blogging

  • Akismet will cure your comment spam blues

    Yes, the time has come for me to publicly express my love for Akismet. It’s a relatively new plugin for WordPress that grabs comment spam and dumps it in a moderation queue. Since I installed it, Akisment has blocked 100% of the droves of unprintable comment spam that streams into my site on a daily…

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  • Maine wastes taxpayer money on inept web campaigns

    Let’s see if that title earns some much-warranted attention to this story. See, something stinks here in my home state of Maine, and at least this time around it’s not the State’s abysmal DirigoChoice health are program. Instead, I’m talking about some highly irregular, irresponsible, and completely unprofessional behavior on display by our state’s Office…

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  • Full-text RSS is mandatory around here

    Now that my RSS reader has grown to include 139 feeds (I put an informal cap at 100 a few months ago), it’s time to do some pruning. As much as it pains me, I’m starting by usubscribing from all my feeds that are not full-text. The biggest loss for me in that department is…

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  • edgeio: Classifieds, and a hope for distributed community

    You may think the previous post on my blog, in which I listed a propane fireplace for sale, was a little bit strange. In fact, there’s another reason for it besides my desire to sell the fireplace (after all, I’ve already paid to post it for sale elsewhere). The ad was also my first test…

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  • More first-hand reporting on Iraq from Michael J. Totten

    Michael J. Totten, the enterprising solo reporter/blogger who published a fascintating first-hand report on Iraq yesterday, is back today with an even more amazing post (with photos!) on the future of Iraq’s Kurdistan region. This is groundbreaking, amazing original reporting that also happens to be extremely readable and engrossing. If you have ten minutes, please…

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  • Michael J. Totten, a freelance reporter, spent some time in the northern Iraq city of Erib and files an engrossing first-person report on his time there. Michael’s braveity in venturing into Iraq virtually on his own is to be greatly admired. Perhaps even more so is his willingness to report back with candor, narrative, wit,…

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  • The night before my book came out, Glenn Reynolds linked to it and drove its Amazon rank from around 12,000 down the mid-hundreds. Two days later, his links again propelled the book, this time all the way to #4. Of course, I can’t return the favor, but the least I can do is link to…

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  • 2005 Blogs of the Year

    My picks for 2005 Blogs of the Year: 5. Scripting News – Dave Winer / He’s often infuriating, especially in a disagreement. But there’s no doubt that Dave Winer is the unofficial Chief Technical and Philisophical Officer of the living web. While some people find one or two interesting things to say every couple of…

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  • WordPress hosted blog service goes public

    WordPress.com, the hosted blog service developed by the WordPress team (the gears running this site), is now out of private beta and is public. I’ve been using the service for about two weeks now (but I’ve only posted to once so far, to my detriment). My reaction is split down the middle, as I stated…

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  • More on Measure Map: a useless, but fun, feature request

    My review of Measure Map generated two comments. One was by Jeffrey Veen, a partner in Adaptive Path, the consulting firm that built and is launching Measure Map. Rather than reply to Jeff’s comment with my own comment (which would bury the conversation down a layer) or reply to him with an email (which would…

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