chuggnutt.com

I had hinted a while back about a new project I was starting, and I think it's time to launch and announce it. It's a new blog called Hack Bend, and it's purpose is to be an insider's guide to Bend and Central Oregon. (In fact, the tagline I have on it right now is "Getting the most out of Bend and Central Oregon." Original, no?)

There's always a bit of trepidation in announcing something like this, but I'm excited about it. I've got a bunch of ideas and things to write about already, but as I wrote on the About page, "obviously, I can't claim to have all the answers or know everything there is to know about the area." One of the things I'm considering is opening it up to multiple authors, making it a group blog—but that would be down the road sometime. In the meantime, anyone who has any hints, advice, stories, or hacks about the area, please let me know! I'd like to make this a definitive website about Bend, and the more contributions I get, the more likely that'll happen.

So pop on over and check things out, subscribe to the RSS feed, and become a regular contributor. And let me know what you think!

A new local weblog has popped up: Bend Oregon Restaurants. Found it when "BrENDa" (its author) left a couple comments here. Finally! A good restaurant review/guide blog for Bend, by someone who knows what they're talking about.

And you gotta love the honesty in her reviews: read the O'Kane's review or the Bon Bien review to see what I mean. My favorite line: "Bon Bien is Non Bien."

Yep, finally did it: I turned off trackback on this blog and The Brew Site. 99.9% of all traffic I received via trackback was spam, so in the end I decided it's just not worth it. So, just over one year since I turned trackback on, it's gone. It was an interesting experiment, though.

This looks interesting: The Bend, Oregon Celebrity Weblog.

Yep, a new Bend blogger: Rhysently. First saw this today show up linking to me in Technorati, and ORblogs has it listed as a new addition tonight. Only two entries so far, but I found them quotable:

Anybody who doesn't live in Central Oregon is a sucker. This is the most amazing, beautiful place on earth. I'm never leaving, ever. It's so unbelievable that this place and someplace like Florida—that miserable swampy armpit with the most roaches and serial killers than any other place in the world—could exist on the same planet, let alone the same country.

And:

I paused to reflect on something that deeply bothered me in the past: the NASCAR fried chicken bucket series....

What kind of white trash CEO thought this one up? And let me tell you, I'm not using that term loosely. I grew up in a town with 23 bars and no library. I lived in a trailer for part of my youth. I have relatives with more tattoos than teeth. I KNOW from white trash, okay? And still, I can't think of anyone tacky enough—not even my mulleted cousin Dwayne who's spent more than half his life in jail and gets conjugal visits from a beer-swilling hottie who can braid her own armpit hair—to actually SAVE THEIR NASTY GREASY CHICKEN BUCKET. Arggh. Seriously, do you display them on the mantel, or what?

Okay, we seriously need to have another blogger meetup and get all these new bloggers to come.

I'll post about the Bend SummerFest tomorrow I think, but I just wanted to get something out there tonight, and I note that ORblogs is reporting another Bend weblog: under the ponderosas. Right on.

Forgot to mention this when I saw it the other day, but there appears to be another blogger here in Bend: e n | x | e n d u b. Did anyone else catch this?

Either way, welcome!

Well, I posted too soon. Tonight's blogger get-together has been cancelled, too many people had something come up. Hopefully we can convene next week or something.

Unless plans changed when I wasn't looking, the Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together again tomorrow, Tuesday the 8th. It's at the Cascade Lakes Brewery Lodge (upstairs!) on Bend's westside, starting at 7pm. I don't know yet if I'll make it, but I know a bunch of the others will. Cheers!

Found on ORBlogs: The Grumpy Forester, a new Bend blog. Well, Lapine, I guess, but that's okay. And "new" is relative, the archive go back to January 22 of last year. But it's new to me! Welcome!

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.)

Now this is interesting... Robert Scoble announces he's writing a book on blogging... all on a blog. Well, to be fair, he's co-writing it, but his plans are, write the book online, on a blog, and then sell the publishing rights on ebay. Wow.

Q: Why should I buy the book if the entire thing is going to be done online?

A: Easy. You shouldn't. But you should tell your friends to buy it. We're figuring that for every blog reader there are three friends out there who don't know anything about blogs and don't want to read a book on a computer screen. So, if we give away 100,000 copies (not an unreasonable number because we had more that many show up on Channel 9 in just the first two days in business and Firefox has given away, what, seven million copies of Firefox so far in just a few weeks) that we'll get a few sales from your friends. So, the people who help us write the book and hype it up get it for free, but their friends have to pay. Plus, if the book is actually good maybe some of you will want it on your bookshelves to show you support good stuff.

Some more on trackbacks. To my mind, they are simply another form of comment, so that's exactly how I'm treating them. You won't see a special "Trackback" down there next to the "Comments" link. Instead, they'll just be integrated with the comments in chronological order.

I think I saw Sam Ruby doing this first, and it makes much more sense to me to treat trackbacks this way.

I've finally bitten the bullet and implemented Trackback here—well, half of it, anyway. My site should now be able to handle Trackback pings from other sites. I even implemented the RDF autodiscovery crap, but added a bonus: a new meta tag like so:

<meta name="trackback.ping" content="Trackback URL for a particular entry">

So maybe I can influence client software development in some small way with this.

I haven't implemented outgoing Trackback pings yet—i.e., me pinging others' sites when I link to them. I'll get around to it at some point.

So I observe over on Ensight that Jeremy has basically sold his blog for something in the neighborhood of $15,000 (Canadian or USD?), and still got a sweetheart deal:

I am effectively considering bidding closed. I have a deal on the table. It's substantial, is from a longtime Ensight reader, allows me to keep editorial control and turns me into a paid blogger.

Right on! It's the blogging brass ring. I've been thinking lately of ways to make money doing this whole blogging/"nanopublishing" thing, and in addition to this highly apropos example, I've been poking around the Weblogs, Inc. sites to get a feel for what they're doing and how.

I'm not necessarily talking about writing in general—that's a whole different topic that I will actually address sometime soon—but rather how to leverage some of these trends and technologies in weblogs toward money. It seems to me that if you can't get someone to pay you to blog, then the best bet is to bootstrap yourself via advertising (Google's AdSense and/or other?), like what the Weblogs, Inc. guys (and guys like Nick Denton) are doing. And perhaps via the "tip jar" method: accepting PayPal donations and the like. And of course this doesn't even address RSS...

Not to say I'm ready to give up blogging if I can't make money at it; I'm not, of course, there's too much of the writing bug in me. But I've got some ideas in mind and I'm wondering, can it be done?

Thoughts?

The variety is amazing: here's a list of various agents, spiders and bots that I've culled from my chuggnutt.com logfiles over the last 30 days that have to do with RSS and/or blogs (specifically blogs, not just general purpose spiders like Google's). These are only the ones I know for sure are blog or RSS related; others in my logs might be also, but aren't obvious about it.

Geek types, note that these strings (with wildcards mostly) can be used as-is when identifying HTTP_USER_AGENT.

• Bloglines: The web-based feed reader/aggregator
• kinjabot: The (currently) beta bot for the Kinja weblog directory/guide
• Feedreader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• PubSub.com RSS reader: Another searchable, web-based aggregator
• FeedDemon: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• fastbuzz.com: Fastbuzz News is another web-based aggregator that scans news and blogs
• ORblogs.com-bot and ORblogs-bot: The crawlers for ORBlogs which compile metadata and RSS for the aggregating site
• SharpReader: Windows-based feed reader/aggregator
• Technoratibot: Technorati's crawler
• UniversalFeedParser: Mark Pilgrim's liberal feed parser which is used in a variety of RSS software
• Feedster Crawler: Feedster's RSS spider
• BlogBot: I think this is Blogdex's crawler, but I'm not totally sure
• BlogPulse: Yet another blog/RSS crawler and indexer
• Slower, Friendlier Spiders (BlogShares V1.35): The spider for BlogShares, the fantasy share market for blogs
• NITLE Blog Spider: The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education's spider for their blog census
• LocalfeedsPageCrawler
• NusEyeFeedCrawler

It was (another) small get-together tonight, with only myself, Simone and Dane. Lot of fun, though. And the Cascade Lakes Brewing Company's westside lodge just rocks! Upstairs is the game room, with a couple of pool tables, real dartboards, and... Donkey Kong.

Oh yeah, you know we were playin' that.

Notice for the next Bend blogging get-together: Wednesday, September 8^th starting at six o'clock at the Cascade Lakes Brewing Company in Bend. That's on the westside, just off the Chandler/Colorado roundabout.

All the usual suspects will be there. And let's mix it up a little! New bloggers and out-of-town bloggers, come on down too!

Fun evening at Timbers South with the other bloggers. Let's see, who else showed up... Jake, Dane, Jesse and his wife, and Barney. Simone, who suggested Timbers in the first place, never made it.

Some takeaways:

Jake is a pool shark, man, he ran the table. Never shoot stick with him. Ever.

(Well, okay, so I won the two games we played. That doesn't mean he's not a pool shark. Supposedly. Or something.)

Dane actually brought half a carton of eggs (expired in May) and a street sign, just as he promised he would on his blog. I guess I just have to learn to take everything he says at face value...

Jesse knows way, way too much about fonts and typefaces.

And finally, just three words:

Chicken Gizzard Blizzard™.

Yes, announcing another exciting Local Blogger Social! Wednesday, August 11th, we'll all be meeting at Timbers South in Bend, starting at 6pm.

Timbers South is located at 61131 S. Highway 97.

See you there!

Tonight's local blogger meetup was a lot of fun, but only 3 of us showed up! (To be fair, Jesse did show up around 8:20, just as we were leaving.) Myself, Shannon and Simone made it to the Bend Brewing Company and had a good time. The funniest part, which I forgot until I got online just now, was the Nebraska State Quarter Designs riff. Let's just say letting the public design the state quarters might not be the best idea...

I keep seeing references to a new Oregon-related group blog called "BlueOregon," purporting to reside at the domain name www.blueoregon.com. However, every time I try this domain, I get a "Future home of a domain" page—i.e., the domain name has been registered, but it's parked on a generic landing page. (Even ORBlogs is showing content from it.) Is this a joke? Really bad DNS/proxy/caching/something configuration on BendBroadband's part? What's the deal?

Public service announcement: The Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together tomorrow (Wednesday, July 21) at six o'clock at the Bend Brewing Company. I'll be there, and I know a few more of us will be, too. See you there!

So, what's even geekier than meeting up with a bunch of fellow bloggers? Well, blogging about it, of course! So, here's my summary of our Bend Bloggers meetup tonight.

Nine of us showed up, which was pretty impressive. In no particular order, they were: me; Shannon of There's Always Something; Jake of UtterlyBoring; Jesse of Bring Back the 80's!; Barney of Bend.com; Roger of High Desert Skeptic; Simone of On the Bright Side...; Dane of Brainside Out; and Kerry of Bend Buzz.

I had a good time; it was cool to put the faces to the sites. Though I gotta say, I was nervous enough at first and was sitting in just enough sun to warm up and start sweating like a pig for a while, which, you know, is just great for impressing people you meet for the first time. Yikes. Sorry, guys.

When someone asked how everyone got into blogging, I gave the entirely lame (but mostly true) answer of, "It sort of just happened." Which is true, but sucks as an answer and could definitely be fleshed out. Sometime soon I'll give a whole history, both to how I got started blogging and where "Chuggnutt" comes from.

And as to a couple of conversations that got left unfinished:

Shannon: McMenamins is known for buying up older, historic sites and turning them into brewpubs, bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, etc. The Kennedy School in Portland is a good example, which has a brewpub (or two), a restaurant, bed-and-breakfast (old classrooms are the rooms), a cigar bar, a liquor bar, a movie theater, and more I think. The Edgefield is similar. And they're buying (have bought?) the Old St. Francis School here in Bend and are supposed to be opening it up this fall (although they've said that the past 3 years).

Roger: Now that I've thought about it, it seems like I recognize you from somewhere as well. Hmmm...

Dane: Well, no actual unfinished conversation that I recall. I just had to say, Damn! You are animated, dude.

Reminder: the first Bend Blogger meetup is tonight, May 12, at 7:30pm at the Bend Brewing Company downtown. If you're a blogger and in Bend tonight, come on by.

BBC's address:

1019 NW Brooks St.
Bend, OR 97701

And here's the Yahoo map to Bend Brewing.

Well, it's official, there's gonna be a Bend blogger meetup on Wednesday, May 12, at 7:30pm at the Bend Brewing Company. Jake blogged it here, and there's even a Bend.com press release on it here. All are welcome, the more the merrier.

The funny thing about this is, my wife saw the press release on Bend.com and knew about it before I did. Aren't I supposed the one who's plugged into this stuff?

Notable: Weblogs mentioned in the Oregon Voter's Pamphlet. Definitely milestone-worthy. The interesting thing to note is not that "blogging" is referred to in print, but that it is mailed to every home in Oregon. That's impact.

Over on Jake's site on a roundup of all the known Bend bloggers, the topic has come up in the comments on having a local blogger meetup. Time and place to be decided. I'd vote for one of the breweries.

Any interest?

Notable: Tonight's episode of Law & Order: SVU marks the first time I've heard the term "blog" used on a TV show. Not just used, it was central to the plot.

Inspired by Tim Bray:

From We Interrupt This Broadcast by Joe Garner:

The Potsdam communique arrived in Japan on July 27.

Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions, and point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

Some things I found interesting this morning.

Via Technorati I found a link to my site from eugene.com's blog of the day archive; apparently my site was their blog of the day on November 16 last year. Neat!

And from ORblogs I found a new blog from Portland: the Kenilworth-Abernathy neighborhood blog. Not only does it center on that cool patch of southeast Portland that we like to visit (my brother, when he lived in Portland, always lived southeast, and my bestest friend lives there), but it has "Abernathy" in the name. I never knew one of the neighborhoods in Portland was named "Abernathy." Worth further investigating.

Just wanted to give a few plugs and props to one of the better weblog-related sites out there, Oregon Blogs.

I thought about trying to describe what it does, but the best I could come up with is that it's equal parts RSS aggregator, group blog, and weblog directory rolled into one; really, the way to find out about ORBlogs is to just visit it. It's one of the more solid, useful and innovative blogging apps I've seen (even if it is written in ASP! :) ), and continues to surprise me with new features; for instance, clicking on the "info" link for a blog reveals a detail-rich page devoted to that site, including a snapshot of what the site looks like, state and city-scale maps showing where the blog lives, metatag data gleaned from the HTML source (much of it clickable), and the most recent blog posts.

Definitely a great site. Worth looking at even if you're not from Oregon.

Add to that ever-so-slightly growing list of Bend (Oregon) webloggers: Brainside Out. Excellent.