Archive for February, 2008

Watch out bloggers and web publishers. Don’t do anything too controversial or you may find your site shuttered by the law. In a very strange and clearly tech illiterate move, a California judge ordered the removal of the domain name for a web site (Wikileaks.org) that publishes leaked documents posted anonymously by people around the world. It’s a lame move because the site is still accessible at its IP address ( http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks ).

Apparently, some heavy legal help is on the way for Wikileaks as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Northern California plan to intervene on behalf of the site and its owners.

Update: The federal district court judge who order the domain name removal has himself removed his removal order. “Judge Jeffrey White cited concerns about the First Amendment, the effectiveness of disabling the wikileaks.org domain name, and the court’s own jurisdiction over the case as reasons to dissolve his previous orders.”

Yay!

Technorati Tags: aclu, censorship, eff, wikileaks

It’s been a long road, but a couple weeks ago we got the OK to launch the new Adventure’s Edge web site. We’re pretty proud of this project because of the various tools we either built or incorporated in to the site.

We’re quite proud of the design. It’s simple and straightforward, but with the Flash on the home page and some dynamic tools, it’s a vast improvement over their old site.

We used our own in-house content management system for most of the site. But we integrated Wordpress in to the design as a blogging tool. Not only has the design been integrated, but we also made recent blog post titles availabe on the home page and on the various department pages.

We also built a tool to highlight all the brands they sell, and when they get their new online store up and running, the brand names will link directly to the store categories for those manufacturers.

BTW, Adventure’s Edge is now under new ownership with some new people helping to run the show and they seem very enthusiastic about making the site useful and effective for their customers.

Technorati Tags: adventure, arcata, open source, web development, wordpress

I’ve spent a lot of time reading and studying the esoteric arts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the voodoo that seems to make some web sites come up at the top of the lists at Google or Yahoo when people search on certain combinations of words. I long ago came to the conclusion that the real secret is actually rather simple: have good content and get a lot of incoming links to your site. But some folks like to make it a mysterious and complicated process. Mainly, I think, so they can charge a ton of money for not doing much. I’ve written before trying to make the process simple and fairly straightforward. But  this cartoon sums it up really well.

Not long ago a client whose site we had built called and asked if we could get them to come up on the first page in Google for a certain phrase. Seems they’d attended a workshop and the workshop leader had typed in the phrase, which, on the surface sounded like an obvious term for someone looking for this kind of a company. It included the word Eureka so they were localizing the search. None of the local companies in this industry came up on the first page. I looked at this client’s site and sure enough, the word Eureka was not mentioned. In ten minutes I added the word Eureka to the title tag and built a header on the home page that included the phrase. The change didn’t appreciably alter the content of the page and wouldn’t confuse or distract a human user. Within a week, the company’s web site came up number one on Google for that phrase. It’s still there. Oooh! Magic!

Now, of course, no work was done to see if this was a phrase that people actually use to find insurance brokers in Eureka. Nor was any follow up done to see if incorporating this phrase actually increased traffic to their site, and if so, did they sell more insurance as a result. These things, too, are not that hard to discover. Perhaps another day…

Technorati Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimication, seo

In spite of the what seems like huge sucking sounds coming from massive server farms and data centers soaking up electricity it appears, according to a new study, that the “net” affect of the growth of the Internet is a savings in energy usage.

“Indeed, all America’s servers – the computers that direct traffic on the Internet – and the systems that cool them use about 1.2 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to a study last year.”

“But it turns out that for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used by information and communications technologies, the US saves at least 10 times that amount, the new ACEEE report found.”

Good news! One more reason to invest in improved broadband infrastructure. Doing so will help energy efficiency thus reduce our impact on global warming and reduce our dependency on imported oil. Let the bit torrents begin!

Technorati Tags: energy, global warming, internet, oil

When the Governor’s Broadband Task Force released its report (PDF) a couple weeks ago there was some optimism and excitement that practical steps would be taken to advance the broadband infrastructure in the state particularly in rural and under served areas. Some of us believe that government needs to take the lead as clearly the free market is failing us as we fall further behind the rest of the world.

But the Eureka Reporter managed to find someone who thinks otherwise. In an opinion piece by Daniel Ballon of the Pacific Research Institute, the report’s recommendations a likened to Senator Ted Stevens’ (R - Alaska) boondogle bridge to nowhere. The Pacific Research Institute appears to be a think tank with a mission to”…champion freedom, opportunity, and personal responsibility for all individuals by advancing free-market policy solutions.”

While Mr. Ballon makes some interesting arguments, his conclusions make little sense. In the face of the Broadband Task Force’s conclusions and all evidence he claims “Only in the absence of government interference can the state achieve service that is both universal and competitive.” If this were true, why does the U.S. keep falling behind countries where governments have realized that public investment is necessary to advance deployment, boost speeds and keep prices reasonable for the very individuals the Pacific Research Institute purports to support?

Technorati Tags: broadband, daniel ballon, free market, pacific research institute, task force

After about a year and a half of struggle we finally unveiled the third version of the Prosperity! Network’s new web site. The saga of this project is a good example of design by committee that is the death of many projects and results in cost overruns on many others. In spite of some valiant efforts to define the goals and features of the site from the beginning, the project kept morphing. There literally was a committee behind the effort, but the make-up of the committee changed from meeting to meeting. Eventually, the county hired someone (Angie Schwab) dedicated to get the project done and that is what she did.

Our role has been to try and advise the Prosperity folks on what can and can’t be done within the project’s budget and to find the best technology to implement what they finally decided on for the site. Early on we chose to build the site using the Drupal platform. At one point, though, during the murkiest time in the development process we suggested abandoning Drupal for something simpler. But the decision was made to go forward with Drupal and for now, that seems to have worked out.

Sometimes working with Drupal is like trying to solve a Rubick’s cube puzzle. One move affects all the other squares and their relationships. So, you might start down a path thinking you are making all the right moves. But then a new feature request comes in, you install a new module and that module doesn’t play nice with something else you’ve installed. Fun. Still, Drupal is the most feature rich, flexible platform we have found in the open source world. I think Drupal will serve them for some time.

Technorati Tags: drupal, humboldt county, prosperity. economic development

Coming a little late with today being Super Tuesday, but InfoWorld has an article breifly reviewing the remaining (well not Ron Paul, but the comments on the article make up for it I guess) Presidential candidate’s views on major tech issues.

Not surprising to me the Democrats have actual policy statements on various topics. Both Clinton and Obama (PDF) are in favor of Net Neutrality and extending broadband services.

It appears the Republican candidates have more or less avoided dealing with the subject in any comprehensive way.

Technorati Tags: barck obama, hillary clinton, net neutrality, politics