Publishing
Getting a Read on My Readers
People who have read Workbench for a while are probably wondering whether this has become a political weblog. My site has always emphasized what I'm working on at the moment, and I'm currently developing the LAMP web application that runs the Drudge Retort and serving as an unofficial geek advisor to the Alan Colmes Radio Show. As a consequence, I've been eating, breathing, and sleeping politics for weeks. I may be taking it too far; I dreamed about Michelle Malkin last night, and all we did ... (read more)Wikipedia's a Sticky Wicket
The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article on Wikipedia are disputed. The Los Angeles Times gave up its wikitorial experiment after three days. Someone got their goat by adding one of the web's most infamous gross-out photos to the site. Jeff Jarvis defends the honor of wikis, blaming the Times: They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its ... (read more)President Clinton on Alan Colmes Tonight
I picked a good time to become new best friends with Alan Colmes. He scored an interview with President Clinton that airs this evening on his syndicated radio show, which broadcasts live from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern. I've borrowed Matt Drudge's siren, because I have some advance details about the interview. From excerpts that I wheedled out of a Fox News publicist, they discuss Hillary Clinton's political ambitions, his lingering sentiments about impeachment, and whether he would accept the ... (read more)Keeping Computer Books Up-to-Date
Charles Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald: With the number of blogs increasing at a phenomenal rate, more people than ever will find themselves dealing with the market-leading Movable Type. The Movable Type 3 Bible, from Wiley, gives you a thorough grounding in the complexities of a blogging platform that, on the surface, looks relatively easy to master but repays the effort required to learn about its more powerful features. Increasingly, these books are rendered somewhat out of date with ... (read more)Googlemilk: And Then They All Blamed Me
Alex Pareene, who describes googlemilking as "thinking of a great setup, and letting the internets provide the punchline," offers this contribution to the game: "and then they all blamed me." The phrase reveals scapegoated sex club workers, abuse survivors, drug addicts, and a Canadian who blogs about flatulence: i guess all this talk of gas has had its effect on me. last night i had two dreams and in each one i 'let one go' while i was around other people and they all blamed me and i denied ... (read more)I Heart Alan Colmes
I've been exchanging e-mail lately with Alan Colmes (namedrop!), the cohost of Hannity & Colmes and his own nightly radio show. This isn't payola; I'm doing this as an expression of love. As a huge fan of talk radio I've wanted to adopt a liberal show on the Drudge Retort, inspired by Matt Drudge's relentless self-promotion of his Sunday night show. Every night as Colmes airs, the Retort will post live links to upcoming guests and a place to talk about them. I don't know how this experiment ... (read more)2005/06/16Robot Behaving Badly
Before I can run Urchin to track web traffic, the Apache script split-logfile creates log files for each virtual domain on my server. A bad request from a webcrawling robot breaks split-logfile: www.drudge.com//retort.shtml 65.19.150.252 - - [13/Jun/2005:03:50:15 -0400] "GET //retort.shtml HTTP/1.1" 400 323 "http://www.drudge.com//" "OmniExplorer_Bot/1.07 (+http://www.omni-explorer.com) Internet Categorizer" The error's in the first field: OmniExplorer_Bot should be requesting the page from the ... (read more)
Movable Gripe
A review: What is the Last Book You Bought? The Movable Type 3 Bible by Rogers Cadenhead -- singularly the most useless reference book I've ever bought. I've learned one thing. One measly thing. Put this on your "do not buy" list. Potential cover blurb for the next edition: "singularly the most ... I've learned." ... (read more)Teaching Kids to Leapfrog a Jackass
I've been ending each day by reading a chapter of The Great Brain to my sons, the first book in a series by John D. Fitzgerald that I devoured as a child. The books, which detail life for three Catholic brothers in a Mormon town in 1890s Utah, describe a time when children weren't raised like bubble boys (my preferred technique). They explore caves, test their mettle with fistfights under rough and tumble lumberjack rules, and do demented things like this: "We are playing Jackass Leapfrog," ... (read more)Master of Their Domain
Internet pornographers got lucky with ICANN and will receive their own top-level domain. A Florida domain registry and the International Foundation for Internet Responsibility, the groups that requested the domain, will devote .xxx explicitly to sexual content, making it easier for Internet users to avoid such sites entirely or dive headfirst into the fleshy sea of sin: ICM and IFFOR selected .xxx as the sole string for this application based upon its high ranking in the aforementioned ... (read more)
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