Archive - Jan 2005
January 13th
Success and Failure
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/13/2005 - 21:46Today was a weird day. The need to get some positive cash flow loomed high in my mind. I spent a bit of time speaking with a person who took a job in California that everyone said I would have been perfect for. However, moving to California for that job wouldn’t have been perfect for me. So, I am hoping my discussion was useful and the project goes well.
I also spent a lot of time talking with people around the country about the efforts to help elect Howard Dean DNC Chair. In one message I wrote to various state leaders, I said,
January 12th
Exploding the Explosion
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/12/2005 - 14:23Today, I signed up for Blog Clicker. On first glance, it appears to be a cheap knockoff of Blog Explosion. People whave told me it is going to be much better than Blog Explosion. I will explore it a little bit and see what I think.
This does illustrate a little bit the whole idea of dealing with startups. The barriers to entry for new competitors is very low. If someone can come up with a slightly better way of doing Blog Explosion, BlogClicker, or whatever the next variant will be, they can draw away the traffic. However, there are a lot of people that will stay with Blog Explosion because they were first to market.
If any of you have looked at both Blog Clicker and Blog Explosion and would like to make comments about why you like one or the other better, I would love to hear it.
A new Drupal Filter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/12/2005 - 05:06Today, I had a conference call with Aaron Kline from Progressive Punch. I started talking with Aaron though Zack at CivicSpace about coming up with a nice way to bring data from Progressive Punch into CivicSpace sites.
Based on these discussions, I worked on two Drupal filters, wmfilter and curlfilter. wmfilter allows users to connect create simple links to other sites using the Media Wiki syntax. curlfilter retrieves data from one site and embeds it in a CivicSpace site using CURL. Used together you can easily retrieve data from Progressive Punch's database of congress people to embed in your own CivicSpace website. You can see a sample of this at the Test SmartCampaigns site.
January 11th
Radio EchoDitto
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/11/2005 - 16:30Back in early December, I wrote a patch to CivicSpace to so that you could use it for podcasting.
Today, I received an IM Tim Jones at EchoDitto. EchoDitto is a bunch of techies from the Dean Campaign that have set up a company that are doing some neat technology stuff.
He was letting me know that Radio EchoDitto is now up and running. I am currently listening to their podcast about 'World of Warcraft', as well as podcasting.
They are talking about the social aspects of 'World of Warcraft', the idea of podcasting or streaming 'World of Warcraft' games, which borders onto the whole world of machinima.
I'm glad to see that someone is making use of the patch, and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.
My reflections on the State Chair race
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/11/2005 - 15:06Reflections on the State Chair Race
After the November elections, many people have been reflecting on the direction of the Democratic Party, both nationally and in Connecticut. Nationally, the November 3rd theses set the tone. Another friend wrote about the issues that the Democrats face here.
Locally, Democrats in Connecticut did okay. It was great to see the victories of Ed Meyer, Deborah Heinrich and Gayle Slossberg. However, there are still more Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives than there are Democrats.
