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A few days ago Eric asked me in a comment what I’d made of Jim Wallis’ recent talk at Calvin, and how it had affected my thinking about the upcoming Bush commencement speech. Jim actually led two sessions at Calvin. The first was particularly focussed on the commencement speech, but we didn’t manage to get to that, favouring his main talk which was more in line with the rest of his book tour. As a result I didn’t get to hear any of his thinking directly about the commencement situation, but it was certainly on my mind. ...

Since moving Grand Rapids WiFi to Textdrive I’ve been experiencing some peculiar problems with my access logs. Despite apache directives saying to log the remote host IP, the server had been logging its own IP address and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why. I tried various alternative log formats, but with no change. Last night I began wondering if it was because the domain name was an alias for the default account I got when I signed up. I’d used the default account to test the site before I moved the domain name and it seemed easier to simply alias the domain name than make any deeper changes. ...

Among many reasons for my slackened writing pace of late has been an influx of new toys. In particular, just over a week ago I took delivery of a mac mini and OS X Tiger. The mini is going to function as a combination of home entertainment centre and subversion/trac server. In the latter role, it’s working very well, while the former will have to wait until I take delivery of a memory upgrade and the Apple DVI->S-Video adapter. ...

Now that everything is off the old servers, it seemed a good time to reassess my spam filtering. This blog is run using Wordpress and so far it’s been relatively spam-free, but some referrer spam has begun to leak into my logs and a few inappropriate comments and trackbacks have appeared lately. My other blog is one of a number I host using MovableType and they (probably in large part because of their good google rankings) tend to get inundated with comment and trackback spam. ...

I’m well aware that I’ve been quiet here of late. In part that’s due to a desire to step back, spend a little more time reading and to pay a bit more attention to detail when I do post, but I had intended to intersperse that with more short posts. One of those short posts was to have included links to two recently launched websites: The Image Shoppe and Bazzani Associates. The Image Shoppe is a Grand Rapids-based design and communications agency with whom I’m working a lot at the moment. Last week we launched an initial version of their site, with further developments to come as the work schedule allows. ...

Shortly after writing my previous entry on consumerism, I began reading Jedediah Purdy’s “For Common Things” and was reminded of an aspect of ‘our logo’ thinking that I had neglected to cover. Purdy discusses the idea of the “Free Agent” (the wealthy individual able to entirely construct their own identity) extolled by Fast Company and Tom Peters’ corollary idea of “Brand You.” The concept of personal branding in the self-promotional sense has been around throughout history but, as Purdy highlights, its contemporary articulation involves building the fiction of the ‘autonomous’ individual, one whose pursuit of success trumps any concern for the public sphere. ...

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with The Image Shoppe, the Grand Rapids design and communications agency behind the Local First materials, among other things. Between other projects we’ve been working on redeveloping their site and the first phase of that is live now. As time allows we’ll be adding more work samples, so keep an eye out for that. And after a local process of revisions we now have the new Calvin College International Admissions website live. I’ve worked with the admissions staff to completely rework this aspect of their site with a wealth of information aimed at students living outside the US and Canada. The image gallery work I talked about a few weeks ago is part of this project, but will actually sit elsewhere in the Calvin site so isn’t live yet. ...

Services_Technorati 0.6.3 has just been released. The main change this time around is that the suite of unit tests are now complete for basic queries. I may add more at a later date to test handling of optional parameters, and more will be needed once Attention.XML support comes online, but for now they do their job. Following the completion of the tests I found a few little bugs which are now corrected. They mostly related to the testing of parameters and the building of cache filenames. I also added a patch from Ryan that improves the cache checking. ...

Responding to an article in Slate about Newsmashing, Alan Taylor wrote a post entitled " newsmashing with delicious" talking about the possibility of annotating web pages by posting comments in del.icio.us’ ’extended’ field. These annotations could then be retrieved by any visitor to the site using a bookmarklet that will retrieve the del.icio.us entries for a given URL. As someone points out in the comments on that post, there is some resemblance between this and the ’technorati this’ bookmarklet that lets you quickly find incoming links to a given URL. Unlike technorati, this method makes it easy to quickly comment on a URL without having to make use of your own site. (and you can of course then retrieve your del.icio.us RSS feed and use it on your site). While this doesn’t allow the precision annotations of individual page elements discussed in the original Slate piece, it could well be an interesting tool. ...

I’ve been really enjoying watching the use of the web around the UK General Election. From what media coverage I’ve been able to glean, it’s not seemed so heated as the blogging-focussed US election furore, but instead a number of sites have appeared that focus not so much on expressing opinions as to provide a space for conversation. Much conversation, particularly political discussion, is a fleeting thing. With a few exceptions, the news media and ’the public consciousness’ have short attention spans. While many of us would like to find ways to use new technology to support a deepening of public debate that will necessarily require a lengthening of such debate, some things that are only of short-term interest deserve to be captured and there’s a possibility that by doing that we’ll learn more of how to engage those longer-term discussions. ...