Hosting Unlimited Blogs with TypePad Premium
Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter and one of the pioneers of blogging, recently moved his self-hosted personal blog to TypePad:
I really like Typepad and though I'm giving up things like custom .htaccess redirects for old posts and my old permalink URLs, I'm gaining things like the easiest to use posting UI available and most importantly, I'll never need to update any software by hand ever again.
It's been a long, frustrating week with several days spent trying to move off Wordpress (I was tired of my weblog app chiding me for upgrades every two weeks) followed by several days trying to get MT to work followed by brief experiments with Textpattern followed by giving up and finishing here.
I made the same journey, installing several weblog publishing programs on my server before throwing in the towel because of frequent security and feature updates. I finally decided last year to buy a $299 yearly subscription to TypePad that gives me unlimited hosted blogs, each of which can be published at its own domain, use guest authors, and employ advanced templates.
I'm still publishing Workbench with software that I wrote, but all new sites that I create begin as TypePad blogs. I love being able to turn an idea into a web site in five minutes, particularly when I'm creating sites with other people. Now, when I pester somebody I know to begin a blog, I fire up TypePad and create one for them to show how easy it is.
So far, I've only run into one area where using TypePad was problematic. The service makes it easy to incorporate content from other sites on a blog using widgets, but I couldn't find a widget for adding Google AdSense or any other ads to a blog. I had to put the ad code in a TypeList and give the list an empty title containing nothing but space characters (" ").
This workaround is awkward, because you end up with a bunch of no-title TypeLists containing ad code for different blogs. Finding the code later, when changes need to be made, will be an enormous pain in the ass.
Six Apart has been extremely responsive to new developments in blogging, adding new features to TypePad as they become popular in other publishing tools. It was one of the first companies to adopt the recommendations of the RSS Profile, such as including an atom:link element to identify a feed's URL.
Michelle Malkin, Commercial Good
I just noticed today that Michelle Malkin is a registered trademark:
Word Mark: MICHELLE MALKIN
Goods and Services: IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Online journals, namely, blogs featuring commentaries, opinions and original reporting about news and current events. FIRST USE: 20040608. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20040608
Standard Characters Claimed
Mark Drawing Code: (4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK
Serial Number: 78716788
Filing Date: September 20, 2005
Current Filing Basis: 1A
Original Filing Basis: 1A
Published for Opposition: September 19, 2006
Registration Number: 3180093
Registration Date: December 5, 2006
Owner: (REGISTRANT) MALKIN, MICHELLE INDIVIDUAL UNITED STATES C/O KENYON & KENYON 1500 K STREET, NW - SUITE 700 WASHINGTON D.C. 200051257
Assignment Recorded: ASSIGNMENT RECORDED
Attorney of Record: David Zibelli
Type of Mark: SERVICE MARK
Register: PRINCIPAL
Live/Dead Indicator: LIVE
I have the strongest urge to use Michelle Malkin inappropriately.
McCain's Attacks Missed Target in Third Debate
During Wednesday night's third and final presidential debate, the former fighter pilot John McCain proved that he doesn't know how to land an attack. Whether due to discomfort or ineptitude, McCain brought up ACORN and William Ayers in a way that had to be utterly baffling to people who don't follow politics closely.
Picking up a week-long Republican campaign against the voter-registration organization ACORN, McCain said this during the debate:
We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy. The same front outfit organization that your campaign gave $832,000 for "lighting and site selection." So all of these things need to be examined, of course.
That's the entirety of what McCain said about ACORN. Though it sounds bad, the attack is less credible because McCain skimps on details. ACORN, which wasn't even an issue a week ago, now threatens to destroy democracy's fabric -- we must elect McCain to be democracy's seamstress!
Because McCain was so short on specifics, Obama stepped in and explained the ACORN controversy to the debate's audience in a manner that's likely to retire the issue entirely. "ACORN is a community organization," Obama said. "Apparently what they've done is they were paying people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people who were out there didn't really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names. It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved."
McCain's reference to "lighting and site selection" was so obscure that I only could find one reporter who tried to explain it in his debate story. Paul West of the Baltimore Sun wrote:
[Obama] did not respond to McCain's charge about $832,000 that Obama's campaign spent during the primaries for what it says were canvassing activities.
The Obama campaign originally had said the expense included "lighting and site selection," as McCain pointed out, then later filed an amended spending report.
The $832,000 was paid not to ACORN but to Citizen Services, a campaign services firm affiliated with ACORN, according to an August Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article. The firm, which collected signatures and managed past minimum-wage ballot campaigns in four states, was paid by the Obama campaign for work conducted during the primaries from February through May. The campaign amended its FEC filing to indicate the payment was for "get-out-the-vote" efforts.
Though the relationship is worth examination because that's a large campaign expenditure, no evidence has been uncovered to suggest anything improper occured. A Democratic politician hired a political firm affiliated with the largest voter registration organization on the left. I've read several right-wing bloggers who allege that Obama's campaign tried to hide an attempt to pay ACORN by hiring Citizen Services, but their affiliation has never been a secret. A 2006 ACORN publication described the firm as "ACORN's campaign services entity."
McCain did little better with details on Ayers, claiming that he's a "washed-up terrorist" who launched Obama's first run for political office in his living room and said in 2001 he wished he had "bombed more." McCain also said that together the two men "sent $230,000 to ACORN."
Republican partisans have believed for months that Ayers was a relationship so toxic that any attempt by Obama to explain it would just make him look worse. But as Obama explained accurately last night, Ayers was an education professor respected by Chicago's political establishment by the time he met him in the '90s. Republicans and Democrats alike served with him on boards and funded his educational initiatives.
Because McCain gave the shorthand version of the Ayers controversy, Obama filled in the details for him:
Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan's former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.
Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of The Chicago Tribune, a Republican-leaning newspaper.
Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House.
Ayers did some loathsome things 40 years ago and continues to hold obnoxious views about his actions, but he was never convicted of a crime -- prosecutorial misconduct hindered the effort. He used that opportunity to rehabilitate himself and carry on a distinguished career in education. Anyone who finds it unacceptable that he was welcomed into Chicago political circles should explain the post-crime treatment of G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, who continue to be heroes to the right.
If politics is about defining somebody before they define you, McCain's clumsy attacks on ACORN and Ayers just gave Obama the opportunity to address them in his most favorable light. Voters think those subjects are distractions from the economic mess. The days the McCain campaign spent on them have left him with a double-digit deficit in most polls and a 1-in-20 chance to win, according to the poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight.Com.
During the debate, all McCain got out of the attacks was the sour response of CNN's independent voters. Every time he mentioned Ayers or ACORN, their opinion plummeted faster than the Dow.
Update: Right-winger John Podhoretz and I are brothers by another mother: "the shorthand in which McCain spoke about these matters made them comprehensible only to those of us who are already schooled in them. In almost every case, Obama answered McCain's shorthand with longhand -- with detailed, even long-winded answers that gave the distinct impression he was more in command of the details of these charges than the man who was trying to go after him on them. ... It is not a rap on McCain to say he’s not good at it; he doesn't want to bother with the introduction. But in a setting like that, the introduction is what matters, far more than the attack."
CBS Orders Full Season of 'The Mentalist'
CBS has made a full-season order for The Mentalist, a procedural drama on Tuesday nights that stars Simon Baker as an eccentric fake psychic who uses his keen powers of observation to fight crime.
The show has averaged 16.1 million viewers and a 3.8 rating/9 share in adults age 18-49, ranking as the top program in the Tuesday 9 p.m. time slot.
Mentalist joins two other freshman series picked up for a full season, the CW's 90210 and Fox's Fringe.
I thought this show was a goner, ranking it fourth on the Television Death Pool. The first two episodes of the show were passably entertaining, but how many quirky and damaged detectives can television support? We've already got Monk (flaws: obsessive/compulsive disorder, grief, germophobia), Saving Grace (alcoholism, Oklahoma City bombing grief, childhood sex abuse), Life (wrongful imprisonment, bad haircut), The Closer (Southern accent) and Psych (slacker), another series that stars a fake psychic who uses his keen powers of observation to fight crime.
Defending ACORN's Voter Registration Efforts
Shelley Powers wrote a blog entry yesterday in support of ACORN:
ACORN is an organization focused on getting people to vote, ensuring that people equal access to housing and education, supportive of unions, and decent working conditions. Really, how awful—what do these people think this country is?
ACORN and Missouri have a long history together because my state is always held up as the poster child for voter registration fraud. Governor Blunt, a man so despised after his one and only term as governor that he didn't even run again, says it's all the fault of ACORN and that the organization is committing deliberate fraud in order to register Democratic voters.
What he doesn't say is that ACORN is typically the first to actually flag suspicious voters.
ACORN takes a hit every four years with wild claims of vote fraud. The 350,000-member organization registers thousands of lower- and middle-income voters. Incidents of fraud are rare, and they always turn out to be some paid worker trying to cheat ACORN by submitting bogus registrations instead of doing the hard work of signing real people up. Voter registration fraud is not the same thing as vote fraud. Signing "Mickey Mouse" up to vote is different than showing up on Election Day and casting a ballot for him.
Powers' entry generated more than 100 comments on the Drudge Retort, where I was surprised to hear from people who think that more people voting is a bad idea. "Why weren't the founders of our country concerned with 'everyone's right' to vote in a presidential election?" one asked.
The founding fathers didn't think women should vote, treated blacks as property, and were divided on whether Americans should be required to own property to vote. In 1788, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter asserting that women were "too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics."
Mad props to those white male 18th century landowners for the American Revolution, First Amendment, powdered wigs and Samuel Adams Pale Ale, but the idea we should defer to their views on voting is obscene.
Aravind Adiga Wins Booker for 'The White Tiger'
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker literary prize:
Adiga becomes the third debut novelist, and the second Indian debut novelist, to win the award in the forty year history of the prize. The two other debut novelists to have won the prize are DBC Pierre in 2003 for his novel Vernon God Little and Arundhati Roy in 1997 for The God of Small Things.
Aravind Adiga's winning novel The White Tiger is described as a "compelling, angry and darkly humorous" novel about a man's journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial success.
The Booker awards 50,000 pounds (nearly $89,000) to the winner, making it the highest-paid fiction prize in the world. Adiga, 33, is the second-youngest writer to win in the Booker's 40-year history.
National Review Dumps Buckley's Son for Voting Obama
A few days ago, the writer Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, wrote that he was voting for Barack Obama:
It's a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They'd cut off my allowance. ... Obama has in him -- I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy "We are the people we have been waiting for" silly rhetoric -- the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader.
Though Buckley didn't write the endorsement for the National Review, the conservative magazine his father founded, his vote for Obama has resulted in his departure from the magazine.
Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted -- rather briskly! -- by Rich Lowry, NR's editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.
My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith.
The election isn't even over yet and Republicans have started forming a circular firing squad.
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