Publishing

Consultants Sue Huffington Post for Stealing Idea

Democratic political consultants Peter Daou and James Boyce have sued the Huffington Post, claiming that Arianna Huffington and other founders took their idea for the site and never compensated or credited them. Daou and Boyce had a lot of planning meetings with Huffington before the 2005 launch of the site, which was originally intended to be a liberal counterpoint to the Drudge Report. They sent Huffington a proposal for a site called fourteensixty.com that pitched features that were later ... (read more)

2011/01/06

Teach Yourself Java While Still at the Bookstore

Out of thousands of comments made about the PAC expenditure story, this one on Balloon Juice is my favorite: Roger Cadenhead, who posted this, is someone who has churned out a large number of computing books, many with titles like Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 24 Hours or Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 21 Days. As a software engineer, these titles make me doubt Cadenhead’s credibility. It might-just-be possible to learn a substantial amount of Java in 21 days (it is a very large language once ... (read more)

2010/04/01

A Daily Kos User By Any Other Name

I posted the story about Jane Hamsher's PAC expenditures on Daily Kos, where it has attracted more than 1,100 comments in six hours. It also earned me a warning from a site administrator because I referred to the real names of two members who post there as Nyceve and Slickerwink: The publication of DKos users' real names here -- if they have not revealed them on this site -- is forbidden. Your use of nyceve's and slinkerwink's real names violated that prohibition. Don't do it again. I wasn't ... (read more)

2010/03/29

New Retort Feature Dies Horrible Death

After banning the same person more than a dozen times from the Drudge Retort, I decided to experiment with a new site feature this afternoon that turned into a failure of epic proportions. I'm documenting it here so that other people who run online communities will avoid making the same mistake. Throughout its history, the Retort has attracted a small number of users who delight in creating a large amount of trouble. They want to prove that no moderation system has ever been devised that can ... (read more)

2010/02/17

Why Leslie Harpold's Sites Disappeared

Leslie had a special kind of magic. But today there's no trace of her sites. As long as those sites were up, her brand of humanity was alive, pure, unedited and quenching. The availability of her writing made her slightly less absent. Sad isn't really an appropriate construct for missing Leslie. And sappy sentimentality wouldn't please her at all. But that writing should remain on the Internet. Those sites should never come down. They belong here like Leslie belonged here. Immortal. -- a ... (read more)

2010/01/08

Dear Derek Powazek: SEO is a Legitimate Profession

I'm a huge fan of the web designer and magazine publisher Derek Powazek, but I couldn't disagree more with his rant that calls all search engine optimization (SEO) a con game: Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned. ... The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn't work, and it's poisoning the web. I tried to respond on his blog, ... (read more)

2009/10/13

Creating a CSS Menu Bar with Listamatic

I'm working on a relaunch of Wargames.Com, the wargaming site that attorney Wade Duchene and I successfully defended from a UDRP arbitration challenge by MGM Studios two years ago. The site began as a wargame store, but sales and traffic weren't enough to justify the aggravation of running an online storefront, so I retreated from ecommerce after 18 months. (I was the entire customer service department. You'd be surprised at the number of people who order from one web site, then call a ... (read more)

2009/02/20

Customizing Apache Directory Listings with .htaccess

I was clearing off my desk today when I found an article I've been meaning to scan and send to somebody -- the story of how my friends almost elected a dalmatian and squirrel to the homecoming court of the University of North Texas in 1989. The alumni magazine wrote a feature on Hector the Eagle Dog and Agnes the Squirrel's campaign, which attracted national media and made a few of the human homecoming candidates very angry. I can never tell when a file's too big to send in email without ... (read more)

2008/11/26

Adding ReCaptcha to a Weblog

I've added a ReCaptcha component to the comment form on Workbench to deter spammers. The ReCaptcha system presents two hard-to-read words that must be typed in successfully for a comment to be saved. Here's what the component looks like: I tried as long as possible to avoid using captchas, but the amount of spam hitting this blog continues to grow, particularly from foreign IP addresses. Workbench has received 16,000 comments and more than 260,000 spam since it began accepting comments in 2002. ... (read more)

2008/08/14

SiteMeter Crashes Internet Explorer with 'Operation Aborted'

Last night several of my web sites, including the Drudge Retort, began crashing Internet Explorer with the error message "Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site ... Operation aborted." I've encountered this error before, and when it occurs out of the blue on a site you haven't changed, the culprit is usually a problem with third-party Javascript code, as CNet's Clientside blog explains: IE does this when you attempt to modify a DOM element before it is closed. This means that if you ... (read more)

2008/08/02

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