chuggnutt.com

Like many blogs out there, I have spam-checking service Akismet set up to filter out the comment spam. It's built-in on my Brew Site WordPress blog, but on chuggnutt and Hack Bend it's using a PHP class that I coded myself.

Up until a few days ago, it's been working beautifully on my two non-WordPress blogs. But all of a sudden, every spam comment to the two blogs started coming through approved (not marked as spam). Every single one.

Tonight I started poking around my code and the Akismet API to see if anything had changed. According to their API documentation, Akismet should only return two possible values for the spam check: "true" or "false".

I poked around with some cURL tests but that was inconclusive; appropriate testing strings ("viagra-test-123" will always return true) were performing as specified. But when I entered that test string as a comment on my site, it was not flagged as spam. Clearly, something had changed with the API, since the code has been running along just fine since, what, 2006?

So I set my PHP code to give me the raw response from the Akismet server(s), and these are the two results—this is the exact code and return values Akismet is returning:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:39:52 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
X-akismet-server: 192.168.7.4

4
true
0


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:40:45 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: close
X-akismet-server: 192.168.6.46

5
false
0

Do you see? Akismet has changed their return values. They are no longer simply "true" and "false", they are pre- and appended with digits on separate lines.

Of course, more fool me for coding my PHP to look explicitly for "true" and "false" only—once I saw this, I was able to fix the problem quickly. (Changing the comparison from "string equality" to "string contains".) Spam checking fixed.

The weird thing is, I can't seem to find anything about this online (other than a comment on another blog so far), and I can't figure why this is what's being returned to my PHP while cURL reported only "true" and "false". Perhaps something to do with UTF encoding? Multi-byte strings? I don't know.

And why now? There have been no server or PHP changes on my end and like I said, it's been working fine for years. Literally.

Anyway, I posted this here to help out other people potentially having troubles with their Akismet code.

I've been thinking a bit lately about Twitter's new "Retweet" functionality. Okay, first of all, there is a scary number of hits when you search "retweet": 9.8 million from Google. That just seems wrong somehow, considering "retweet" is a made up word that's only been in the lexicon for what, a couple of years at most?

Anyway. In short, a "retweet" is when someone copies and re-tweets your Twitter message, usually by putting "RT @username" in front of it. It's a way of sharing something you like with your own Twitter followers and it has become very common practice in the Twitter world.

So common and popular, in fact, that Twitter itself has created a "Retweet" button that they're experimenting with. It's a handy piece of functionality: it copies the Twitter message you like to your timeline so your followers can read it, but instead of looking like it came from you with "RT @username" prepended, it shows the original tweet with a notation that you are the (re)tweet source.

(Obviously I have this Retweet function attached to my Twitter accounts, so I've been playing with it.)

What I like about it is the one-click functionality they've built into it: you don't have to copy a message, scroll back to the top of the screen, type "RT @whatever" and paste the message in—shortening it in case your addition breaks the 140-character limit—and then scroll back to where you were in reviewing your timeline.

However, there's two things this functionality breaks: the ability to modify the original tweet to add your own comment (if there's room), and the "branding" of the retweet.

What do I mean about the branding? Well, consider this: every time I manually retweet a message, it's immediately clear to my followers that the retweet came from me: my image and username are right there, and this is especially handy for people that might be quickly scanning their timelines looking for certain images (people they want to read). With Twitter's built in Retweet function, this is broken; users now see a tweet from a user they may not follow, so they may not immediately assume it's something you recommended.

I'm thinking of this in terms of my Hack Bend Twitter account. In that case @hackbend is definitely a brand I'm pushing, in that I want to build awareness of Hack Bend and ultimately build credibility and drive more traffic back to that blog. When I do a manual retweet, followers can quickly and easily see that @hackbend has posted, and recommends something. With the new Retweet function, they don't immediately see @hackbend, and—if they're looking for Hack Bend-related tweets—they potentially miss it.

So I'm a little on the fence. I think for my @hackbend account, where branding is definitely an issue, I will continue to do the manual "RT @username" retweeting (unless I just get lazy). Otherwise, on my @chuggnutt account, I'll keep playing with the auto-Retweet feature. But I'm curious as to what other people are thinking.

An interesting experiment might be to track which style of retweeting generates more traffic; do a Twitter post in one account, linking to a site (tracking hits from Twitter, of course), and then retweet it in the two different ways in another account. There should probably be various controls, but I'd be curious to see which works better.

(As I type in the title to this blog post, I have the line "Remember, remember the fifth of November" from "V for Vendetta" running through my head.)

I blink, and November has passed; tomorrow is December 1st which for all intents and purposes heralds the Christmas season. Well, actually according to the Shopping Gods the Christmas season is already in full swing—but I'm slightly more of a traditionalist than that.

Thanksgiving was nice and uneventful: a big meal, lots of beer, and a small group. I always view these holiday weekends to be taken advantage of in a relaxing sense, so what was I doing out the day after Thanksgiving hanging lights on the house in a snowstorm?

Freezing, that's what.

Much of my month has been concerned with beer writing (the parts that aren't concerned with work, and family, and so on): I'm gearing up for the Advent Beer Calendar which starts tomorrow on the Brew Site, and I've been signed on as a Featured Writer for RateBeer's new Hop Press group blog.

Meanwhile, I actually have some posts queued up in my head for this poor blog here. Maybe over the next few days I'll actually get them written.

I was in our local Bend Bulletin today, in an article about seasonal beers. Nice article, mostly accurate, but I was very surprised by the amount of "screen time" I got, so to speak. I only spoke with the reporter for something like 10 minutes on the phone last week.

This makes the third time that I've "officially" been in the paper, as an interviewee; the first was for a story on blogging back in 2004, the second was just last year (also on blogging).

But unofficially, I may have been mentioned without my prior knowledge, so it could (sort of) be more than three times: for instance, my blog was quoted (giving attribution to me) back in 2005 but I didn't know about it until after the fact.

Thank goodness I come across lucid in today's article, though. Sometimes I'm in those interviews and I just feel like I'm rambling nonsense.

As a blogger who receives samples of products (mostly beer) and writes reviews of them, I read with interest this story that popped up on LATimes.com today: Bloggers must now disclose if they got paid to write a review.

Basically, the Federal Trade Commission has revised their "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising" to add specific rules and language concerning bloggers.

A blogger who reviews a product — but leaves out the fact that he or she got a payment, high-value gift or free vacation to write the review — could run afoul of new federal regulations on advertising.

"The post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement," said the agency in a release. "Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service."

A blogger can, however, accept a free sample of a product for review purposes without disclosure, "provided that the product itself does not have such a high value that would make its receipt material (e.g., a car)," according to the revised rules.

I'm surprised I haven't seen more being made of this online yet; this should be a big story in the blogosphere. These changes go into effect December 1st.

Fortunately I disclose everything that I've received on behalf of my blogs (really only The Brew Site has generated anything), and just as fortunately, while I've received lots of samples, I haven't accepted any money or high-value material payment to do so. (I've received various bits of glassware with some of the beer, but that's it—and it's all documented on the blog.)

I'm going to be very interested to see how this shakes out the blogging world. Kids, disclose those payments!

This year, or the latter half, at least, has been a big harvest year for us. And one of the things that goes along with harvesting your own produce (or whatever) is the packaging and storage: you don't want the stuff you picked to go bad. So there's been a lot of freezing and canning this year as well.

This is the first time I've ever canned, believe it or not. Me personally, I mean; my mother canned all sorts of things when I was growing up. But having never done it myself, it was always a bit mysterious as to the process; turns out, it's very, very easy. Most of the work comes in processing the fruit before it even hits the jars.

Check it out:

• Our July trip to Hood River yielded a bunch of cherries and blueberries: about 12 pounds of the former and about three pounds of the latter. We vacuum-sealed and then froze them.
• Between my small hop vine and the hops at my parents' place, I picked several pounds of hops, which yielded something like 11 or 12 ounces of dried hops. Which I'll be brewing the next several batches of beer with.
• The four pounds of wild plums from my parents' place that I blogged about yesterday is yielding one gallon of wine.
• Another fruit-picking trip to Hood River a couple of weeks ago netted us about 130 pounds of apples and pears. Literally. Plus we brought home 12 or so pounds of peaches. The peaches went into freezer jam, and I've made (and canned) applesauce, canned four quarts of sliced apples, and eight quarts of halved pears. So far; there is still a lot of fruit to go.
• Three nice tomato plants were very productive.
• Our small garden this year (which was flooded out by torrential rains in the spring) yielded a number of carrots, onions, and a bit of lettuce; one medium-sized pumpkin (which is still on the vine as of this writing), and even one very small watermelon!
• I have a giant bulb of fennel from my mom's garden. And come to think of it, several pounds of frozen rhubarb from her garden earlier in the year, too.

There's more canning to be done this weekend, and I'm also thinking up other things to possibly do with the pears and apples—but since my creativity in this area tends to run towards alcohol, what I've come up with is apple/pear beer and pear wine. Perhaps a pear vodka sounds interesting too.

Oh, I was thinking about making some apple butter also.

And I've been making more beer this year, I suppose that counts. In fact, I have two five-gallon batches in carboys ready to bottle (likely this weekend), and if I want to brew with the fruit I should probably have another batch going soon.

Our house has become so domestic...

Today marks seven years since I started this blog. Seven! Strangely enough, I launched on Earth Day without even knowing it. So when I talk about the significance of "April 22nd" I'm usually not on the same page as everyone else.

→ My porting of The Brew Site to WordPress worked out remarkably well (minus more fine tuning I still need to do), so sooner or later I'll get around to porting this site over as well.

→ Not sure what to do with the ebooks page anymore. It's not going anywhere (I don't like linkrot), but the Palm eReader platform they were all released for seems to no longer be a relevant format. Seems like Mobipocket is the way to go: it's supported by all main platforms, it's an open standard (with development tools, I think), and even Amazon.com has adopted it.

Of course, I have less time than ever to even think about offering up new ebooks...

→ We went to the school's Family Fun Night this evening and actually won the drawing for a weekend coast getaway—a condo in or near Newport.

→ Last weekend I opened up some mystery bottles of homebrew that had been in storage for an indeterminate (but fairly long) amount of time.They were actually not at all bad; one was very oxidized and reminiscent of a sherry—no idea what style it was originally—the other was a stout, also oxidized but not as badly. Kind of fun tasting mystery brews like that, so this evening I put four more bottles in the fridge to taste this weekend.

In this case, I know for sure what at least one of them is: the second beer I ever brewed, a honey wheat ale. Vintage, mid-nineties.

For reference, I have several bottles of my early batches of beer: one bottle of the very first batch I brewed, a generic amber-ish ale; a bottle or two of the honey wheat; one bottle of the third(?) I brewed, a porter; a bottle of an Oktoberfest (very early also, but I don't recall exactly when); and one or two bottles of "Capricorn Porter", a beer brewed with all sorts of things like juniper berries and licorice and such. It dates to '96 or '97 I think.

There are also several other unlabeled bottles as well. I can't speak for certain how any of these have held up with questionable storage conditions, but who cares? I'm having fun with the adventure. Anyone want to get in on it?

And just like that, winter is officially over and spring has arrived. No one's told the weather, yet, but it'll figure it out sooner or later.

I think this past month has been my worst non-blogging streak at this blog to date. Sorry about that. I've actually jotted down notes here and there of things to write about but have just been—frankly—too lazy to make the effort to get them down.

I've been porting over my Brew Site blog to run on WordPress, as promised, and it's been mostly painless. The biggest effort was mapping the database fields and writing the SQL to convert the data from the old tables to the WordPress tables... which turns out to be not that big a deal. Actually, that wasn't the biggest effort; the biggest effort was creating the theme to more-or-less match what I had before. It's mostly done, good enough for government work anyway, though I'll still be twiddling around with it for a while and I already have ideas for something new.

Next I'll convert Hack Bend over and finally this blog. Those conversions should go quicker now that I have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done. I'm pretty sure I'm going to open Hack Bend up to multiple contributors. Who wants to write for it? It's all free, of course, at least until I can figure out how to enable different Google AdSense users.

That's all for tonight. Next post: a review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

Here's an idea (or several) that has been banging around in my head for a little while now: print on demand (POD) magazines generated from blogs.

It's not a new idea—ironically, shortly after I began thinking about this, I discovered OpenZine, a site/service which seems to do the same type of thing—but right now it would be stupidly easy to implement it. All you really need is some software on your website (in PHP, ASP.NET, whatever) to insert blog posts into a nicely formatted PDF, and hey presto, instant magazine that a user could read online or print out.

But extending the idea a bit more: what if instead of the "owner" (or blogger or whomever) doesn't select what to publish to the "magazine" (since it's virtual), but the end user gets to pick what articles should appear? Either by selecting specific articles (blog posts, reviews, whatever), or by setting some search or filter parameters (the last 10 new articles in the "beer review" category).

Then not only do you have a print on demand magazine built out of your blog—at no other work from you than writing your blog (like you're doing anyway)—but it's customizable on a user-by-user basis.

Sure, they could just go to your blog (or a specific post) and click "print"—but this would be just as easy and they'd get a (custom) layout that looks like a magazine and could be (should be) much more readable than a straight printout.

Again, there's no magic here; it would still be stupidly easy to accomplish.

What about monetizing your POD blog magazine? Some bloggers are going to want compensation, after all. Since the user is already choosing what content they'd like to have in their magazine, why not let the user also select what advertising they'd tolerate in it? This would be more complicated, of course, because then you'd actually have to be selling adspace and have a variety of ad topics to give the user lots of choices. And they couldn't be clicky ads, either—it's intended for print, remember, so clicky ads don't make sense.

But I'm sure that if there's not already a third party service out there to broker ads for you in this type of manner, someone could set one up pretty easily. Maybe?

I don't know quite how the payout would work for this... perhaps when the user builds their POD 'zine and selects their ads, it would mark that ad as "sold" and you'd get a payout of whatever set fee. No commitment, no risk, and no cost to the end user (other than the paper they print it out on).

All the pieces are out there, there's nothing from a technical standpoint that would prevent this. The questions then are:

• Has anyone put all the pieces together and is doing this?
• If not, why not?
• Would (enough) people be interested in a POD zine?
• Would people actually do the "print" part of POD? Or just read a PDF? (If they don't print it out, then it's pretty much pointless)
• Would advertisers be interested in this?
• Is there such an ad broker that I speculated about?
• Would you use it?

Seriously, this could be a WordPress plugin by next week.

Astute readers know (or can probably guess) that the software running my various blogs isn't your standard blog software; in fact, it's all PHP code that I wrote myself, and have gradually refined over the years.

Truth be told, though, I'm getting sick of it and I'm considering switch everything over to WordPress. Why? Here are some of my reasons:

• My own software is horribly out of date. It might have been cutting edge three or four years ago, but I just haven't had time to keep up with the Joneses, as it were.
• To that end, I'm just one person with limited time; I can't compete with an internet-wide community of open source developers contributing to the most popular free blogging platform around.
• The latest version, 2.7, is a major update and it's really solid—and has all the administrative features I'd want in my own software anyway.
• It's just time to get with the program.

Needless to say, I have a number of pros and cons as I'm thinking about this.

Pros:

• WordPress is PHP/MySQL, which is what I do. I'm enormously comfortable with it.
• I can still develop blogging tools in PHP in my spare time—just develop/release them for WordPress as plugins.
• My blogging will be much more efficient—one of the problems now is the admin tools on my current software are quirky—essentially I'm spending more effort managing data rather than writing.
• Automatic upgrades to the software (see the "community of open source developers" reason above).
• Ajax-y auto saving of blog posts—this is huge. I don't have it in my homegrown software, and I've lost more than one post and cursed myself for not having an autosave feature.
• There are tons and tons of neat plugins that I'd love to have instant access to, which I would with WordPress. (Trying to get rid of my own "not invented here" attitude.)

Cons:

• It's going to be a huge pain to migrate all the blogging data from my database tables to the WordPress tables. I have it all backed up, of course, but mapping from one schema to another is work.
• To that end, I may end up losing URL/path info (hello 404 errors!), tagging data, and years' worth of other massaged data formatting or content. (The major stuff will be fine, of course.)
• Time to do and fix all of those issues, of course. As in, I don't have that much time at hand.
• Image handling; I know WP likes to put everything under its "wp-content" directory, but I prefer storing images in an "images" directory. I don't want to move them, and I'm unsure how configurable WP is in regards to it.

I'm thinking it's going to happen, regardless. And no, I'm not considering any other blogging platforms; WordPress is the only one in consideration.

This is cross-posted from Hack Bend (I was there in a "Hack Bend" capacity) because it's cool and I'm just narcissistic enough to post multiple times:

Last month I had been invited to be on media panel at the Deschutes County offices, as the resident blogging expert representing how blogging and "new media" are becoming more prevalent in news and reporting and such. (The "expert" notion is up for debate, of course. I just do what I do.) The panel was to supplement media communications training for County employees and was held today—and I have to say, it was interesting and enlightening, and definitely something I'd do again if asked.

With me on the panel were Barney Lerten, of KTVZ; Heather Roberts, of KOHD; Heidi Hagemeier, of the Bulletin; and R.L. Garrigus from the Bend Radio Group. I've known Barney from back when he was still Bend.com, and had known of the others but not met them before. All very nice folks, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out they were already familiar with Hack Bend(!).

For the most part, it was as much a learning experience for me as for the County employees, I suspect; I talked a bit about the blogging aspect of things as it pertains to media and reporting and communication, but to a large extent I just listened to the others, all of whom come from more established channels with much more background than I.

And a big thanks to Anna Johnson, the Public Communications Coordinator with the County, for inviting me and arranging it all. Thanks!

I cross-posted this over on Hack Bend, as well: that blogger bash I wrote about? Yeah, it's on for sure.

This Wednesday, April 30th, at The Summit Saloon and Stage in downtown Bend at 125 NW Oregon Avenue. Starts about 5:30ish and goes til whenever. Here's the "official" description:

The first blogger meetup was a big success! Since then there's been a lot of growth and new folks have popped up in our local "blogosphere". Meetups like this are a nice chance for all of us to gather, unwind, and put some faces together with the blogs.

This event is primarily intended for bloggers who wish to meet other bloggers. If you don't have a blog, then this may not be the get-together for you. So, if you just can't stand not being there and don't already have a blog... what are you waiting for?!

I'll be there for sure. Will you?

Today I've been officially blogging for six years. Ironically, yesterday marked Chris' five-year blogiversary. It's going around!

Not much more to it than noting the date, except to bring up the imminent next blogger meetup.

Which will be this month, on the 30th—next Wednesday.

Shannon, Jen, BOR, and I are in talks to figure out where. (Stay tuned for further announcements.) So obviously the four of us at least are in. Who else is in?

Since I'm celebrating six years of blogging this month, I thought it'd be interesting to go back through the past six Aprils and link to some highlights.

April 2002 - Really not much to see here... I was just starting blogging, playing with the software I was developing, and it's really just mundane stuff. I think Pong was a highlight.

April 2003 - Even less than in 2002. We saw Bon Jovi for the first time and there was more work on the software.

April 2004 - I was blogging up a storm. Pretty geeky stuff, an equal mixture of technical posts and non-technical-but-still-geeky posts and some random things. My musings for an A-Team movie first appeared, and—strangely enough—I first noted the use of the word "blog" on Law & Order.

April 2005 - I feel like I was hitting my stride in blogging style. A lot less of the technical posts and more... I don't know, "general" posts? Fun posts? More of a mix of links, ideas, commentary, irony... Not sure if that's the best way to describe them, but here's a sample to judge for yourself:

• Superman is a dick
• Globe
• Sesame Street top 25
• Scrapple
• $40 a day
• Cougar! (and Cougar! The Return and Cougar! Reloaded)
• The Burger King creeps me out (with 673 comments!)
• Things about Bend that I miss

April 2006 - More of the same. I really think it was around 2005 and into 2006 that I found my "voice" and I don't really cringe when I read those and later posts. You can see the seeds of Hack Bend being sown with this post (and I started Hack Bend the following month, in May '06), and this post and this post still make me laugh. A lot.

April 2007 - I blogged a lot less—no kidding, right—but I prefer to think of it as "quality over quantity" in this case. My favorite for that month has to be this post, showcasing just how wonderfully twisted San Diego-area activities can be.

It's been at the back of my mind recently that this month marks six years of blogging for me. I am of course talking about "official" blogging, with the software and reverse-chronology posts and comments and such—naturally I had web pages before 2002 but none of those were blogs.

Six years of blogging. April 22nd, 2002, to be exact, and since then I've spun out two other blogs (which lately have been getting far more attention from me) and written a crazy amount of words—exactly how many will have to be a topic for another post. But I keep thinking that this is some sort of milestone (since I missed the five-year anniversary) and that it should be celebrated somehow.

Shannon's organizing another blogger meetup this month, I believe, so maybe something in conjunction with that.

Thoughts?

On Thursday I was interviewed by Peter Sachs from our local paper the Bulletin for an article on the local blogging community, and today the article showed up—on the front page, no less! Here's the link to the online version.

I didn't get my picture in it this time (unlike the last time, a few years ago, that we bloggers were profiled), but—allow me to gloat a little—I did get the first quote. Which was a total surprise to me; I actually figured I was more incidental this time around, since there were a bunch of other people that were talked to before me.

On a similar note, I was invited by Anna Johnson, Public Communications Coordinator for Deschutes County, to serve on a media panel on blogging and the media late in April. I accepted, and as that approaches, I'll probably have more to say on it.

Fun! Maybe there is something to this blogging thing after all...

Jen posted something along the lines of what I was thinking; first there was National Novel Writing Month, now there's also a National Blog Posting Month, what's next?

Any why are they both for November? Did the NaBloPoMo guys just follow the model too closely?

Okay, enough rhetorical questions. (The answers, by the way, are National [insert meme here] Month, they aped NaNoWriMo, and yes.) For what it's worth, I'm half-seriously considering trying NaNoWriMo (that's the one where you try to write a 50,000-word novel in a month)—I know, I know, I've said this before—but by now everyone should know I'm full of grandiose schemes and ideas, right? Right?

At any rate, blogging every day isn't really that much of a stretch, since I'm more or less doing that already (not here recently, but certainly between my other two blogs). But the novel... you'd have to average 1667 words per day just to meet the 50,000 mark.

(For reference, my longest piece (I think it's my longest) here on chuggnutt.com is this, at about 3500 words, just over twice what that daily average should be.)

Something to chew on. At least the idea's out there in the ether now. And it looks as though Jen will be participating in both—though I like her idea of National Cookbook Writing Month (NaCoWriMo?) in an ironic sort of way...

Jake beat me to the punch on blogging this, but I couldn't resist anyway. I got this comment on my clothesline post the other day:

The rules are the rules. Anyone who doesn't want to live by the rules can go live in the ugly lowlands.

It was signed "Sally Heatherton" and points to the blog "Marvelous Bend!". Intrigued (I mean, would someone really say such a thing?), I checked out the blog and was utterly incredulous for a minute, and then realized that it's a fake. Satire. And it's brilliant! It's freakin' brilliant!

Well, maybe not that brilliant, but it's damn funny. (And sad to say, plausible enough—I actually know someone very much like this.)

Like Jake, I went through searching the web and DIAL and Dex and found nothing.

Almost nothing, that is. It's not an identity or anything like that, but (up until today) the only result I could get for "Sally Heatherton" on Google (quotes included) was a hit on a character in a book: The Barrow Murder by James Huston. Via Google's Book Search (that's good stuff):

I went to the window of a teller I knew at the bank, Sally Heatherton. We had even dated for a short time, until she called our relationship off. "I don't want to get involved with someone who's broke all the time," she announced. "A loser. I want to get married to someone who's a success, who can support me, so I can get the hell out of this teller cage."

I guess the new game around here is "Guess Who Sally Heatherton Really Is."

One more day and I'm off to the Oregon Brewers Festival; like last year, I'm going again with the intent of blogging the experience. (You can read all of my OBF-related stuff on The Brew Site here.)

What's different this year, though, is that I, as a blogger, am also recognized as a media/press person; I contacted the OBF press guy and as a result, I get the full treatment: press kit, program, and all. Now I know most media/press folks (and a few pro bloggers) would be entirely blasé about it, but I have to say—I'm incredibly excited about this! Maybe the shine will wear off at some point, but for now, I just think it's too cool.

I'm also hoping to meet other bloggers and writers, and brewers, and, well, anybody interesting. So I'm trying something new; I'll have my cellphone with me but I don't necessarily want to publish my phone number for the world to see and abuse, so I registered a free phone number and voicemail with PrivatePhone—a service from NetZero that seems promising.

How it works is I get a free private phone number, and all calls to it go directly to voicemail. I can check this voicemail via phone or computer.

So here's the deal; if anyone wants to get a hold of me this weekend, call and leave a message on this number: 360-362-1627. I'll check for messages every hour or so, and call you back.

(Yeah, I couldn't get an Oregon area code. What's up with that?)

I'll also try to be checking email, but that won't be happening til evenings, if I get the chance. So don't rely on that if you want to reach me sooner rather that later.

Off to drink beer and blog about it!

A few link-worthy items that caught my eye but that I can't squeeze a full post out of (yet)...

The Real Oregon: a new(ish) blog subtitled "Oregon for the eccentric traveler." Looks promising, with travel tidbits about Oregon that seem pretty interesting to me.

How a $2 bottle transformed the wine industry: Charles Shaw wine (AKA Two (or Three) Buck Chuck) turns five. Who'd'a thunk it? And for the record, I rather like the wines.

Burst Culture: A bit of brilliance from Warren Ellis that's been making the rounds online. Pretty much ties in with ideas I've been having about the web and blogging, and giving me stuff to think about.

I'm adding up the numbers from my three blogs, and it turns out that between them I wrote approximately 101,192 words among 511 blog entries for 2006. Wow... the previous year the numbers were 78,181 and 466. Another way to look at it: that's roughly the equivalent of a novel a year.

Go and check out today's Pearls Before Swine comic strip. It's the good stuff.

When I said "the first part of my day" in my earlier post today, I really had no idea that actually meant "the entire day." Somehow I always undershoot these estimates with the misplaced optimism... like also thinking I'd only need one load of compost...

In order to topdress the lawn with compost, I had to borrow my dad's truck so I could haul it in bulk (ever tried to cover several thousand square feet of lawn with only bags of fertilizer? Me neither, and I wasn't about to try). My mom had suggested steer manure compost, and most places in town that offer it (always in a mix with "yard debris") were outrageously expensive, so we settled on getting it from Hershey Cattle Company over in Redmond for only $15 per yard. This is actually a 40/60 mix of manure with topsoil or something, but it was still half as costly as the next place.

The catch, of course, to borrowing Dad's truck was that I had to drive out to his place (in Alfalfa) and help him load a couch into the back of the truck, which he'd promised to a co-worker. So out I went at 8:30 in the morning. We loaded up the couch, tied it up, and I followed him back into town.

I helped him deliver the couch, to an apartment complex behind COCC, which of course was on the second floor, up a narrow, cracked concrete staircase. Once that was done, we were back to my place, where Dad took my car back home and left me with the truck. By now it was about 10:30.

Let me digress for a bit about Earth Day, since I did mention it in the title to this post. Today being both the anniversary of this blog and Earth Day, it was of course the perfect day to do Earth-friendly yardwork with (ahem) organic eco-friendly fertilizer. My wife transplanted flowers. I worked out in the sun all day. So it doesn't get any more "Earth Day" than that, despite the goofy guy in a "Cat in the Hat" hat on Z21 yapping about how cool it was that there was some parade downtown to celebrate... how cool the Earth is, or something (hey, his words, not mine). Okay, digression over.

I left around 10:50 or so for Redmond. (I actually had to turn back after two blocks because I forgot my tarp. You didn't think I was going to drive all the way back from Redmond with a truckload of manure and not have it tarped, did you?) Let me just say this about my dad's truck: I know it's been awhile since I had my S-10, but holy crap the clutch on his truck is way looser than mine was and that truck's seen some miles (and it was only a year older than mine). I was about halfway to Redmond before I got used to driving it.

Got to the Hershey place, paid for a yard (which pretty much fills up an S-10 truckbed), and panicked a bit when the guy dumped the load of manure into the truck with the backhoe and I thought for a moment the shocks were going to go. All of a sudden I was driving a rear-wheel low-rider—really low. I wasn't looking forward to the drive home (on busy Highway 97 nearly the whole way). So I tarped up the load, tied it, and was pulling out when I realized another nasty little surprise had crept up on me.

You ever drive a pickup truck when it's fully loaded in back? And by "fully loaded" I mean overloaded? Yeah, besides the obvious (it takes a lot longer to speed up and slow down), the entire front end seems to float around, like you're suddenly piloting a wobbly boat. I hadn't really remembered that little phenomenon since living at home and hauling over-burdened loads of hay. I was less than thrilled.

The drive home was uneventful, though (if a little tense). By the time I got back it was nearly 11:30.

Now, this compost was really good, really soil-like in composition. It still stank like steer manure, but it might as well be topsoil in appearance. I figured it would be easy to spread, because we have this little Turf Builder® spreader with adjustable spray opening, and I could just walk around the yard, pushing the spreader and blithely spraying manure all over the place. So I load it up, and the thing won't work worth a damn. It's just too small for what we're dealing with.

So that meant back to the tried-and-true method for cursing gardeners everywhere: wheelbarrow and shovel, and spreading it by hand.

And of course today was a windy day. Not just breezy, but big wind gusts that would come in and handily blow steer manure dust from the shovel all over the place—in your shoes, on your clothes, in your face and eyes. Very lovely. I think I can still sense the stuff in my nasal cavity. But I got a rhythm going finally, and went back for a second load at about 2:30.

Same routine as before, only I think this load was heavier: piloting a jerky boat down the gusty highway. This load went quicker, thanks to my wife helping, and we even had a couple of wheelbarrow loads left over (now in a pile out by the shed). By the time I'd showered and was sitting down to relax, it was 5:20! Where'd the day go? Oh yeah, I got a bunch of shit done... (rim shot).

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but I'm really getting tired of owning a lawn. I think I'm beginning to hate it, actually. The stupid thing is full of dry and dead patches, there's not enough topsoil underneath the front half (thus necessitating the topdressing), watering is a joke during the summer months (we're on the edge of the High Desert, remember?), and general maintenance of what amounts to a crop of an invasive plant species is wearing very, very thin with me.

And what are lawns good for, anyway? Let's see, sitting on (watch out for bugs)... avoiding dog poo... playing croquet on (if you're British)... lawn darts (try not to kill the opponent)... hmmm. Jeez, when I was growing up, we had very little lawn, and we kids always ran off to play in the dirt and rocks and trees anyway. Go figure.

(Okay, not entirely true; the lawn made a good wrestling ring when we were trying out WWF wrestling moves. But they say kids shouldn't do that nowadays, so...)

Me, I'd be perfectly happy with a little more natural Central Oregon wilderness. But that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.

The rest of my day involved drinking some beer and reading my favorite new book. Now that's the right way to end a day.

And oh yeah, I even sunburned my neck a bit. Now I'm just a red neck hauling manure around in an old truck.

Go figure.

Yes, it was exactly four years ago today that I started this blog. I don't have much to say right now, I just wanted to mark the occasion.

Though I should probably do something special for it. The first part of my day will be hauling manure around, topdressing the yard, so I guess I'll have to come up with something better for later. ;)

I've just gotta give Shannon props for writing up the quote of the year: "i thought it was cool in a blog stalker sort of way." Love it! I am totally going to steal it. :)

Okay, maybe not for the entire year... but I'll give it to her for April, at least.

So, yeah. Go check it out. It's funny.

I see today that the new WordPress.com free blog service went live. It's a hosted setup, just like Blogger. Interesting, so I decided, what the hell, I've got a few minutes before I leave for lunch, so I just set up free blogs on both WordPress and Blogger.

Why? Well, to test out the various services, and see how they work. I've always done the blogging thing from the ground up, writing and maintaining my own software, so I'm curious as to how well the free services work. And it makes me more of an expert in blogging.

Actually, I've used WordPress before, in setting up my mom's blog, so I'm already a bit familiar with it. So far the online service is very similar.

First impressions—WordPress's service is easier to use than Blogger's. Especially for non-techie types; to add links in the sidebar, Blogger requires that you edit the HTML of the site template itself, whereas WordPress gives you their easy link management interface to do so.

Barely has the smoke cleared from my last blogging for money post and there's already another new blog network launching: Instablogs (tagline: "A News Organization based on Blogging"). Apparently this one is based in India, and their aim is to launch 50(!) blogs on October 5th. Seems like a lofty goal. Of the first seven blog teasers they list, the astronomy blog sounds the most interesting.

Well, the "Blogging for Money" meme is rearing its head again. Wired just ran this story which is kind of an overview:

Whether you are Calacanis, Denton or Hauslaib, to create a profitable blog requires much more than a keyboard, an internet connection and too much caffeine. You need a talented writer entertaining enough to hold an audience, a consistent publishing schedule, content worth linking to by other bloggers and worthy of press coverage, marketing savvy to sell advertising or enlist third-party networks and, as a culmination of all of this, plenty of traffic.

Says Hauslaib: "If a blog debuted with virtually zero startup costs, then it takes little to earn a profit. One ad will do it. But at the bare minimum, a lone blogger will likely need to attract high four- to five-figure daily visitor figures to even attempt a blog-based livable wage."

And, there's a new blog network that just launched: b5 media, with 13 or so blogs in the network. Their blogs range from the predictable, well-worn ground of Microsoft, movies and sports, to some more promising, interesting ones, like Literally Blogging (about literature), Unplugged Living (how to live off the grid, which seems ironic to blog about), and She Knows Best (terrible name, IMHO, but "lifestyle tips for guys" which could work).

So, when am I launching my own blog network? Riiiight. :)

Today's hint that blogging is gradually getting mainstream comes from an article in this month's Realtor Magazine titled, "Blogging for profit". It was pointed out to me here at work (since I work for a builder, with real estate agents coming and going). There's nothing new here, it's just another introductory article, though there's an interesting statistic in the print version of the article that doesn't show up online: only 26% of Americans are familiar with blogs. Which means that 74% of Americans haven't heard of blogs (or are unfamiliar with them; I guess this depends on what your definition of "familiar" is). I'd guess that sounds about right.

Busy busy busy weekend, that's why I haven't been posting. And I'm getting hammered at work with things, but I needed to jump on to post this bit, lest I forget again:

There's finally another Bend blogger meetup this week! Wednesday (July 27) at the Farmer's Market downtown, at six o'clock. Basically we'll have a picnic in Drake Park. (Buy your own dinner at the Farmer's Market.) We'll be meeting near the booth selling fish, though Shannon said if anyone gets there late, look for her and an orange blanket. So if you see a group of people sitting by an orange blanket in the park near the Farmer's Market, odds are it's us.

Maybe we could get a roll call in the comments here, so we know who all can make it?

Jeremy Zawodny wonders When will blogging peak? I don't think it will, anytime soon or maybe even at all. Why? Because, like I wrote last month, it ain't even mainstream yet. Plus, it's too compelling. It will likely evolve, but it isn't even close to peaking, if it ever will.

Dave Winer mostly agrees with this assessment, but then writes this:

Blogs with ads, like their print counterparts, strive to be as broad as possible, to reach as many people, and in doing so, lose their value as an ad for the author.

No, I don't think that's true at all. Blogs with ads don't automatically lose their value. I do think blogs that try to be as broad as possible and make money with ads largely won't work; it's the niche blogging that works. Blogs that do this the right way are making money. Otherwise Jason Calacanis' Weblogs, Inc. wouldn't have just made over $2,000 in a single day with AdSense.

You'll note that I have AdSense on both of my blogs (this and The Brew Site). This blog is broad in scope, and has wildly varying ads; if I was relying on it to make money (rather than just running the ads as a nice extra), well, I'd have to keep my day job. The Brew Site, being much more focused/niched, doesn't make as much as this site but does have a higher quality of ads and click rates. If I were to get the kind of traffic there that I get here, I'd see some nice figures, I think.

Finally, in other blog news, Scoble today tries to downplay being a A-list blogger. Get this: "Forget the A-listers. They don't matter anymore. Well, they don't matter as much." Yeah, right. Sorry, but being an A-list blogger is better than ever, period. Doubt it? In the same post, Scoble mentions that he "was talking to Chris Pirillo [another A-list blogger] the other day about the 'long tail' metaphor and while we were flying over mountains in the Boeing plane...." This refers to the fact that himself and several other prominent (A-list) bloggers were invited on an exclusive test flight featuring Boeing's new in-flight WiFi service... they all got flown to Walla Walla for wine. And buzzed some mountains.

Man, don't try to tell me that the A-listers don't matter anymore. Jeez.

Hmm. Anyone else notice the irony of this post? I'm pointing to the A-listers. Must be sour grapes or something.

monkeyinabox: "Are blogs really as mainstream, as some of us thought?"

No. No they're not. That's easy to forget for those of us "on the inside," but blogs really are still a fringe phenomenon.

They're getting there, though. The Journal of Accountancy just ran an article called "Would You, Could You, Should You Blog?" which is a decent introduction to blogs for accountants. Now that's getting mainstream.

But I'm really not. If I'm burning out on anything, it's work and the daily routine of it. As a consequence, blogging takes a backseat and even though I have things I want to write about, when I'm finally at the computer at a point where I can, I just don't have the energy or ambition to do it. Which is ironic, since what I'd really rather be doing is blogging/writing full time instead. But alas, I haven't yet (figured out how to) (gotten to the point where I can) make enough money doing that...

There's a new Bend blog in town: Bend Reality Check, but I don't know how long it will last. I say this because the tagline is, "Mission: to maintain some sort of reality for those who think they are the most important people in Bend, Oregon" and it appears to have been launched primarily to get back at Shannon and Simone for blogging their bad experience at Kanpai. As such it's full of snarky comments about the two of them.

That's too bad, because this sounds like it could be a good insider's blog about the restaurants in Bend:

I am an culinary hermit that lives in the shadows of Bend, Oregon. In a former life I was a culinary mercinary in this town, with 14 years of food slinging under my belt. Titles were bestowed upon me, such as: restaurant manager, production chef, lead saute chef, kitchen manger, etc, but I renouced my titles to walk the earth, like Caine in Kung Fu, only unsheathing my food mojo for special people and occasions.

So I've helped my mom to set up and start a weblog, to be found at DianeAbernathy.com. She's a real estate agent, herbalist, teacher and more, it should make for interesting reading. Go check it out, I'm making the case that a weblog is much better tool for building an online presence and influence than a typical real estate agent's website (for instance).

Incidentally, I set the blog up using WordPress, which I mostly find to be pretty good software. I'd recommend it for anyone who has their own server, it was about the quickest and easiest software to set up that I've ever seen. And so far it works pretty well, too.

This article from the Wall Street Journal online is actually rather remarkable. It compares and fits blogging with mainstream journalism, and is maybe the fairest take on it I've seen.

6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM [main stream media], and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web. [emphasis mine]

There are blogs that carry political and ideological agendas. But everyone is on to them and it's mostly not obnoxious because their agendas are mostly declared.

7. I don't know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pearson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and '40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don't know how Walter Lippmann or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they'd lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them—but, well, too bad. I've been attacked. Too bad. If you can't take it, you shouldn't be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.

Maybe Mark Jen was the tipping point: even CNN has picked up on the "fired for blogging" meme. Read their article here. Kind of a puff piece, but does delve into some First Amendment issues.

But employee and non-employee bloggers don't have the same legal protections.

Workers who rant or rave about bosses online — whether it's done on the company clock or at home — generally don't have a strong defense.

In most states, employees who don't have a contract are considered "at-will," which means they can quit at any time and for any reason. Conversely, employers have the right to fire them at any time and for any reason, except for well-known exceptions like race, age or gender.

So whether a supervisor discovers an underling ridiculing his thinning hair at the company elevator bank, at a local bar after work, or on the worker's personal blog doesn't matter. In either instance, the boss can turn around and say, " 'We don't need you. Why don't you go work for someone else?' " said Margaret Edwards, a partner with Littler Mendelson, a national law firm that represents employers.

Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco employment lawyer, says there's a false sense that employers can't punish their workers for voicing personal opinions — on their blogs or anywhere else. "People mistakenly believe that the First Amendment protects them in the workplace, which is generally not the case," he said.

Gee, it sure seems like the way to quickly get famous online these days is to get fired for blogging.

Fortune magazine has a big article about blogging out (here, via Joi Ito), it's pretty good. There's a few quotes I really liked that I pulled for everyone's enjoyment:

• "If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie" — quote from Steve Hayden of Ogilvy & Mather
• "Yes, for all its democratic trappings, there are hierarchies of influence in the blogging world."
• "E-mail is for old people, says Irving; kids prefer to communicate by phone and IM, and, now, by keeping blogs."
• "Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist's notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened." — quote from Marissa Mayer of Google

Email is for old people? What about if I use email to notify me when I get a blog comment? Hm.

The Google comment about timestamping ideas in blogs in especially interesting; I touched on similar issues and themes nearly a year ago in my RSS as Poor Man's Copyright post. (I don't know how patentable an idea from a blog might be, though.)

At least according to this Newsweek article on the subject:

In order to crack into the upper strata, you have to post frequently to stay on the fickle radar of this ADD-infested crowd. You have to link prodigiously to other blogs, increasing your profile and increasing the chances for inbound links. And you must hold strong opinions about what you're writing about—passion is required in a good blog.

Heh.

Interesting article, if a little odd-sided and basic. More interesting to me is that it's an honest acknowledgement of the dichotomy between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of the blogging world: all too often I've seen many of these same A-listers deny there is any such hierarchy. That's bullshit, of course. I hardly need to point that out. I've never been able to figure out why they do that, though.

And what's up with this?

"If you're into blogs to make money, you're into it for the wrong reasons," says Searls. "Do you ask your back porch what its business plan is?"

Not only does this notion seem quaintly naive, I have to wonder why Doc Searls—of all people, given his background as one of the original Clutrain authors—is dictating the reasons for people to be blogging. Jeez, get off the high horse. If someone's into blogs to make money, that's as legitimate as someone who's blogging their lives for a few family and friends.

(And speaking of Cluetrain, I've got to get this off my chest: I recently read The Cluetrain Manifesto, and while I generally found the core ideas and first couple of essays to be good, mostly it's overrated. Blasphemy! Yes, overrated; one of the things that really bugged me about the last half is that none of it seemed relevant to, well, the real world, and instead just came off as another business book where the rich guys are preaching their brand of success to that percentage of the upper middle class who are office workers for some big corporation.)

Anyway, the article was via Scoble. Let's see if I get some link love! :).

Since the beginning of the year, I set a personal goal for myself to write and publish something on my weblog here at least once a day, and I've actually stuck to it. (Yeah, there's some gaps on the calendar there, but if you look closely, it's because the post didn't get done until something like 12:07 a.m.—so while I didn't technically get it in on the calendar day, I still count it because it was still part of the day I had, before going to bed.) The trick, of course, is coming up with something to write everyday—or rather, as I've been finding, something to write that I have time to do.

(This is the point where other writers, upon hearing my complaint about not having the time to write, scoff and insist that if I truly was a writer, I would make the time. I know. Fair enough.)

I've got several ideas for longer articles that I want to (eventually) write and post, but by the time I'm at the point in my evening where I can sit down to write, it's late and I don't really want to stay up much past midnight most of the time, so what I'm stuck with is trying to come up with shorter items to blog about. And see, that's actually harder for me sometimes than in coming up with longer items to write about. What I could do is start longer articles in draft mode and work on them as time permits, and post them when ready—and I do, sometimes—but that doesn't really mesh with my goal of blogging something everyday.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but it felt like something to get off my chest. I actually spent a good part of my time this evening working on a long article that I'll publish here soon, but since that's not ready for prime time I wanted to get this out of my system, too.

Any other bloggers out there with similar thoughts?