rsync wget crontab is all comming together

Coooooooooool!

Demonstrating Support for The Bill of Rights.

I ran into Eric Niederkruger at our favorite coffee house Higher Grounds, we discussed the gjActive project for about an hour. Then Eric said that he was heading over to a demonstration by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. I decided to join him. About 15 of us spent the lunch hour standing along side walk of North Avenue next to Mesa College. This is one of the highest traffic areas in Grand Junction. We had 10 placards for each of the amendments that make up our Bill of Rights. I got the hold the Second Admendment - the Right to Bear Arms.

During the hour, I suspect that we waved our placards at nearly a 1000 vehicles. Not one of the people who passed us expressed any hostility. Perhaps 90% of them showed total apathy, but 10% who expressed positive support were very enthusiastic.

While I stood there a young man on a bicycle came by, asked if we were protesting against the War in Iraq. I explained that we are only making a statement in support of the Bill of Rights. He said that the is from Hungry and is traveling around America this year. He has had a hard time understanding the real world practice of American Democracy. Why aren't more people active?

Oh, and thanks to Jimmy Mayfield for the nice picture! By the way, Jimmy sent along this WMD 404 link.

pyBlosxom day 4

I know many of my friends feel very let down by the inconsistent nature of my blog entries of late.

My new pyBlosxom web software is coming along very nicely. The server side software is working nearly perfectly, and now I am focusing on improving the workflow to make it very easy to write stories and update the site.

Right now I am testing my rsync setup to automatically update the web server with my new blog entries with a minimal of fuss.

New Blog

Well, the big move was finally made. I am now using pyBlosxom to run this blog. I have been working on this on and off since last Feburary. The transisition has been and will continue be a little rocky. Most notable, is the fact that blog entries have been less frequent in the past week.

Alas, I still have to deal with problems with how the blog entries are dated. Until I have this resolved, you may see some blog entries that are a bit out of order and have the wrong dates. I know what I have to do, but it will take a little while to fix this.

But I have every expectation that this transistion will be worth it:

• No more lost blog entries!
• Much easier to use the writing tools that I prefer: BBEdit, OmniOutliner
• pyBlosxom is open source (Free as in Speech, not as in Beer).
• Coded in the python language so I can much more easily add features.
• pyBloxom runs as a program on my webserver, so it can be much more interactive.

This is going to be very cool.

pyBlosxom day 1

Well the new site design is nearly done and the conversion to pyBlosxom has gone smoothly. Several new features like the category listing on located on the right have been added. Still allot of design tweaks to do.

The two big items are determining the best way to keep dates of articles in sync, and too spend some more time thinking about my new catagories which are currently rather haphazard.

Hmm, site not up dating?

What is up with my blog software?

Were is Saturday?

Hmm, I seem to have lost my Saturday postings.....

Slow Blog updates ??

Hmmm, I have entered new stuff to my blog, but it is not on my public web site.

Thinking about new names

Having just named my new PowerBook G4, I am now considering the name of my blog. Lee Joramo's Political Margin has never fit perfectly. Careful readers of my blog will know that "Political Margin" was the name of my weekly column when I was the opinion page editor of the College of the Sequoia's student run paper. This column ran for a year and I covered issues such as failure of the simplistic two dimensional "Left-Right" political spectrum, the lack of curtesy in feminism, raising the 55mph speed limit, and legalizing recreational drugs.

So when I was considering a name for this blog, I did think of my old by line. I think that "Politcal Margin" is a good name for part of my blog, but I am increasingly feeling that a better name is needed for the site as a whole.

"blogs don't always lead with the news, but they reliably make it personal."

Doc Searls points out that blogs are about giving us connection to news events in ways that were once impossible. Doc points us to David Pinto's Baseball Musings. From his pages you will see that David was an ESPN baseball statistics researcher for 10 years, and he deeply loves baseball.

But today David also has a personal story to tell. About a connection to one of the astronauts who died on Columbia. Of how he saw the Columbia take off in person and watched NASA TV for its return.

Old news sources would either be unable to learn of David's story, or they would heavily filter it. Here we have blogging at its best.

How to blog

Yesterday, I showed Christella how my blog system works. She was amazed at how easy it is. "I could do that!", she exclaimed.

Well yes it is easy. I hope that more of my friends will start blogging. Maybe, I need to setup a blog server for my friends.

Hello?

Will this work? Yes! Maybe

Blogging as Life path finding

Doc Searls has some good advise about using a blog.