy. How could anyone not want a pair of these?

At the end of the work day on Friday, there was one last thing I needed to read on a web page to help solve a problem that had been vexing me for a couple weeks, but I knew that if I took the time to look at it in the office, I'd miss the bus and have to wait an extra half hour for the next one to pick me up. So I grabbed my work-issued laptop, tucked it into my backpack, and rushed off to the bus station. Once on the bus, I pulled the computer back out and began reading the web page, but soon realized that to arrive at the solution, I'd have to follow a link to another page. The next time the bus stopped to pick up a new rider, I quickly scanned for an unencrypted wireless network, connected to it, and clicked on the link, just in time to fully load the next page before the bus pulled away and out of range.

Then it occurred to me: ten years ago I would have considered such a sequence of events science fiction. The idea of retrieving information from the other side of the country through a random wireless network from a laptop while sitting on a bus would have seemed ludicrous. But like so many new technologies, we almost instantly assimilate them into our lives, considering them no more noteworthy than a bicycle or an electric light. I don't even think twice anymore when I see people walking down the street with white earbuds in their ears or the cyborg-like bluetooth cellphone headsets clinging to the side of their heads like barnacles. It makes me wonder how different technology will have made our lives by 2026. If we could peer 20 years into the future, would we recognize ourselves?

On a completely unrelated note, I just saw that gas prices around here have plummeted more than 60 cents from their highest levels a few months ago — just in time to have an impact on the upcoming elections! Is it just a coincidence?

Maybe it's the summer doldrums that have been keeping me from posting an entry on this blog for the past couple weeks, or maybe it's the photography gigs I've had, or maybe it's just the lack of anything interesting to write.

One thing is for sure, though — I haven't been collecting dust. And while the site's content has been getting stale, some of the innards have been freshened up. I've made the search feature more robust, and added a little "advanced search" option on every page. I haven't the foggiest idea what anyone would want to search for, but the capability is there if anyone wants to use it.

Also, I know that when I switched the design of the site to use a fixed-width layout for the main content, some people with really wide, high-resolution monitors were confronted with a lot of wasted space. So, I put together a little "widescreen bonus" section that only appears if your browser window is wide enough to accommodate it. For some reason, I can't get it to work quite right on the Safari web browser for the Mac (it only appears when you manually resize the window, not immediately when a page loads), but it shows up just fine in IE and Firefox. The bonus column shows links and descriptions of noteworthy articles that I've read on the web as well as a "blogroll," or list of links to other blogs and web sites that I like to visit.

There are some other little tweaks here and there, little usability things not worth mentioning and barely noticeable to anyone not looking for them. But there is one other added feature that I'm particularly fond of, a little Harry Potteresqe magic trick that changes the entire look of the site. A hidden key somewhere on the home page unlocks a whole new look to the site — one that is a little rough around the edges but just fine for the few people that might stumble upon it. And how to get back to the old world charm? Seek the children. Oooh, mysterious!

The Grand Rapids Press featured an article in its business section yesterday about the local grocery chain Meijer starting up a new online store — meijer.com — focusing on gourmet, upscale, and hard-to-find items that shoppers might not be able to find in their brick-and-mortar stores. The article noted that shipping takes 2 – 5 days and its cost is calculated by weight. An additional $2.50 handling fee is applied to any order under $25.

On my first trip through the site, I wasn't terribly impressed. To get to the online store, you first have to click on a link, and then from the next page click on a button that opens the store in a new window. As a confessed control freak, I hate it when sites force my browser to open a new window. The actual store looks like it's run by a third party ecommerce company, because the URL switches to c-els.com/[gobbledygook]. Once I started looking at the product offerings, I found the navigation and page layout a little confusing. For example, the landing page of each section — organic, for example — shows a list of "featured items," but for a while I thought that those were the only items available in the section. Some sub-sections show no products at all, forcing you to look through the "store aisle" menu in the left-hand column below the "quick search," "request it," and "shopping cart." The general look of the site is unpolished, as if they just dropped their products into a third-party application without giving a whole lot of thought to design.

Meijer is going to have to do a lot better than their current offering to compete with amazon.com, who just launched their own online grocery section today, after having a beta version up since late May. Shipping times vary depending on the type and carrier you request, but orders over $25 are eligible for free "Super Saver" shipping (which usually takes 5 – 7 days). The store carries over 10,000 non-perishable products, and the prices, as far as I can tell, look pretty good. Still, a lot of the items require you to buy in bulk, so if you don't have a lot of room to stock up, you might want to limit your purchases here. Kraft Mac & Cheese, for example, is sold in packs of 24 boxes ($20.90 – $22.00) and Kellogg's Product 19 comes in a 4 pack ($14.25). From now until the end of August, amazon.com is offering $10 off purchases of $49 or more if you use the code GROCERY2

The grocery section's layout and structure are similar to those of all of amazon's other sections, which makes it — for me at least — fairly easy to navigate through their offerings.

Because these online groceries don't sell any perishable goods (a few such efforts crashed and burned in the late 90s), they certainly won't let you skip the weekly (daily?) trip to the store for milk, eggs, and bread. But for those who get overwhelmed by huge warehouses like Sam's Club or Costco, amazon's grocery section could be a welcome alternative.

If you've visited English Rules lately, you may have noticed a few changes around here. The site is sporting a brand new look, which evolved out of a little collaboration with a friend at work, Jennifer Wetzel. Jennifer and I struck a deal a few months ago to help with each other's sites: She would design a "mockup" for my site in Photoshop, and I would help implement a new site for her. So now Jennifer has a cool new site, jcreativedesign.com, to display her gorgeous design work, and I have a fresh way to display all the stuff that has been accumulating here for the past couple years.

To create the new look, Jennifer started with a photo that I recently took of an antique trunk that I saw in the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia. She used the trunk as a kind of motif, developing the color palette and a number of the background elements from it.

In addition to giving the site a facelift, I also performed surgery on its internal organs—cleaning up a lot of the code that had been spiraling out of control (which I won't describe in detail, to save you all from death by boredom) and simplifying the navigation to make it easier for people to get around. Now each of the site's main sections can be accessed by the horizontal menu at the top of each page, and a secondary menu on the left-hand side of the page lists what is available in each section. The right column has links to some extra stuff, like contact info, each section's "get updates" feature for email and "feed" notifications, and links to interesting sites around the web.

The Photography section still hasn't received the makeover treatment because some special tweaking of the design is necessary for graceful display of the big images. Also, I have plans for a couple interactive bells and whistles that I hope to implement over the next month or so. In the meantime, I hope you'll wander around and enjoy what's here.

My evenings (and early mornings) have been pretty busy over the past few months. After coming home from work and eating dinner, playing with the kids and putting them to bed, spending a little time with Sara and taking care of a few household chores, I've been sitting down at the computer and cranking out a few web sites.

A friend of mine in Grand Rapids has a few web sites that offer warranties—one for GM extended warranties, one for Ford extended warranties, and one for Chrysler extended warranties. The sites were getting buried in the Google search results, so he asked me to help move them up in the rankings. A whole industry has emerged out of the need for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and a lot of it seems to be equivalent to magic 8 balls and dowsing rods. There are all sorts of snake-oil salesmen selling people "guaranteed" number-one search results and crooks trying to "game" the system by creating Link Farms, stuffing pages with keywords, and releasing various forms of spam—making it difficult for honest people to have their sites noticed, especially in certain markets.

My work on these sites consisted mostly of reorganizing the source code, making the content more prominent and more easily indexed by the search-engine robots. I didn't make any substantive changes to the designs that were already in place, but instead worked behind the curtain, so to speak. It'll be interesting to see how much their rankings improve over the next several months.

Another friend of mine, Sara Hendren, is an artist in Los Angeles, specializing in primitive, naturalistic paintings. I had a great time collaborating with her on the design of a new web site to display some of her more recent work and list her exhibitions for other galleries who might want to consider showing her paintings. We came up with a spare, minimalist design with a sophisticated, modern feel. The site is pretty simple and small, but I'm really excited about the way it turned out.

On the other end of the spectrum is a site filled with custom house plans by internationally acclaimed architect Wayne Visbeen. It's the first "e-commerce" site that I've ever done, and it was enormously challenging. There are currently a little over 100 plans that people can purchase online, with options for either a one-page, high-resolution PDF or a full 16-page set of documents that are complete and detailed enough for a contractor to use to build the houses. Mr. Visbeen, who happens to live in the Grand Rapids area, has a house featured in the June 2006 issue of the national magazine Home.

In addition to these sites that I've completed, I have a few others in the works for a real-estate agent friend of mine, a local massage therapist, and a nearby medical office.

So, when people ask how I'm doing these days, I usually just say, "busy."

Video is all the rage on the internet now for people with a broadband connection and a little too much time on their hands. Sites such as YouTube and Google Video are garnering millions of visitors as user-published video clips—some legal, some not—find their way on the web.

Two videos that I've found especially entertaining recently are the Stephen Colbert speech at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner and the Jake Shimabukuro's brilliant performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the ukelele.

That first video, the speech by Colbert, is the subject of what the New York Times refers to as an "e-spat." The video became wildly popular on YouTube before C-Span demanded they yank it from the site. Then C-Span turned around and gave Google exclusive rights to offer the video on their site. Read A Comedian's Riff on Bush Prompts an E-Spat

Here's a third video (via waxy.org) that I just saw tonight of a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution going up for a little flight with the Blue Angels. He passes out three times, which apparently isn't so bad for a first ride.

Dramatic changes are afoot at the New York Times website. First they hire one of my favorite web-design bloggers, Khoi Vinh, to head their web design department (see his eloquent post on the subject). Then they release their beautiful new look that just about everyone is raving about. Jack Schafer of slate.com thinks it's so good, in fact, that he's ready to cancel his subscription to the paper version: I'm Canceling My Times Subscription.

Unlike my brother, who doesn't trust "that liberal newspaper," I've loved reading the Times online for years. My favorite part is the Editorials section, so one other change in the last year or so has left me quite displeased: they moved my favorite columnists, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd, behind a subscription-only firewall. Since I'm cheap stingy frugal and unwilling to fork over the necessary cash, I figured I'd have to miss out on two of the best editorial journalists in the country.

But the other day I remembered a little resource that I used quite a bit while I was teaching high school English. The Grand Rapids Public Library has a collection of online databases available to anyone with a library card and an internet connection. Hosted by InfoTrac, the New York Times collection houses the full text of 576,883 articles, as of today. There used to be a 30-day lag between the publication date and the date the articles were searchable through the database, but now all articles are indexed the day they are published.

I still prefer the official New York Times website. It's more pleasing to the eye and a whole lot easier to browse. The InfoTrac database could never replace it. But as a way to get for free what I'd otherwise have to pay for, the ugly-looking database hidden behind the library-card gateway is a beautiful thing.

I suspect that other libraries have a similar deal with InfoTrac to provide the New York Times to their members. So, if you belong to your local public library, check out the reference tools on their website. Who knows? You just might find something you didn't know you could get for free.

Lately I've been trying hard to improve my meager skills at work by reading the excellent new book DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith, the contents of which are too techy to go into here. Let's just say it appeals to the geek in me.

Anyway, the book got me thinking about this clever little extension for Mozilla Firefox (a web browser that you really should use if you don't already) called Greasemonkey. The idea behind Greasemonkey is that users can create "scripts," or little snippets of code, for a particular website that will make that site look or act differently than it was originally intended. So, for example, someone might write a script for a website that makes the pages appear without any of the ads or one that compiles any multi-page article into a single page. Someone else might write a script that adds a feature to one of the popular web-based email programs. These scripty folks then make their enhancements available (usually at userscripts.org) to anyone else who wants their online life to be just a little bit more pleasant. [Note: For a much better explanation of what Greasemonkey is all about, read the article in Wired.]

One type of user script that especially appealed to me turns amazon.com into a conduit for a local library search. I downloaded one that adds a search link from amazon.com to the Seattle Public Lirbrary, looked inside the file, and started tinkering with it until I got it to work with the Grand Rapids Public Library. The search by ISBN number turned up some pretty crazy books when it didn't find an exact match, so I added a second link to search by title.

Now, if I'm tempted to buy a book while browsing through amazon.com, I can just click on the Grand Rapids Library search instead and see if I can check it out for free.

If any of you are interested in trying this one out for yourselves—and why wouldn't you be?—here are the instructions:

Prerequisites

1. Mozilla Firefox web browser
2. Greasemonkey extension for Firefox

Installation

After you have downloaded and installed Firefox and added the Greasemonkey extension to it, you're ready to start adding user scripts.

1. Click the right mouse button on the link below
2. From the menu that appears, choose Install User Script...

amazon.com to Grand Rapids Library

Update: Oops! If you tried to install this user script before 9:10am on 2/23/06, you'll have to try again. I originally linked to a non-existent file. Silly me.

Last night as I was scanning my inbox for new email, I came across a message from my dear friend "Mailer Pharramacy." Since I hadn't heard from her in a long time, I immediately opened it to see what she has been doing for the past few months. But when I read through the email, I was a little confused:

Hello,
We acknowledge you for being our customer. Thus, we put wise you of information and renovates between whiles.

Our logs indicate that you perhaps have necessity in a supplement.

We beg your pardon and would like to propose you again a set of the most popular medicines online at reduced prices, fast delivery and toll-free customer support.

If you wish to order drugs you are in need or to run over the edition, please go to...

Then it dawned on me. This wasn't my friend Mailer Pharramacy at all. It was an impostor! I'm no dummy, and whoever sent me that email wasn't going to fool me.

As George W. Bush so aptly put it, "Fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again!"

A recent issue of PC Magazine noted that the organization Reporters Without Borders has released a Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents. The free handbook is intended to help those who want to get a message out, but face persecution if caught divulging unflattering information:

Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest.

Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation.

While Reporters Without Borders undoubtedly has the best intentions, I imagine that the same methods of ensuring anonymity could be used by character assassins who want to slander others without fear of reprisal. Isn't that always the way with powerful tools? They can be used for great good or great harm.

Calvin College was a great school back in the late 1980s when I attended it, but it seems to have even more going for it now (and I'm not talking about the George W. Bush commencement address). Each year Ken Heffner and the Student Activities Office put together an extraordinary lineup of concerts, and the January Series is widely considered one of the best college lecture series in the country.

Then there's the Festival of Faith & Writing, which the English department hosts every two years. For such a small school, Calvin has drawn some big names in the literary world—from Chaim Potok and Elie Wiesel to John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. This spring the big news is that Salman Rushdie is coming to speak, but I'm looking forward just as much to hearing Marilynne Robinson, whose novel Gilead I wrote about before.

This year I have a personal stake in the Festival, as Shelly Dunn and the rest of the Festival committee have entrusted me with the design and development of their website. It's been a fun project, one that has kept me up late quite a few nights, plotting, planning, and piecing together the online space for Festival information. It's also one of the reasons that this blog has been a little less active lately. I've also been busy with a couple other, smaller web projects, along with a new role at work, but I'm saving details about all that for another day and another entry.

Check out the Festival of Faith & Writing website. Better yet, treat yourself to a few days of pure literary bliss, April 20 – 22. Online registration will start at the end of October.

Technology has not been my friend this summer. In fact, it's been downright nasty. All these little gadgets I own have been breaking, leaving me with the strong desire to ditch them all and set up camp in a cabin somewhere in the mountains of Montana.

The problems started back in July, when the 6GB Hitachi microdrive for my digital camera died while I was photographing a wedding. All the gory details of that saga can be found in my previous entry, Recovering the Photographs. Since then, everything else seems to be falling apart.

Cell Phone

A couple weeks ago I decided to switch my cell phone service from Sprint to Cingular, for the sole purpose of saving the $150 or so that it would cost to buy a new cell phone with an existing service. These cell phone companies give away phones to new customers who sign a one- or two-year contract. Never mind that my Sprint contract had expired and I would gladly have added another two-year contract if I could get the same deal on a new phone. But, no, those free (or $30) phones are for new customers only.

So now I have a fancy new phone with a camera and the whole shebang, but the signal is so poor that I can't receive any calls at work—and many other places, for that matter.

DSL

As part of my self-styled penny-pinching program, I decided to switch my ISP from Comcast Cable to TDS Metrocom DSL. The DSL service is going to save me $35 per month for the first six months and $10 per month thereafter. If only I could get it to work. After I set it up according to the instructions, I tested the bandwidth and discovered that I was getting roughly 19Kbps. That's slower than dial-up! I haven't had a chance yet to call the service provider, because I've been too busy dealing with other problems (see below), but my inauspicious first attempt leaves me doubtful that customer support will be able to help.

iPod

Last Tuesday my iPod died on me. Well, it didn't exactly die, but I couldn't play any music on it, and neither the iPod itself nor iTunes showed any songs on the thing. A look at the directories in Windows Explorer and the Apple Finder bore no fruit. Apparently, I had what people in the business call a "corrupt file system." I had already been through something similar with the digital camera's memory card, so I knew where to look for recovery software. I got the files off the iPod and onto my iMac and then started the painstaking process of retagging the files that lost their artist, song title, or album information. I was happy to have the files back, so I tried to keep my complaints and under-my-breath muttering to aminimum.

iMac

But then, on Friday night, the unthinkable happened. My programs seemed to be running a little slow on the four-month-old iMac, so I thought I'd shut things down and restart. Sometimes we all need a fresh start, right? I selected Restart from the Apple menu, verified my intention when the dialog box popped up, and ran downstairs for dinner.

When I returned later that evening, the iMac was still trying to restart. Uh oh, let's try again, I thought. I powered off the machine and then started it up, but again, nothing. Just a little Apple logo and a spinning gear. I then tried booting from the installation CD and ran the Disk Utility, but the Repair Disk function balked before doing much of anything and spat out an arcane error message. I tried linking my computer to my brother-in-law's iMac, but that one didn't recognize my poor machine's existence. Finally I gave up and brought it into the shop where I bought it and am now waiting to hear the diagnosis from the professionals. Will they be able to recover any of the files from it? Will they have to replace the hard drive? Will any of it be covered under my warranty? Stay tuned.

Ever since Google released their Maps site, people have been creating "mashups," overlaying all sorts of data on the U.S. map or parts of it. Last month CNN ran a story about these Google Maps tinkerers, and the weblog Google Maps Mania announces new mashups as they appear on the web. The best of the new sites tap into the flexibility and power of Google Maps to allow visitors to click and drag around an area and zoom in and out of any location. Here are a few of my favorites:

• gMaps Pedometer: Double-click points on the map to measure a route. This site is great for runners who want to measure their training distances. If you want to see what this looks like in use, take a look at the 3.2 mile bus route I take to work each morning.
• gCensus: Get U.S. census data—population, housing units, land area, and water area—for any slice of the map. Zoom in on your neighborhood to see how many people liver there.
• Google Maps Transparencies: Cool page that blends the street map view and satellite view into a combined view. "Click and drag anywhere, just like normal Google Maps, and see how the Map View matches the Satellite View (or vice-versa). Control the level of transparency with the slider control at bottom."
• Housing Maps: View homes for sale or apartments for rent that have been listed on craigslist. Choose a city (from a limited list) and price range to see where your next home may be.
• Iraq War Casualties: "This page shows the progession of US military casualties from the Iraq war. Each click of the (+) displays 30 more casualties, starting from the beginning of the war." Click an icon to see a soldier's name, rank, home town, and date and place of death. The interface is a little frustrating because you have to start with zero casualties and work your way up in 30-soldier increments, instead of allowing you, for example, to instantly see the map with all casualties to date. Still, it's an interesting and sobering site, well worth checking out.
• Chicago Crime Database: See where crimes have been committed in the Chicago area, and get fairly detailed information about them. You can filter the items that appear on the map by type of crime, date, street, police beat, type of location (e.g. ATM, gas station, bowling alley), and so on. They should have one of these for every city.

A friend of D. Keith Robinson made up a MadLib for Keith's birthday the other day and asked him to post it on his website and start a "meme." It looked fun to me, but all of the fill-in-the-blanks were embedded right in the story, so it was missing that element of goofy surprise that I remember about the MadLibs I did as a kid.

As it turns out, this MadLib presented just the opportunity I needed to try to write my first PHP script. Even though I had bought PHP for the World Wide Web: Visual Quickstart Guide months ago to learn how to do some rudimentary programming, I never got around to actually using it—probably because I didn't have a compelling reason to do so. It's usually a lot easier to learn things when the lessons can be applied immediately—especially when it comes to languages, whether they be human or computer.

Anyway, the script is really simple, but I suppose I need to start somewhere. It pulls values that have been entered into a form and inserts them into a story. When fields are left blank, it inserts default values. With the help of a friend, I also managed to get it to properly use "a" or "an" in most cases, except when the following word begins with some consonant-sounding vowel, such as "eulogy" or "urinal."

So, check out the Typical Day MadLib Generator and play around with it a bit and let me know what you think.

The time seemed right to change the site, so that is what I'm doing.

I'm taking it slow, though, beginning with the home page and adapting other pages to the new design as I find the time. So let's just call this a work in progress.

In keeping with my "process" attitude, I'd love to hear from anyone who has a comment or suggestion for the new look, and I'll try to incorporate all the good advice, which doesn't mean, of course, that any advice I don't incorporate isn't good advice, but merely that I may not be competent enough or energetic enough to implement it, but, as I said, I'll try.

The lines are open. Operators are standing by. Leave a comment and let me know how I can improve the home page. As soon I feel good enough about that one, I'll move on to the other pages, for which you are more than welcome to offer suggestions as well.

So I finally bit the bullet, took the plunge, made the switch from the dingy Windows of old to a bright new OSX future. Well, I'm not getting rid of my Windows PCs altogether, but last week I plunked down a fair bit of change and purchased an iMac G5, the new one with the gorgeous 20-inch monitor. Now it's sitting pretty on the desk in my study, having replaced the behemoth PC with its Scylla-like cables and painfully loud fan.

The best thing about the iMac so far is its sight and sound—elegant hardware design with a small footprint and almost no fan noise. It hasn't been as easy to set up as the marketing folks at Apple would have us believe, but that's probably because I'm doing some things with it that are a bit beyond the typical user's experience.

The first challenge I had was to connect it to a printer in such a way that the Windows PCs in the house (I know, I know, having four computers is a little excessive) could use it to print through the wireless network. The solution, as I discovered in an online Mac forum, was a byzantine set of steps that I can't for the life of me remember, now that it's done. Hopefully I won't have to do it again.

The second challenge was to set up the iMac as a personal web server running PHP so I can use it as a development platform while learning the web programming language—if I manage to find the time. This process, while not without its false starts, was actually faster than the printer networking, even though I had to type arcane Unix commands into the Terminal to get it working right.

Now I think I'm finally ready to play and have fun with it. iMovie, Garage Band, and QuickSilver are on my short list of programs I want to tinker with. I also want to install a good free Feed Reader (aka News Aggregator) with a feature set similar to that of the Windows-based Sharp Reader. If anyone has any recommendations, please put them in a comment. And while I'm asking for advice, if anyone out there knows how to re-map keyboard keys, I'd love to hear how I can get the "home" and "end" keys working on my bluetooth keyboard so that "home" will move the cursor to the beginning of the current line and "end" will move the cursor to the end of the line. Right now the two keys don't seem to do anything.

Update 7/14/05: Well, I haven't figured out how to remap the home and end keys (even though a couple commenters graciously tried to help), but I did learn that I can get to the end or beginning of a line by holding the Command key while hitting the right arrow or left arrow, respectively. That's good enough for me now.

I'll probably write again about my iMac experiences as I delve deeper into the applications. In the meantime, any and all advice about programs and utilities and productivity techniques are welcome.

A couple people have recently asked me about how I got my weblog started, what software I use, how much it costs, and what I would recommend for them. Here is my reply to one of them. If anyone else out there has a favorite blog platform, maybe one that I'm failing to mention, let us know about it in a comment. Or, if you want to take me to task for a shortsighted or misguided opinion, feel free to do so. You won't hurt my feelings.

Intro

There are a number of options for creating a blog—from the quick and easy to the complex and robust. All of them allow you to publish entries, assign entries to categories, enable comments, and display images. They also have built-in archiving systems and design templates. The quick and easy options have limited flexibility. Your choice will depend on how much time you want to devote to setting up the blog, designing it, and maintaining it.

Quick & Easy:

1. TypePad (30-day free trial, then $4.95 per month for Basic or $8.95 for Plus): This is a hosted service, which means everything is stored on typepad's servers. You don't have to pay a Web Hosting fee to another company. Also, the installation and configuration of the blog software is done for you. With TypePad, you have a couple options for your URL (web address): example.typepad.com or example.blogs.com (where "example" is any name not already taken). Also, at the $8.95/month Plus Level, which allows up to three blogs per account, your URL could be example.com, as long as you get the domain name registered through a domain registration company.

2. Blogger (FREE): Another hosted service, and very easy to set up. In fact, they claim you can be up and running within 5 minutes. Blogger allows you to post entries by email, or even by phone. Your URL will be example.blogspot.com. If you want your own domain name (example.com), you'll have to register it and have it hosted by another web hosting company. I'm not sure if it costs extra for that feature. Also, the free option lets you choose from about 8 design templates, but you can't create your own design, and the Blogger logo will appear on every page.

Complex & Robust:

3. WordPress (FREE) This is a great product, and it's faster to set up than the other offering in this category, but if you want to tweak it much, you might have to learn some basic PHP.

4. Movable Type (FREE, $69.95, or $99.95): The free version does not include technical support, although copious help pages and third-party tip sites are available. Free allows for 1 author and 3 weblogs; Personal (69.95) allows for five authors and unlimited weblogs; Unlimited Personal (99.95) allows for unlimited authors and unlimited weblogs.

Both 3 and 4 have some nice templates to get you started. Third-party sites also give away templates. They're both non-hosted, which is why two of the Movable Type options have a flat fee instead of a monthly fee. That means, though, that you'll need to register a domain name and pay another company to host the site for you. There are technical requirements for the blogs to work, so if you go this route, make sure your web host provides the necessary components (such as a server database). Both have RSS capability built in and ping popular blog index sites when you post an entry.

I use Movable Type, because I'm a geek and I love to tinker with this sort of stuff. I have full control over the appearance of the blog, and have fully integrated it into the rest of my site.

If you just want to get started right away and don't want to fuss with settings or technical details, you can't really lose by going with Blogger. By the way, Blogger is now owned by Google.

Others

Here is a list of a few other blog platforms that I didn't mention above because I don't have all day and I don't know enough about them. If none of the big four suit your fancy, you might want to look into one of these.

• Textpattern
• Drupal
• bBlog
• Grey Matter

Which one would you recommend?

Grand Rapids, MI

In what is widely considered a stunning fulfillment of expectations, the English Rules blog—along with its companion blogs Photography, Word of the Day, and Writing Guide—did not win any of 2005's prestigious Bloggies™. In fact, the collection of blogs at englishrules.com was not even nominated for an award.

Early this morning, site owner and editor Karl Swedberg released a prepared statement (34KB PDF) to the press, denying any hard feelings:

To receive a Bloggy—or is it Bloggie?—is to reach the pinnacle of blog-success, the apex of blog-stardom, the top of the blops. It is, therefore, perfectly reasonable that my blog should be overlooked.

And overlooked, it was. A few of the many categories in which the English Rules blog failed to register a single vote include:

• Best American Weblog – Weblogs from the United States (Winner: Dooce)
• Best New Weblog – Weblogs that began during the year 2004 (Winner: Defamer)
• Best Photography of a Weblog – Photoblogs and other weblogs that regularly feature photography (Winner: Daily Dose of Imagery)
• Best Meme – A replicating idea that spread about weblogs. [see my definition of meme] (Winner: Flickr)
• Best-Kept-Secret Weblog – The best underrepresented weblogs (Winner: Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again)

When asked to respond to the news, Karl's mom, Ginny, said, What? What did you say? Bloggie? What's that? Never heard of it. Hold on a second, let me turn down the TV… Is that you, Karl?

No further comment was recorded, due to an apparent problem with the phone line.

Tainted Category

Reports of the snubbing come amid charges that one of the Bloggies™ categories is unfairly judged. Critics of the contest contend that the policy of presenting the "Best-Kept-Secret Weblog" award to a site with the most votes rather than the least constitutes an "egregious disregard of logic." Meanwhile, others are taking a more philosophical view, wondering how the winner of a popularity contest for "best kept secret" can be a well kept secret at all.

Contest officials categorically denied allegations of wrongdoing, while representatives of the 2005 Bloggies™ refused to respond to requests for information about their hand soap preferences.

Funny how "nerds" and "jocks" never seem to get along in high school, when in the "real world" they have a surprisingly symbiotic relationship, each group feeding off of the talents of the other. The nerds produce new technologies that give the jocks the edge that will justify their exorbitant salaries, and the jocks use their exorbitant salaries to pay for the latest technologies, thus lining the pockets of the nerds. One clearly nerdy company, VectraSense Technologies, has created a shoe that any professional athlete with a multi-million dollar salary would love—the VectraSense VerbForShoe. This shoe senses your activity level and automatically adjusts to improve comfort and performance…through an embedded computer that learns individual movement patterns and adjusts the shoe accordingly. This computer also allows for wireless data storage and information sharing.

And since we're on the topic of over-the-top technology, why not take a look at the SwiMP3? According to the website, this music player is revolutionary in that it relies on bone conduction of sound. When the device is placed on any bones of the skull (i.e. the cheek bones or the mastoid tip) it leads to vibration of the fluid in the inner ear. Thus swimmers can enjoy clarity of sound with the SwiMP3 device that was never before possible.

It's a strange new world we're living in, isn't it?

All sorts of social software sites are popping up on the web, trying in various ways to link people up with others who share their interests. Here are a few sites that I think have a lot to offer. And so far they're all free.

• Furl: This site lets you save, share, and recall web pages. It "caches" those page, too, so even if they are removed from the original site, you can still access them. For more information about Furl, see Amy Gahran's excellent article, 10 Cool Things To Do with Furl.
• Simpy: This one is very similar to Furl, with the added feature of uploading all of your Internet Explorer favorites or Mozilla Firefox bookmarks. That way, you can access them from any computer with a web connection.
• del.icio.us: This social bookmark site doesn't cache web pages, but it's so simple and easy that I find myself posting bookmarks to it all the time. In fact, the "Noteworthy Articles" that I link to in the left column are generated through a del.icio.us RSS feed based on my bookmarks that I tagged with the keyword "noteworthy." Eashy, huh? Check out my complete list of bookmarks, and see where the related tags will take you, within del.icio.us and beyond.
• 43Things: I'm not sure how to explain this one, so I'll pull some snippets from the site's FAQ. Make a list on 43 Things and see what changes happen in your life. Best of all it's a way of connecting with other enthusiasts interested in everything from watching a space shuttle launch to growing my own vegetables.…Other people often have great ideas. You can get inspiration from others. Adopt a goal as your own or set up your own goals from scratch. Either way, 43 Things can help you document your success, share information, and make progress on what matters to you most.
• Audioscrobbler: This site lets people share their music lists and listen in on personalized music streams. It integrates with your computer's music jukebox, sending information about each song that you play. Then it finds others who share similar tastes in music. These folks are still working out some bugs in the program, but it's very promising, especially for those who listen to a lot of music on their computers.
• Flickr: Here you can do with photos what you can do on del.icio.us with web pages. Very cool way to share images with friends and make friends by sharing images.
• Friendster: This is the mother of all social networking web applications. It links people according to interests and spawns of web of "friends" (how's that for a mixed metaphor?).

That crazy Google has become very generous with the Gmail accounts. They've supplied me with 50 more to give away. If you'd like one, make your request by posting a comment. If you want to know more about Gmail, see my previous article or visit Jim Barr's collection of Gmail tips.

There is a great tradition of visual artists using "found" objects to create new masterpieces, be they sculpture, collage, or mixed media. Musicians, too, have mixed a variety of elements into new compositions—bird songs, environmental noise, samples of other recordings. Now, someone who goes by the name Clown Staples has created a song using only the very basic Sound Recorder that comes pre-installed with Windows and the collection of generic sounds that play when users perform certain actions on their Windows computers. You can watch a Flash animation of Clown playing the tune: Windows Noises. (hat tip: Robin Good)

While I'm not crazy about the song itself, I admire Staples's decision to limit himself to a rudimentary tool and a discrete sound source—a great example of how limits can actually foster creative expression. It reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who chose to write many of her poems in sonnet form long after the rise of free verse, or Richard Wilbur, who is still churning out verse with complex rhyme schemes and rigid meter. Maybe, at least when it comes to art, there is such a thing as too much freedom.

The response to my Gmail account giveaway was more enthusiastic than I had expected. Google refreshed my supply, and I still ran out.

For those of you who are just starting with Gmail, you might want to visit Jim Barr's collection of Gmail tips.

I still have four GMail accounts available for anyone who would like one. Just request it through the comment form of this entry, and I'll send you the invite.

If you haven't heard about it yet, GMail is a cool web-based email program that Google has been beta testing for the past year or so. It gives you a full gigabyte of storage space for all those big file attachments, and it's free. So far it's available through invitation only. Here is what they say about that:

Thanks for using Gmail and helping us improve the service. We're ready to expand our test to a few more users, and because you've been a trusted early tester of Gmail, we're looking for your help. Please invite a few more people who you think would like Gmail and could help us make it even better.

Google has clearly leveraged their search expertise for this product. Rather than having you set up a bunch of folders and move messages from folder to folder, GMail lets you set up labels and then "tag" the messages. You can then filter the messages based on those labels or filter based on any text in the subject or contents of the messages. It's quite a nice little email service.

I'll send invites to the first four who submit a request—if I even get four requests. Come and get it!

Though Skype has been on my radar for quite a while, I haven't been motivated enough to try it out. But after reading an article on Neville Hobson's blog about it, I thought I should bite the bullet and give the program a whirl.

Skype is an internet telephony program based on peer-to-peer (p2p) technology that allows people to communicate through their computer with great sound quality (they claim a sound quality far superior to what you're used to from ordinary telephones). The program is free to download, and the Skype-to-Skype calls are free. What more could you want? It also allows you to make calls from your computer (with a microphone and a speaker or headset) to a real phone anywhere in the world for a very small per-minute fee (approx. 2.6 cents).

I haven't until now tried it out because I couldn't think of any long-distance friends who were geeky enough for me to suggest it to without feeling embarrassed. But, if you're reading this, you're probably at least a little geeky. So, how about it? Are there any takers out there? I just need a friend or two to try it out with me. There are no drawbacks, as far as I can tell—except that it will take a little time to set it up and to actually make the call.

Skype is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. In addition to voice calls, it has instant message and file transfer capability. You can have multi-person chats and conference calls. And Mr. Hobson notes that they're testing a voicemail feature as well. The only real disadvantage compared to regular phones, other than the fact that you're tied to the computer during the call) is that other people can't call a Skype account from a regular phone. So it wouldn't work as a replacement for a regular phone, but it could be a nice complement. Did I mention that it's free?

Update: After installing Skype last night, I used it successfully to speak with Paul VanderLei in South Korea and Neville Hobson in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The sound quality was pristine. The cost was nil. A good time was had by all.

Watching the 60 Minutes report on Google the other night reminded me of how much I love the nifty little tools that they keep churning out. Here are a few that I think are particularly cool:

• Google Suggest: As you type, Google will offer suggestions. Use the arrow keys to navigate the results. I love this feature. And I can't believe how well it works.
• Google Local: Find local businesses and services on the web.
• Google Print: puts the content of books where you can find it most easily—right in Google search results. It looks like Google is trying to compete with the amazon.com "Search inside the book" feature.
• Google Scholar: Search for academic articles from reputable journals.

But Google also has a few tools that I find a little disappointing:

• Google Desktop: I tried this out for a few weeks, and while it did an excellent job of searching items on my computer, the set of file types it could find was too limited. It finds items from the Microsoft Office suite, text files, and Outlook (or Outlook Express) email. It doesn't however, find images, which is what I spend most of my time trying to locate on my home computer. It also doesn't find email from any program except the two from Microsoft mentioned above, which is a bummer because I've switched over to Mozilla Thunderbird.
• Froogle: This shopping search engine has lame filtering and sorting features. The few times that I've used it have been rather unpleasant because of the bewildering number of search results in a seeminly random order. I prefer the shopping comparison sites Price Grabber and MySimon.
• Google Toolbar: Well, this was a nice little widget to have when I was using Internet Explorer, but now that I'm using Mozilla Firefox, I don't have any use for the special toolbar. All of its features are already built into Firefox.
• Google News: I suppose it's okay as far as news compilers go, but the search results contain an annoying number of duplicate articles (usually when they're syndicated in various newspapers).

What are your favorite Google tools or features? Which ones can you do without? Have you found other search engines that you like more? Let's hear it.

Technology is not my friend today. While taking pictures of a friend's baby, the battery in my Nikon digital camera ran out. No problem, I thought, I'll just switch to my 35mm camera while I recharge the digital camera's battery. But when I tried to turn on the Nikon N80, its batteries were dead, too. I ran to the closet where Sara keeps a huge stash of extra batteries in case one of our kids' 5,328 toys that require batteries is in need of a new set, put the new batteries in the camera, and attached the flash. Guess what. The flash's batteries were dead. By this time, the digital camera's battery was recharged enough to use for the 15 or so pictures I had to take, so I switched back. Baby Sidney started to get a little cranky during this comedy of errors, but we managed to grab a few good shots of her.

Relieved that the embarrassing photo shoot was over, I went upstairs to download the digital pictures to my laptop, but when I grabbed the wireless mouse and moved it around a bit, nothing happened on screen. Need I say it? The mouse's batteries were dead. I may be a little slow, but I'm starting to get the feeling that Someone is trying to give me a big hint.

If you've ever had to contact customer support at amazon.com and wanted to do so by phone, you've probably run into the same roadblocks that I have. The number is nowhere to be found on the customer support pages.

One intrepid reporter, Timothy Noah of slate.com, managed to track it down by calling a corporate number he found on an investor relations page and asking the operator for customer service. Here's the number he was given: 1-800-201-7575.

A blogger who goes by the handle "Not Martha" took a more conventional route and looked up amazon.com in the Seattle phone book. Here's the number she found: 206-266-2992.

Thanks to Timothy and Not Martha, Christmas will be a little bit less frustrating for a whole lot of online shoppers.

Newsweek has just come out with an article all about blogs and their growing influence in the world of ideas. I guess this means blogs are really, truly in the mainstream now. What's interesting, though, is that two of my coworkers in the past week have asked me what a blog is. And I work at a hip interactive communications agency! So, when I read the article, I tried to see it through the eyes of someone like my mom, someone who isn't exactly up on the latest tech lingo. (No offense, Mom.) While the writer makes a half-hearted effort to explain some of the concepts discussed in the article, I'm afraid a lot of people are going to read it the way Charlie Brown heard his teacher: "Wha waah wha WAAH WAAH waah." Granted, there's a nice definition of blog in the first paragraph:

A Weblog, or blog, is a personal Web site where somebody self-publishes an electronic journal, often linking to other things on the Web that strike the author's fancy.

But the article fires off so much techno-jargon that the casual, non-geeky reader will probably run for cover before getting to the end of it. Here's a little list of techie words in the article. Which ones could you define? Which ones are you even familiar with?

• Weblog
• blog
• blogging
• blogger
• blogosphere
• blogspace
• alpha blogger
• A-listers
• cross-link
• podcast
• podcasting
• audio feeds
• geekdom
• newbie

Side note: The next time I feel bad about how much time I spend on the internet, I'm going to remember this: All of this takes time: Scoble spends two hours daily writing his Weblog and three more hours reading hundreds of other blogs in search of fresh ideas and nifty software innovations.
[Read the NewsWeek article]

Every time I add an article to my website or send a cool new link to my wife, she asks me where I find the time to do all this stuff. Part of the answer, as I mentioned in a previous post, is that I stay up late at night. Too late.

But the other part of the answer—the part that makes Sara's eyes glaze over when I talk about it—has to do with the way I view the web. In short, I use a news aggregator.

News aggregators, also known as news readers or feed readers, come in a variety of flavors—some as stand-alone applications, some integrated with a web browser, and some integrated with an email program. They all have the same function, though, which is to collect and organize articles from news sites and weblogs (a.k.a. blogs). Rather than surfing from site to site to read the news (or commentary or entertainment gossip or shopping deals) of the day, all of the information comes to you in a single, neatly organized program.

When you're viewing a website and you see a little orange image with XML or RSS printed on it, you know that the site has a "feed." With most news aggregators, all you have to do is drag that image and drop it into a folder, and presto, instant headlines. You can arrange the feeds any way you like, and you can speed through the headlines in no time. The aggregator is scheduled to "ping" sites at regular intervals to see if there is any fresh content. When a site publishes a new article, the aggregator will grab it and store it for you to view.

One of my favorite aggregators, SharpReader, gives you a three-pane view of all your articles. In the left column is a list of all of the news sources, categorized whichever way you want. Click on a folder or an individual news source and you'll get a list of all of the articles in the upper-right pane. Select an article's headline and a summary or excerpt appears below; double-click and the full web page appears.

A couple months ago I abandoned SharpReader for Mozilla Thunderbird, because Thunderbird efficiently integrates the news feeds into its email program. Now I use the one program for reading both my email and the news. If you're using an Apple computer, I've heard that NetNewsWire works really well on the OS X platform. FeedDemon is a very nice one for Windows, with a polished interface and a collection of feeds to start you off. SharpReader, Thunderbird, and NetNewsWire are free; FeedDemon is $29.95.

The "resources" pages of my website are also news aggregators of a sort, using RSS to pull headlines from metacritic.com, The New York Times, and Christian Science Monitor for the pages' right-hand columns.

As I write this, I get the uneasy feeling that the news aggregrator is a little bit like TiVo in that it's an amazing technology with a core group of ardent admirers, but one with benefits that are difficult to communicate to the uninitiated. So, if something doesn't make sense in this article, or if I haven't explained this stuff clearly enough, let me know and I'll try to make it more understandable. You can also check out CNET.com, a technology website that has a good primer on these topics.

Here's an idea so cool and eco-futuristic that it looks like it must be a hoax. Because of the explosion of cell phone users and the maddening upgrade cycle for new features, there has been a problem with the number of old phones being dumped into landfills. An R&D company contracted by Motorola has come up with a creative solution: turn the phones into flowers. That's right, when you've had enough of the phone, you can dig a shallow grave for it. The phone will biodegrade, and a seed implanted in the faceplate will sprout into a beautiful sunflower. As CNN.com reports:

Pvaxx Research & Development…has come up with a polymer that looks like any other plastic, but which degrades into soil when discarded. Researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain then helped to develop a phone cover that contains a sunflower seed, which will feed on the nitrates that are formed when the polyvinylalcohol polymer cover turns to waste.
[Read the full article]

So, I guess if CNN said it, it must be true. It definitely gets my vote as coolest technology of the year.

A friend of mine recently challenged me to limit my time on the computer, outside of work, to one hour or less each day. He didn't think I could do it for a month. So I've accepted the challenge, which means that I'll probably be posting fewer entries on this site and I'll definitely be reading fewer online magazines and newspapers.

Maybe that's okay, though. I have a bunch of New Yorkers that have piled up on my nightstand, unread. And it seems the more time I spend online, the less able I am to read anything longer than a feature article.

Every time I post something on the site, Sara asks me how in the world I find the time to do it. I tell her, "When you're asleep." And it's true: I stay up far too late for my health, and when I'm awake at 11 or midnight or one in the morning, I'm usually reading, usually online. Maybe I have a computer addiction.

So my month of self-imposed computer restraint has begun. Wish me luck?

After eight days of vexing back and forth with tech support from two companies, I finally have my little blog software running again. Just like a long-lost friend. Thanks, everyone, for your patience and understanding as I worked through the byzantine world of cgi, mysql, php, and other odd strings of letters. Now brace yourselves for some pent-up blogging energy ready to explode.

If you've looked at englishrules.com lately, you may have noticed a few changes. First, I tried to freshen up the look a little bit, with a color palette pulled from the new image across the top of the pages. I also made the photography section match the rest of the site.

There's a new search field at the top right of (almost) all of the pages now, the utility of which is a bit suspect as I have no idea what anyone could possibly hope to find on this site.

The homepage sports a new Word of the Day feature, which I'll try my best to update daily, although it might turn into a word of the week. I actually started posting words about a week or so ago so people who were geeky enough to look at the word-of-the-day archive would not be disappointed.

For the past month I've been receiving the word of the day from the Oxford English Dictionary, and to be quite frank, it stinks. The words must be chosen by some random generator, because most of them are perfectly useless. The words on englishrules.com, while also perfectly useless, are at least chosen by a human being (I am not a monster!). And how will this human being choose these words? Pure whim. If I come across a nice word in a book that I'm reading, I might make it a word of the day. If a funny word strikes my fancy during a walk outside on a crisp fall day, I might make it a word of the day. If I trip over a word on the sidewalk, pick it up, dust it off, and slip it into my back pocket, I might just pull it out again in the evening as the sun scurries down the tree branches, and make it a word of the day. Sometimes the word and definition will be accompanied by a little note explaining what inspired me to share it. Sometimes they won't.

I hope you all enjoy the changes. If you have any other suggestions for change, let me know by posting a comment.

Every once in a while I come across a cool little tool that makes life on the web just a little easier, or a bit more fun. Here are three that I use fairly often:

TinyURL: Let's say you just read a great article in The New York Times and you want to tell your friends about it. Unfortunately, you're not sure you can remember the URL (web address): http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/opinion/16dowd.html? ex=1253073600&en=cd231d47f63894da&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. The good news is that you don't really have to. Instead, you can go to tinyurl.com and paste that gobbledygook into a field, and the web site will spit back a tinyURL like this: http://tinyurl.com/3jxyt. Now, any time you put that tinyurl into the address field, it will take you to the New York Times article.

BugMeNot: Have you ever gone to a news site, such as the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, only to be barred from entry until you give up your email address and other personal information for their free registration? Well, now you can "bypass compulsory registration" at most sites. Just go to bugmenot.com and type the URL for the site you're trying to view (e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com). BugMeNot will give you a user name and password that someone has donated.

Mailinator: Another way to get around the personal disclosure part of the free registration trap is to type in bogus information. Some sites, though, require email confirmation before granting you access; they send an email to the address you enter and give you a link that you need to follow to "activate" your registration. So, a bogus email address will backfire. That's where mailinator.com comes in. Instead of typing your real email address, type any name at mailinator.com (for example, lilswede@mailinator.com). Then, all you have to do is go to mailinator.com, type that fake address (in our example, lilswede) in the "Check your inbox" field, and press the "Go" button. You'll see the confirmation email sent to you by the site that made you register. Open it and follow the instructions as usual. You can think of mailinator.com as a provider of temporary email addresses. Oh, the email people send to mailinator is temporary, too—it's automatically deleted after a few hours.

BONUS

TypoGenerator: Because I'm feeling extra geeky tonight, I'll tell you about this other tool, the typoGenerator. When you go to the web site, type a word or phrase in the input field and press the Generate button. Then, according to the site, " typoGenerator searches images.google for the text and creates a background from the found images, using randomly chosen effects...it places the text, using random effects, too." You can look artsy fartsy without any effort whatsoever. Here are three "typoposters" I generated at the site:

Because I care very deeply about the online experience of anyone who visits my web site—all three of you—I've added a little feature to my "Resources" pages. In the right-hand column of each resource page, you'll see a list of related links from a featured site. The links, popularly known as webfeeds or newsfeeds, are automatically updated through a syndication technology called RSS. Here is what I have lined up now:

• Writing Resources: Latest words from The Word Spy
• Literature Resources: The New York Times Book Reviews
• Movies & Media Resources: Movie reviews from metacritic.com

If you're using a computer running the Microsoft Windows operating system, you might be thinking that your only choice of web browser is Internet Explorer (IE). After all, it's the only one that shows up on the computer's desktop when you first turn it on. Most of the Mac users I've talked to seem content with Safari, but the Windows folks are growing increasingly dissatisfied with IE, and most think they're stuck with it.

One of the problems with Internet Explorer is the annoying pop-up ads that plague computer users while browsing through the web. Third-party software developers sell or even give away pop-up blockers, one of which comes with the handy Google toolbar. But they vary in their effectiveness and can be difficult for novices to find on the web, download, and install.

Also, partly because of its popularity, Internet Explorer is especially vulnerable to viruses, worms, and other little bugs. The logic here is that hackers want the most bang for their time and effort, so they target the largest audience: IE users.

And let's face it, Microsoft has let their web browser languish for the last year or so, when they could have been adding cool features and improving its compatibility with web standards. Why bother, though? They've already won the browser war, right?

Not so fast. Other browsers really are available, and at least one, which I've been using for the past couple months, is quite a bit more advanced than Microsoft's product. Firefox has been my default browser ever since a former student of mine told me about it. Sure, I still have Internet Explorer on my computer—doesn't everyone?—and I'll use it if I absolutely have to, if a web site uses some proprietary Microsoft extension. But the rest of the time, I'll be using Firefox.

Did I mention that it's free? Just go to the site and download it. And if you're not sure how to do that, or you're concerned about getting the Internet Explorer "favorites" exported to the new browser, check out the simple instructions: Switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox.

The basic program already has some great features that IE lacks, such as browser "tabs" that let you have multiple pages open in one window and jump from one to another easily. But if you're like me and you get all geeked out about things like this, there are plenty of "extensions" to boost the functionality and "skins" to change the appearance.

Oh, and by the way, seems I'm not the only one switching over. Paul Boutin published an article about Firefox in the online magazine Slate.com: "Are the Browser Wars Back? How Mozilla's Firefox Trumps Internet Explorer." The crazy thing about that is that Slate.com is owned by Microsoft. So much for corporate control over editorial content.

Here's the kicker: The "Switching" article links to a notice by US-CERT, a division of the Homeland Security Department, that recommends using an alternative browser.

So, is it time for you to dump Internet Explorer?

For a long time Rotten Tomatoes was my critic compiler of choice whenever I thought about seeing a new movie or couldn't decide which one to rent. Especially after the demise of Mr. Showbiz, Rotten Tomatoes was my go-to site; the now-famous Tomatometer, displaying in a simple bar graph the percentage of positive reviews from its culled critics around the Web, and the quick-glance fresh or rotten tomato icon alongside a linked quote from each source made the site well worth visiting. And yet, even with all of its appeal, the site was just a little too cute, and far too busy.

So, now that I've stumbled across Metacritic, I think I'll stay there. It, too, has its quirks, but the design is clean and straightforward, and I can find what I'm looking for faster than I could on Rotten Tomatoes. It uses a trademarked "Metascore," which "shows the critical consensus at a glance by taking a weighted average of critic grades" on a 100-point scale. In addition to film reviews, it has sections for video/dvd, music, and games.

What do you think about these two critic-compiling sites? Which one do you use? Or have you found an even better one?

My boss/friend recently tipped me off to a Wired News article about a subculture of Windows users who like to "skin" their user interfaces to appear as much like Apple's OS X as possible. As a Mac zealot, he of course wonders why people would waste their time trying to imitate something when they could just get the real thing. But I really get where these folks are coming from, even if I have no clue where they find the time to do all this stuff. Have they no lives?

First of all, I grant that the OS X interface is a lot slicker than Windows XP's. That said, I doubt it matters much to those who are doing the customizing. To dip into the realm of sweeping generalization for a moment, here is one of the main differences I notice between Windows and Mac fans: Windows fans like to tinker with the OS. They like to push their programs until they break. They like to tweak the system until it screams. And they like to "mod" the operating system until it looks like something entirely different.

It's the same kind of difference that you see between those who like to buy the brand-new, beautifully designed car and take it to the shop whenever there's a squeak and those who'll take the beater, rip apart the engine, and rebuild it into a souped-up hot rod.