A tag cloud of search terms people used to find this site this week.

Automatic SEO on the fly

Think you know everything there is to know abut SEO? Think you’ve got everything SEO-wise covered with your blog?

Yeah, so does everyone else.

But every once in a while, you leave something important out of your title. Or you accidentally stuff too many keywords in a post. Or you overlook one of dozens of optimizations that would give your site a slight edge over the competition.

Wouldn’t it be great to have an automatic reminder? A helpful assistant looking over your shoulder, altering you to the opportunity to make your post even a little bit easer for people to find?

You know it would be. That’s why, if you have a WordPress blog (and later, other systems) and you want people to find the things you write about, you can benefit from signing up for the new SEO service from the same folks that brought you Copyblogger and Thesis. That service is ScribeSEO.

This is not an affiliate link.

My links to ScribeSEO are not affiliate links. That’s not how I make my money. (I’m a lawyer, not a pro blogger.) But this service is so neat, and promises to be so helpful for squeezing that last bit of SEO juice out of every post, that I want to write about it.

It’s simple to sign up: install the plugin, and then select a service plan. You’ll get an API key that you plug right into the Scribe settings page in your WordPress dashboard. And then, you’re ready to optimize.

Okay, but what does Scribe SEO do?

When you write a blog post, ScribeSEO first tells you if there’s something missing – a custom title, keyword selection, or – Heaven forbid! – actual content. Once you pass those initial three checkpoints, you can press the “analyze” button and ScribeSEO checks the post out for keyword density, keyword position, post length, title length, number of links, and so on… and then you how to fix any flaw in your post that would stop it from getting the best possible reaction from the most common search engines.

Easy-peasy.

But I’m not a blogger!

Guess what? Doesn’t matter. I have a non-blog website that runs entirely on WordPress, using that back-end as a content-management system. There are no blog posts – only “pages” of a more-or-less static variety. And ScribeSEO works on them too. Basic info pages? No problem. Landing pages? Just as easy, and even more important to get right. If you’re using WordPress and any theme or plugin that allows for SEO tweaking (such as the free All-In-One SEO plugin, or the Thesis or Headway themes, to name just two) then you you’re ready to roll.

Zealot-friendly license

Here’s good news for you folks who think the GPL applies to any PHP script that runs in or near a computer that’s ever had WordPress installed: the ScribeSEO plugin is released under the GPL. (It’s a service-based pay model.) So breathe easy.

This is STILL not an affiliate link.

Yup, I’m still not making money off this. And you can try out ScribeSEO for yourself without paying a dime – they’ve got a free test drive. (And if you’re both clever and unscrupulous, you can probably figure out how to get multiple test free test drives. But don’t be a jerk.) Try it for yourself – and if you don’t love it, I’ll refund to you every penny I ever make off your purchase. (In case you’re not paying attention… that’s none.)

Back in the closing days of the last century, roughly a Spartan military unit of us tried our hand at this little thing called “blogging.”

One of those brave souls, who persists to this day, is Sean Hackbarth, the author of “The American Mind.” Now, Sean is clearly a bullshit artist and a suck-up where he claims to have been inspired by yours truly, but let the record show that new media was not always the province of the liberal; even in the early days of blogging there were guys like Sean giving the viewpoint from the right-of-center. (He’s so good, I once even handed him the keys to my own site.)

Five years ago, Sean said “Five years from now, I can see myself still posting, still commenting on political economy, sports, music, and whatever catches my eye.” Well, he still is, and five years from now, I predict he’ll still be at it. Happy tenth, Sean, and may the next decade be good to you.

Note: this is not legal advice. This is my opinion, nothing more. If you want legal advice, hire a lawyer.

How to piss people off with a legal argument

There are no atheists in a foxhole, it’s been said, and there are apparently no agnostics when it comes to the potential application of the GNU General Public License (GPL) to WordPress themes. My last post, which analyzes the matter from the perspective of copyright law (as it must) generated quite a bit of debate even though it’s been raging for far longer than I’ve been following it. I concluded that, under our current copyright laws, WordPress themes are not “derivative works” and therefore are NOT automatically covered by the GPL (unless, of course, the theme author deliberately chooses to release under the GPL).

And that pissed some people off, and pleased a few others. One even accused me of wanting the powers-that-be to “bless” my decision to go with a premium WordPress theme. (Um, no.) Others encouraged the sides to settle the matter in court. Some simply waved their hands and said, “There is no debate,” as if they weren’t debating by leaving their comment.

Whatever.

Your opinions don’t matter

None of your opinions matter… and neither does mine. Derivative work, independent creation, something in between… it doesn’t matter in the end. Why not?

Because whether the GPL applies to WordPress themes or not… whether they are derivative works or not… whether they are part of a “combined program” (as the Software Freedom Law Center advocates) or not, the WordPress GPL can’t stop you from developing, distributing, making money from, and asserting copyright in, WordPress themes.

Because the Fair Use Doctrine protects you when you do.

How can Fair Use apply to premium WordPress themes?

First, it’s important to remember that the GPL is a copyright license: it allows people other than the author the right to copy, distribute, and modify a work – in this case, a piece of software – that otherwise would be restricted to the author only under copyright law.

That means that anyone who already has the right to do those things under copyright law need not worry about the restrictions of the license. The terms of the license only apply to uses which copyright law reserves to the author. And if a use qualifies as “fair use“, then copyright law expressly allows it without a license.

How does use of a work qualify as “fair use”? The law sets out four factors to consider:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

17 U.S.C. § 107.

Each factor weighs separately in the analysis.

Purpose of the use

As to the first factor, copying for a commercial purpose “weighs against a finding of fair use.” Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F. 2d 1510, 1523 – (9th Cir. 1992), citing Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 562, 105 S.Ct. 2218, 2231, 85 L.Ed.2d 588 (1985). However, “the presumption of unfairness that arises in such cases can be rebutted by the characteristics of a particular commercial use.” Sega, at 1523. Such factors include whether or not the use complies with the “primary objective of copyright law [which] is not to reward the labor of authors but ‘[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.’” Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340, 348, 111 S.Ct. 1282, 1290, 113 L.Ed.2d 358 (1991).

In other words, commercial use is presumed to be unfair, but that presumption may vanish if the use also promotes advancement of science and art. Publication of premium WordPress themes, by definition, is commercial, but in many cases, arguably promotes that advancement of science and art when they help produce web pages that are more artistic or which function, in some way, better. Almost all WordPress themes are created with this intent, and would be difficult to sell as premium themes if they miss the mark.

Tha analysis finds support in the Sega case:

We further note that we are free to consider the public benefit resulting from a particular use notwithstanding the fact that the alleged infringer may gain commercially. Public benefit need not be direct or tangible, but may arise because the challenged use serves a public interest…. In the case before us, Accolade’s identification of the functional requirements for Genesis compatibility has led to an increase in the number of independently designed video game programs offered for use with the Genesis console. It is precisely this growth in creative expression, based on the dissemination of other creative works and the unprotected ideas contained in those works, that the Copyright Act was intended to promote.

Sega at 1523. (citations omitted) Like in the Sega case, WordPress themes promote a “growth in creative expression” by making WordPress easier to use or more aesthetically pleasing. I think a court would find this factor in favor of fair use in the case of WordPress themes. But just for sake of argument, let’s tip the balance on factor one slightly against fair use for now.

Nature of the work

For the second factor, the “nature of the copyrighted work,” we look again to the Sega case, which states:

The second statutory factor, the nature of the copyrighted work, reflects the fact that not all copyrighted works are entitled to the same level of protection. The protection established by the Copyright Act for original works of authorship does not extend to the ideas underlying a work or to the functional or factual aspects of the work.

Sega at 1524. (citations omitted) And, “To the extent that a work is functional or factual, it may be copied.” Because computer programs are largely functional, “many aspects” of computer programs are not even protected by copyright. Sega at 1525.

To be fair, the “nature of the work” analysis can be much more complicated than I can discuss here, but generally speaking, more protection will be provided towards fictional, fantasy, and entertainment works, with less protection being given towards largely functional works, and none at all to some types of works that are purely functional. As a computer program, WordPress is highly functional in nature, and therefore enjoys less protection than pure works of imagination. Based on that sliding scale, it is fair to tilt the second factor in favor of fair use where the nature of the work is a content-management system for web pages, such as WordPress.

Amount and substance of the copying

The third factor is the “amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work.” In other words, how much of the protected work was used, and how important to the work was that portion? Both the quantity and the quality of the copies portion matter. Salinger v. Random House, Inc., 811 F. 2d 90 (2d Cir. 1987)(where copy was “essentially the heart” of a copyrighted work, factor three weighed against fair use).

In the case of WordPress themes, this factor weighs heavily in favor of a finding of fair use. No theme that I’ve ever seen incorporates any actual code from WordPress; instead, they rely on function calls to the main program, asking it to send data back to the program that comprises the theme. In other words, the only portion of WordPress “copied” are the names of the functions themselves. As a percentage of the total amount of code in WordPress itself, this is simply a tiny amount. Furthermore, the names of the functions are, in themselves, hardly the core part of the expression from a qualitative nature. Both from a quantity perspective and a quality perspective, there is almost no significant copying of any protected WordPress code. Factor three, then, weighs in favor of fair use.

Effect on the potential market

The fourth factor, though, is the real clincher that leads me to believe the distribution of premium WordPress themes is fair use of any protected WordPress works. The “market effect” test has been deemed by our Supreme Court to be “undoubtedly the single most important element of fair use.” Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 556-57, 105 S.Ct. 2218, 2233-34 (1985). The “market effect” test determines whether the alleged copyright infringement would somehow depress or diminish the ability of the author of the protected work to market that protected work.

In this case, the answer is a head-slapping “Of course not!” It is axiomatic that a WordPress theme cannot function unless there is a copy of WordPress running to support it; in fact, this is one of the arguments that GPL proponents make to support their case that the themes are derivative works. The “copying” by theme distributors can never displace a single copy of WordPress, so there is no negative effect on any potential market; and in fact, by enhancing the aesthetic and functional value of WordPress, themes promote more widespread use of the underlying software. Developers of WordPress themes increase the market for WordPress, not depress it. Increasing WordPress market share is in the theme developers’ best interest, for more WordPress users means more potential customers for premium themes.

Because the impact of premium themes on WordPress market share is at worst neutral, and in all likelihood premium themes substantially bolster the market share of WordPress with respect to its competitors, the fourth factor weighs heavily in favor of a finding of fair use. As the “most important element” of fair use, this finding cannot be understated.

What it all means: Blow it out your GPL

Of the four factors of fair use, two weigh heavily for fair use, one slightly in favor, and the other we allowed to tilt slightly against even though it could easily go in favor of fair use. To be sure, changing the underlying facts could change the outcome of any individual factor, but based on the facts as I understand them, development and distribution of WordPress themes, to the extent they engage in any “copying” or derivation from WordPress code, are resoundingly fair use of that code. And if they are fair use, then federal copyright law expressly allows them to be made, copied, and distributed with no regard whatsoever to the GPL or any other license that may apply.

So all the hemming and hawing about whether themes area derivative work, or “should be” a derivative work, is completely irrelevant. Because the GPL need not apply in either case.

Note:

This is not legal advice. This is my opinion, nothing more. If you want legal advice, hire a lawyer.

Why aren’t WordPress themes automatically covered by the GPL?

There’s been a firestorm brewing in the relatively small world of WordPress premium theme designers, after WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg broadly asserted that themes built to run on the WordPress platform – and by implication, plugins and anything else that hooks into the WordPress system – are covered by the GPL.

This is important, because if Matt is correct, then anyone who gets a copy of a premium theme then has the right to freely distribute it or modify it virtually without restriction (expect, of course, those restrictions found in the GPL itself). Understandably, even though some voluntarily release their themes under the GPL, many premium theme designers object to having their code distributed for free.

Matt, who is an outspoken proponent of open-source software, has explained that designers can still make money off GPL code by providing support and other valuable resources to users of that code. And he’s right – that model exists, and has been shown to work for some.

Are premium theme designers “evil”?

But he also goes so far as to call non-GPL premium WordPress themes “evil” – naming Chris Pearson’s Thesis as one such example. Now, I own a Thesis developer’s license and run several sites on the theme. I was happy to pay for it and would do so again. I also know Matt and have considered him a friend for several years now. I commend him for his support of open software and for the impact he’s had on the weblog community.

So it’s tough to say this: Matt, you’re wrong. Not only are these developers not “evil,” they provide a definite benefit to the community. And perhaps more important, the WordPress GPL does not, in most cases, require them to release their own themes or plugins under the GPL.

The argument for an expansive GPL

Here’s the argument for applying the GPL to all WordPress themes:

The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

In other words, the code created by theme developers, because it works together with WordPress code (and in most cases, cannot function without it) is a “derivative work” of WordPress under copyright law and therefore falls within the scope of the GPL. (The GPL, as a copyright-based license, applies only to the original work and those works that derive from it.) At least, that’s the argument.

The counter-argument to an expansive GPL

But is it enough to say that a theme calls to WordPress functions or that it is somehow “combined with WordPress code in memory”? Does that make it a derivative, and therefore covered, work under the law and the GPL?

There are plenty of reasons to disagree with the expansive GPL view expressed above. First and foremost, it’s just not enough to say that themes running on top of, and using function calls from, a piece of software are “derivative” of that software. If that were the case, then any software application would be a derivative work of the operating system it runs on – such as Windows, Linux, or OS X – which in turn would be a derivative work of the software hard-coded into the chips running the computer. For that is the way all software works, down to the bare iron – it sits on top of, and makes function calls to, the software layer beneath it, until to get down to the silicon pathways in the chip itself. No software could run without those lower layers, and nothing is truly independent of them. But “dependent” and “derivative” are not the same thing.

Instead, copyright law takes a very pragmatic approach to determine what constitutes a derivative work.

The alleged derivative must “physically incorporate a portion of a copyrighted work… [or] supplant demand for a component of that work.”

In the case of Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., 964 F. 2d 965 (9th Cir. 1992), a federal appellate court considered that very issue. Galoob manufactured a “cheater” cartridge that plugged into Nintendo games, between the game cartridge and the game unit itself, and allowed the player to change the game’s parameters – for example, players could give themselves unlimited lives using Galoob’s device. Nintendo sued Galoob, claiming that the devices violated Nintendo’s copyright in the games as a derivative work of the games.

The Galoob court rejected Nintendo’s argument. In order to be considered a derivative work, the alleged derivative must “physically incorporate a portion of a copyrighted work… [or] supplant demand for a component of that work.” Galoob at 969. Finding that Galoob’s device did neither, the court determined that there was no derivative work.

An important part of the court’s analysis was that “technology often advances by improvement rather than replacement.” Id. The court also noted that software often depends on other software to function:

Some time ago, for example, computer companies began marketing spell-checkers that operate within existing word processors by signalling the writer when a word is misspelled. These applications, as well as countless others, could not be produced and marketed if courts were to conclude that the word processor and spell-checker combination is a derivative work based on the word processor alone.

Id. Applying that theory to the Galoob device, the court concluded:

The Game Genie is useless by itself, it can only enhance, and cannot duplicate or recaste, [sic] a Nintendo game’s output. It does not contain or produce a Nintendo game’s output in some concrete or permanent form, nor does it supplant demand for Nintendo game cartridges. Such innovations rarely will constitute infringing derivative works under the Copyright Act.

Using that rationale, the question of whether WordPress themes are “derivative” of WordPress itself becomes more clear.

1. Does a theme, rather than simply calling a WP function, incorporate actual code from WordPress?
2. Does it somehow supplant the demand for the WordPress software itself?

If the answer to either of those questions is “yes,” then the work is probably derivative, and the GPL probably applies. If not, then even a theme or plugin that entirely dependens on WordPress to run at all, or simply improves WordPress in some way, would not be a derivative work and the GPL would not apply. For the vast majority of themes I’ve seen, the GPL would not apply because the theme is not, in my opinion, a derivative work. (In fact, if any one thing “incorporates” another, it’s most likely WordPress incorporating the theme, by use of the PHP include() call, rather than the other way around.)

Should the GPL apply to premium WordPress themes?

Matt’s own experience with WordPress is a very convincing argument that it is possible to change the world, or even just make a living, by writing, distributing, and supporting GPL-based software. There are many premium theme designers – promoted and catalogued by WordPress – who choose to apply to GPL to their own labors. But those who choose not to? Not evil – at least not for that reason.

It’s great to talk about open source software as “free” and speak of the GPL – as Matt does – as a “Bill of Rights” – but what Matt seeks to do would reduce freedom by expanding copyright restrictions to non-derivative – and therefore legally independent – works . At its core, the GPL is simply a fancy way of controlling other people’s work through the imposition of copyright restrictions. Those who seek to extend the GPL beyond the bounds allowed by copyright law, do not promote freedom but instead take freedom away.

Update: What WordPress itself says about derivative works and copyright law

I should have done this in the main article, but here’s what the GPL that came with your copy of WordPress says about the issue:

a “work based on the Program” means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language.

(Emphasis added.) In other words:

1. Copyright law controls the definition of what constitutes a “derivative work” (and therefore, a covered work); and,
2. The GPL expressly invokes the standard embraced by the Galoob court, namely, that some part of the original work must be contained in another work in order for that work to be considered derivative.

We didn’t start the fire

How many people can say they were on the front lines of a revolution? Ten years ago, inspired by some pretty interesting people, I started a little blog. At that time, there were roughly three hundred webloggers in the world, and most of us knew each other. There were few enough that everyone knew when a new one started up.

Around that time, there were two camps of thought regarding weblogs: overly optimistic, and overly pessimistic. This quote sums both up nicely:

Weblogs are a “revolution.” They’re “journalism.” They’re “art.” They’re, again and again, the next New Thing. To which the only possible response can be: come on, people.

This is not to say that weblogs aren’t useful or fun. I read several every day, and have profited from the experience. I just love that Mahir guy.

But how can you not boggle at the level of self-delusion, of self-infatuation, it takes to declare that weblogs are going kill off traditional journalism? That the concept will be alive and well a decade from now? That weblog readership will increase a hundred-fold in that time? That they’re an art form?

Have weblogs “killed off” traditional journalism? Damned near. Is the concept alive and well ten years later? Hellooooo! Has readership increased a hundredfold? Closer to a millionfold. An art form? Well, you’ve got me there.

But clearly, we were on to something. And everyone else gradually caught on.

A new world order?

From 25-score bloggers to perhaps billions. Blogging has changed, and the world’s information flow will never be the same. But so, too, has the world changed over the last ten years. It’s fun to see some of the radical transformations:

Then: America’s first black president
Now: America’s first black president

Then: Waiting for the world to collapse
Now: Waiting for the world to collapse

Then: Evan Williams poised to take over the internet
Now: Evan Williams poised to take over the internet

Then: Toy Story 2 in theaters
Now: Toy Story 2 in theaters

Maybe not.

Well, maybe some things never change. But I feel pretty good about this: ten years from now, we’ll look back at 2009 and reflect on some of the things that did change, in ways we cannot even imagine today. And some of them? We might even call them “art.”

It’s amazing what you can learn in the doctor’s waiting room.

Nate was playing with the big toy – the one where you move all the beads back and forth across the wires – and I took a minute to check out a web design question I had, surfing the web on my phone.

I stumbled across this CSS tip for styling buttons… and, as it turns out, everything else.

I’ve been out of the loop on cutting-edge web design techniques, so I didn’t know you could now do rounded corners and drop shadows in CSS. And, as it turns out, you can use these techniques on more than just buttons.

You can style any element this way. Even block quotes. Or paragraphs. Heck, you could probably style a <span> this way.

And that’s pretty cool.

I’ve played around a little bit with the design. The theme hasn’t changed – I’m using the outstanding Thesis theme – and I’m taking advantage of Thesis’s ease of customization.

If anything breaks, let me know.

I’ve been a Dreamhost customer since 2000. In that time, I found a lot to like about the service. It’s been convenient to use, packed with all the features I could want and then some, and seemed fairly reliable.

But if you were to search Twitter today for the word “Dreamhost,” you’d have found an uprising. Hundreds, if not thousands, of DH customers lost all their incoming emails this morning due to an unspecified failure of the spam filter… because when you upgrade a spam filter for thousands of users, you definitely want to do that first thing on a Monday morning. (None of those businesses needed their email, anyway.) Support? Completely non-communicative.

Well, that wasn’t all. A Twitter search for Dreamhost this evening shows that, not only had they failed to resolve the email problem for many users, literally dozens of web servers and database servers collapsed under the strain of… well, no one seems exactly sure.

Dreamhost did not cover itself in glory this day. In fact, I can’t imagine doing more damage to one’s own business than Dreamhost did.

As for me, I expect that I’ll be moving to a new web host mighty soon. Feel free to leave me recommendations in the comments.

(Photo source: niña mala under a CC License… see also Baby Chucky)

Instead of putting a generic URL in your Twitter profile, some folks think it’s better to have a custom “landing page” meant especially for Twitter users to learn more about you.

In lieu of actual fun, I thought I’d try that out.

Write for a blog long enough, it’s bound to happen. You see a link in your referrer logs, find something on Google, get an email from a reader… you follow the link, and there it is: your hard work, spread across someone else’s page, used as bait for ad revenue or something worse.

David Risley asks the question: How do you deal with web sites that steal your content?

Personally, I’ve dealt with it in two ways. First, I contact the offender directly and ask them to take the post down. This usually works, because anyone who’s copied my work knows what I do for a living. If I can’t contact the webmaster, I next contact the web host.

So far, problem solved, every time.

Nine years ago today, I became one of approximately 300 people in the world who had something called a “weblog.” It was hosted on AOL. I wrote it in MS Notepad.

I’m under no delusion that it was very good, then or now.

At the time, blogging was cutting-edge. Now, it’s a punchline. A marketing cliche. But it’s also a powerful tool. A still-growing, diverse channel of information. It was started by a few score of people, and I was fortunate enough to be in their number.

I still am.

Do you have any friends you would never have known unless you met them online? Most of us do. I do. Most of them are fellow webloggers. And we “met on the net” long before it was cool.

Sometimes cool is overrated.

Blogging became very cool, very quickly. And then suddenly, it wasn’t cool – it was corporate. And common. And not worth discussing. But it’s pervasive, and powerful, and in hindsight, we’ll probably recognize it as the second step, behind only the Web itself, to the future where everyone is plugged in, all the time. (Just ask Evan Williams.)

A good friend of mine has started blogging about politics. His site? Keep 1600. Only a few posts are up now, but it looks like the bug has bitten him hard.

So how come I never met this guy? He lives in Florida, is an FSU fan, a Mac user, and a Halo player. I’m sure we’d get along famously.

My Orlando friends have some ‘splainin to do.

OK, I admit I’m back-dating this. November 19 came and went and I didn’t even notice. So why bother to go back and add something now? Because, eight years after my very first weblog post (hello, awful pseudo-futuristic “interface”!) the very notion of a “blogiversary” has ceased to become remarkable. To maintain a weblog for years on end is commonplace, rather than notable.

So commonplace, I forgot to note when my own rolled around this year.

RIAA Keep your Hands Off My iPod by (_nickd)

By the way, the site that led me to the previous post is a pretty good read if you’ve got a law degree and a strong sense of sticking it to The Man. Recording Industry vs The People chronicles all the pending court battles, the tactics, and the players involved when the music cartel sues another dead woman, or a disabled man, or a technologically clueless single parent. They trumpet the victories, lament the losses, and help point the way to freeing the earth from the scorched-earth litigation tactics of this dying conglomerate. Worth a read even if you don’t have a law degree.

I’ll let Matt say it:

I recently realized there are a lot of people trying to make a living from blogging but there aren’t a lot of sites with basic business advice for people doing it. I figured maybe it’d help some people out if I wrote up how to find a good accountant or lawyer, when to start a LLC, and how best to manage advertising.

I’m going to be sharing the things I’ve picked up along the way here, with a new essay posted every Monday week about some aspect of doing business online. If you’re a freelancer hoping to someday ditch your clients, just starting out with a web business, or already have an established blogging empire, I hope you’ll subscribe to the feed and enjoy the ride.

There’s just a handful of entires so far, but what’s there is quality. I’ll be following Matt’s observations closely. You should too.

Christine wants to be number one again.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Florida lawyer Michael Alex Wasylik announced that he has filed suit today in U.S. District Court in Tampa against Chicago-based web application firm 37Signals. The suit alleges trademark infringement of the Perpetual Beta name and seeks damages in the amount of 13 signals – just over one-third of the company.

“I’ve ben using this name since 2000,” said Wasylik, “and then these guys come along and tarnish it by applying it to fly-by-night dot-coms like Google and Flickr. They’ve probably never had an original thought in their lives. I’ll show them!”

Citing a recent surge in online theft of intellectual property, Wasylik said the only remedy was to “sue the bastards. Sue them so hard that their grandkids feel it.” Asked how he filed the suit on a Sunday, Wasylik said that the court has special hours for the April 1st holiday

Contact: http://perpetualbeta.com/contact/

As part of the Perpetual Beta Blogrolling Project, I’m pleased to announce that today’s featured blog is the Illinois Trial Practice Weblog, run by blawger and alleged Illinois trial attorney Evan Schaffer.

ITP is primarily useful for those who find themselves in a My Cousin Vinny-like situation in downstate Illinois: rules of evidence, courtroom demeanor, and dealing with obstreperous judges. (Spelled that one right on the first try! Go me.) But may also it may benefit to those who are not in Illinois, not on trial, and have never practiced for anything. It’s chock full of generic how-to’s and how-not-to’s, like this tip on How To Track Changes in MS Word. Note that you don’t even have to be a lawyer to understand or apply that — it means Evan’s probably talking down to you.

So if you’re a lawyer, from Illinois, and you’re in the courtroom on a regular basis, ITP should be on your regular reading list. If you’re a vacuum-cleaner sales rep from Topeka, it should be on your reading list too, just in case you ever find yourself in Kankakee on trial for shooting a convenience store clerk.

From the “mailbag” that is my comments feed:

Hey there!
My website includes a link to yours within my list of Tampa Blogs:
http://sticksoffire.com/about/tampa/blogs-more/
Would you be so kind as to return the favor?
You can cut & paste, if you like:
Sticks of Fire: a Tampa website
Thanks for your consideration.
tommy
Sorry to post this request in your comments but i could not find your contact information.

Well, Tommy, I don’t have a blogroll per se and haven’t for, oh, maybe four years. But I do want to recognize certain special blogs, so I’ve gone and created a whole new category just for you: Blogrolling. In this category (of which this is the first entry) I will periodically post short snippets about blogs that should be considered part of my “blogroll.”

So here’s yours: Sticks of Fire is not Tampa’s first weblog, nor its most prolific, but it may be the Bay Area’s most decorated. Showered with awards from local free culture papers like the Weekly Plant (or whatever it’s called now) Sticks of Fire is widely considered Tampa’s best blog about Tampa. Though reading Sticks, my wife and I had the chance to meet local author Wendy Boucher (and I got designated the “hottie husband” which is all good, ’cause the missus won’t take me for granted if she knows I got options, y’know)

Anyway, Sticks of Fire is the place to go if you’ve got a jones for Tampa-based weblog goodness. Enjoy.

(Oh, and by the way, tommy, and anyone else looking for my “contact” page, it’s here. Linked from the front page, too.)

Rannie is coming up on one million visitors and to celebrate, he’s giving away unspecified free stuff.

No word on whether he’s including the Nintendo Wii he got. After all, his sister got one too, so he can play hers.

UPDATE: Put me in for Gears of War. Oh, yeah!

On this date in 1999, a weblog was born. At the time, there were somewhere around 300 people writing weblogs. One year later, it was 60,000. Now, there are something like ten million.

That was seven years ago. To put that in perspective, just a few weeks after I began blogging, the world waited with breath stilled to see if the lights would stay on when the calendar rolled over from 1999 to 2000. (They did.) Bill Clinton was sleeping on a couch somewhere in the White House Residence. The World Trade Center still stood proudly over New York. Gas cost $1.25 a gallon. The Internet boom hadn’t stopped booming. A little Texas company launched a service called EnronOnline. The Florida State Seminoles were #1 in the nation, en route to their second national championship. I was engaged, but not yet married, and kids seemed far off in the future. I could write this list for days, and the only thing I would exhaust is your patience. But check the archives and you’ll get a sense for a lot of the rest.

My world and yours are much different now than they were seven years ago, but in many ways, they are also the same. I’m still blogging, and I don’t plan to give it up anytime soon (excepting the occasional hiatus).

Check back in 2013. You’ll know where to find me.

I just realized this evening that comments have been out of commission since my last upgrade. It turns out that the current verion of WordPress filters comments for a referrer that matches the BlogUrl variable set in General options. A stray “www” will cause a mismatch and eat all comments; therefore, if your WordPress blog produces a blank white page (wp-comments-post.php will be the filename) go back and check to make sure your BlogUrl variable is set to match the exact url of the blog.

For the time being I’m only stealing links from Jeff.

He helpfully points out some recent work showing that most so-called “valid XHTML” really is no such thing.

These sources have more on why:

• Surfin’ Safari
• Anne Van Kesteren
• Mark Pilgrim
• Ian Hickson

One big reason: there’s no good way to serve XHTML to all browsers with a valid MIME type. And that apparently matters.

(If this post means absolutely nothing to you, then congratulations, it means you have a life and don’t have to worry about this kind of stuff. Say hi to the world for me.)

I didn’t take part in the CSS Reboot but I was inspired by it.

A couple of weeks of fumbling, and I’m still at nothing. So I’ve decided to start over with a new theme as a base – complete with trendy chunky footer – and then give it a new skin.

I’m probably going to draw the visual elements mainly from our recent bedroom makeover (especially the colors).

At this rate, it’ll take me another couple of months. Bear with me.

(And oh, yes, I’m well aware that the white-on-black color scheme is horrible. Again, bear with me.)

This one’s all in the metadata. A few days ago, Oliver Willis posted an immigration-related item on his blog entitled They Just Hate Hispanics, Admit It. Oliver put the entry under the categories “Immigration” and “Racism.”

Who are these mysterious racists Oliver calls “they”? Oliver doesn’t specifically say, but he links to a single post by Jeff Harrell describing Jeff’s experiences at the immigration protests in Washington, D.C. Now, anyone who’s read Jeff at anything beyond an eighth-grade comprehension level knows that Jeff resonates to external stimuli like a car rolling over rumble strips. The result is often uncomfortable and hard to ignore. On top of that, Jeff tends to process his experiences by relating them, whereas most of us would decline to share those same feelings with others.

Jeff’s post reminded me of the time about ten years ago when the Million Man March came to D.C. I was working on the Hill at the time and our office closed for the day. I only lived a couple of blocks away, so instead of watching the event on TV I walked over to the Mall to check it out in person.

Did I feel uncomfortable, one of the few white men in a crowd of several thousand? Yes, but not for the reason you think. That crowd had gathered because they were supporters, to differing degrees, of Louis Farrakhan, a man whose own racist views are widely known. I was concerned that racism might be visited upon me, by any one of the crowd who took Farrakhan’s views to their natural conclusion. Fortunately, nothing happened and I made it home safe and with a deeper knowledge of numerology.

I think that’s similar to what happened to Jeff – he felt, correctly or not, that he might be harmed because of who he was or who he was not, due to his presence at a specific event. When surrounded by people of another identity group, who are highly excited about an issue they think divides you from them, it’s only natural to feel some degree of apprehension. Jeff felt it. It felt it. I’m sure black people feel it more often than Jeff or I ever do. I’m sure Oliver has felt it.

There’s no way it’s fair to call Jeff, or anyone else in the same situation, a racist for the feelings he describes. It’s nothing more than a debate tactic, and a pretty sinister one at that. It’s the lefty equivalent of standing in front of the abortion clinic, howling “baby killer!” at the sixteen-year-old girls running inside. It takes the debate out of the debate by classifying anyone who disagrees as not just differently viewed, but possessed of some deep character flaw. It’s not just that they have a different opinion – there’s something wrong with them.

The people who read Oliver on a regular basis eat it up. As for Oliver, either he doesn’t know any better, which is very sad, or he does know better and is doing it anyway, which is downright tragic. He’s serving up to his readers the intellectual equivalent of paint chips – and anyone who eats them gets dumber as a result.

Server stats show that this post is the first Google result for “garbage disposal maintenance”.

For folks looking for advice that is neither tongue-in-cheek nor specific to a certain house in Virginia that I no longer own, try checking out the following:

• eHow – How to Use a Garbage Disposal
• eHow – How to Fix a Jammed Garbage Disposal
• DIY – Kitchen Disposal Basics
• DIY – Replacing a Garbge Disposal

The other day I suggested to Dineen that she have a professional web site apart from whatever her firm puts up. Smacking my forehead, I realized that I should do that as well.

So I did.

After the site was largely finished, I did a quick check on MSIE 5 on Dineen’s PC. Busted. DIV elements all over the place, seemingly at random.

Running the site through the CSS validator caught a couple of typos which fixed most of the problem. The header, though, was still a mess.

The header is a single DIV element, the whole width of the page. Inside the DIV are two child elements: a headline element for my name, and a DIV containing the photo. Both are floated left with appropriate margins.

I tried the box model hack for IE 5 and that helped a bit, but the headline was still out of place. Instead of resting nicely to the left of the image, it hung to the left and below the image, knocking the bottom of the box down in order to fit the additional line height.

Problem solved: in the source document, the DIV containing the image precedes the headline element. They were not that way in the stylesheet. Floating elements in a different order than they appear in the markup apparently confuses IE 5 as to where they should go. Reordering the stylesheet so that the floats occur in the same order fixed the problem. I know some web designers advocate using different orders in the stylesheet (I’ve seen at least one advocating an alphabetical order) but the use of floats would seem to dictate this method if you care about them working properly.

(Note: Safari, Firefox, and IE 6 for PC seemed to work just fine regardless of order.)

If you’re not at SxSW but wish you were, here’s two ways to check out the action:

• Keynote and Panel podcasts
• Flickr photos tagged with sxsw06

Psst… Mike… that’s another reason podcasts are cool.

Krempasky’s not impressed at SxSW:

Back at SXSW, sitting through a panel on podcasting – when, why, how. It’s relatively interesting – but frankly – I’ve not heard anything that distinguishes advice about podcasting from advice about broadcasting events in traditional fashion. Why does everyone seem to think that podcasting really is the GREATEST THING EVER? Yes, you make sure to record the questions – yes, you speak in a way that an audience outside the room can relate to.

First of all, Mike, remember that this panel is geared towards web people with no broadcast experience, rather than broadcast people with no web experience. Hence, the fundamental broadcasting advice.

But to answer your deeper question, podcasting differs from broadcasting in a few ways that make it important.

• Anyone can do it.

  Podcasting is to broadcasting what blogging is to print media – open to all comers, low barriers to entry, no minimum audience required to make it worthwhile. In order to get a broadcast on the air, one must convince a broadcaster to accept your content. That’s much more difficult for small, independent media makers and novices than for established media makers. Because bandwidth is cheaper than spectrum and, by comparison, infinite, even podcasts with a small audience can sustain themselves without worrying that some other, more popular cast will push them off the air.

• Podcasts are portable.

  If you want to listen to a radio broadcast, you listen to it at the time the broadcaster presents it – unless you’re taping your radio. Once it’s broadcast, it’s gone, and if you want to hear the program later, you have to find someone else who recorded it or hope it runs again later. Broadcasts require you to be available and focused on the broadcast at the time the broadcaster choses.

  Podcasts, however, are portable in time and space. You can listen to a podcast anytime you want to after downloading it, and if you missed a previous cast, you can usually download that as well. (I’m a big fan of the official Lost podcast and was able to catch up on on the previously-run podcasts after finding it.) Now that mp3 players are as cheap and available as transistor radios once were, it’s easy to catch a podcast even in a place where you might not be able to get a radio broadcast – such as a plane or a subway train.

The portability of podcasts and the low barriers to entry mean that more people can listen than otherwise might, and more people can broadcast than otherwise might. Podcasting, then, increases both the production and consumption of audio content, and enhances the long tail effect in the process. That’s what’s cool about podcasting.

I’ve upgraded Release to WordPress 2.01 today. I expect few, if any, issues, but feel free to send feedback if anything breaks.

The new theme was a whim with the upgrade. I expect to change it before long.

Blame Tom for the tagging by implication.

Four Jobs I’ve Had

1. Food Service Drone: I won’t say where, but I’ll never eat there again.
2. Attorney General: Florida State had a very well-developed student government – I got paid and everything.
3. Congressional Aide: underpaid, underutilized, but once you get outside the Beltway it definitely sounds impressive.
4. Webmaster: When I worked for a D.C. non-profit, we saved money by having a lawyer – me – maintain the organization’s website. They later had multiple waves of layoffs.

Four Movies I Can Watch Anytime

1. Highlander: The original, not any of the sequels which I have fortunately never seen. There should have been only one.
2. The Incredibles: Great story, fantastic production, and really, who doesn’t have the hots for Elastigirl?
3. Blade Runner: One of the best science fiction movies of all time.
4. Reservoir Dogs: Tarantino’s never been better.

Four Places I’ve Lived

1. Cleveland, Ohio Until I was three.
2. Orlando, Florida Until I was five.
3. Evanston, Illinois With a view of Lake Michigan.
4. Washington, D.C. In the shadow of the Capitol.

Four TV Shows I Love

1. Lost: Now, when anyone asks me for a number between 3 and 43, I have several attractive options.
2. Battlestar Galactica: This version is as good as I thought the first production was when I was a highly discriminating eight-year-old.
3. Entourage: I want Ari Gold to be my agent, just so I can steal all his best lines.
4. Rome: The HBO version is a lot more interesting than the version I learned from my high school Latin teacher.

Four Places I’ve Vacationed

1. The Soviet Union: The summer before the Berlin Wall fell – Moscow, Kiev, Yalta, and Leningrad.
2. China: The following summer – British Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing.
3. Budapest, Hungary: Where my mother-in-law knew just enough Hungarian to call out the waiter for talking about us behind our backs.
4. Salzburg, Austria: Probably my favorite city in continental Europe, especially at Christmas.

Four of My Favorite Dishes

1. Chili: If it’s on the menu, I’m ordering a bowl, because I’m a total chili slut. It doesn’t even have to be good.
2. Steak: Preferably so rare that it complains when I cut it.
3. Dineen’s Sunday morning breakfast casserole: Sausage, cheese, potatoes – everything a man needs for healthy living.
4. Lamb shank: Layalina, a Lebanese restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, serves it up just right.

Four Sites I Visit Daily

1. Redstate: Helps me track the barking moonbats.
2. Deadspin: Because when they make a football pick, I know to bet the other way.
3. Kinja: But I’m not so keen on the way they’ve revamped it, so that may change soon.
4. $mainstream-media-site: Whatever headlines pop up in my RSS feeds that look fun.

Four Places I’d Rather Be Right Now

1. Pretty much any part of Hawaii.
2. Austin because I’ve never had a bad time in Texas – especially in early March.
3. Hilton Head, South Carolina, preferably in a beach house in Sea Pines Plantation.
4. Tallahassee, Florida where you don’t have to look far to find a good party.

Four people I’m going to tag

I think I’m the last person to indulge this meme. If you haven’t, feel free to do so and add a comment with a link.

The front page has a new look and a whole bunch more functionality. It used to be a menu and nothing more; now the menu is moved to the side to allow for all kinds of content. The page now features:

• The latest headlines from this weblog
• A short description of the page
• My recent posts to del.icio.us
• Selected photos from my flickr photostream.

And that new content goodness is wrapped in a fresh new coat of paint – crimson and cream, like an antique car or a kid’s bike. There’s also a brand-spanking-new logo treatment, inspired in part by this post at 37signals.

The logo looks best in Safari since it uses css-based text-shadowing, but users of other browsers will get the picture as well. Let me know if anything else breaks horribly.

I’m in what seems to be a tiny minority when I say that I use Kinja as my primary newsfeed reader. I’ve preferred it to other methods for a few reasons.

First, I like that it’s web-based. I read weblogs and news sources from at least three different systems: my laptop, my desk-bound monstrosity at work, and when I’m out and about, my Treo 650. For those of you playing along at home, that’s three different operating systems. Web-based means platform-neutral, portable, and sync-free.

Second, Kinja is manageable. Newsreader clients like NewsFire or NetNewsWire are slick and pretty, but launching either one means several minutes of massive bandwith and CPU power reallocation, as the newsreaders update hundreds of feeds, resulting in thousands of unread items. Kinja, by contrast, is always ready to go with a page-long summary of the latest feeds. And it works just like the web works – read, scroll, point, click, read. I never have to struggle to remember which function keys navigate among the various feeds and feed items.

Third, Kinja gives me just the right amount of information. Kinja gives me web-page sized helpings of newsfeeds, laid out right in front of me with headlines and just enough of the “fat” feed for me to see at a glance whether I want to read further. Very little clutter, very little to distract from the pure flow of the feeds.

Kinja’s been down for a few days for what I thought was simple maintenance. As it turns out, they were apparently scrubbing the whole thing down with Ajax. Now, next to the pure feeds on the left, the whole right section is filled with the “cards” of the weblogs providing the feeds. The cards are the primary input device for – you guessed it – tags, the magic ingredient for every web application since mid-2005, no matter how simple.

Got an image? Tag it. Blog post? Tag it. News feed? Tag it. Dog running loose without a collar? Tag it. Releasing a falcon into the wild? Tag it. Three-day-old pizza on your kitchen counter? Dude, throw that out already! But tag the box.

I suppose tags are here to stay until we invent a new classification paradigm, and they can surely be useful in many circumstances. But for Kinja to pop up, new, improved, and tag-enabled, feels a bit like trend-following to me. I’m not sure they make Kinja any more useful than it was before, and there’s definitely some drawback. What used to be uncluttered and pure now has a spray of cards and tags strewn about the page. Even worse, the tags have only been available for a day and already some cretin has spammed the database with a bunch of “poker” tags. Not sure how that helps the real poker sites, but spammers don’t need a reason to poop in the soup. That’s just what they do.

I’ll keep using Kinja, since it still seems simpler and less cluttered than other web-based options, but the friction preventing me from migrating elsewhere has suddenly become a lot less than it was.

When I code up a new web page, I frequently rely on the world’s largest repository of CSS reference materials – tha Intarweb. This evening I was Googling for techniques on using CSS to pin a footer at the bottom of a web page, I stumbled across the following article at, of all godforsaken places, Apple’s Developer site:

Another common problem with CSS is ensuring a proper page footer. On long pages that use more space than the window height, the footer should appear directly below the navigation and content blocks. That’s very easy to code. On short pages, though—those that span only part of the window height—the footer should nonetheless appear at the bottom of the viewport, and that’s a far trickier code challenge… Ensuring that the footer works properly on both long and short pages is a common cause of CSS headache.

Tables neatly solve these two problems. Correct horizontal alignment has been the most important advantage of tables ever since Mosaic. Giving the table a height: 100% and the cell containing the footer a vertical-align: bottom makes the footer reliable in all circumstances.

(Emphasis mine).

Oh, for the love of Netscape 4.x! This may have been true back when KISS was still touring but in the modern day, if the solution to your problem involves using a table for layout, you’ve just got more problems.

Sometime last July, the Movable Type setup that powered every weblog on our various domains went belly up. All logins failed, password retrievals failed… the database appeared to be empty. But the database was still there, and still flush with all that data. Logging into the web server and running “strings” on the database files showed that all the user accounts and blog entries were still there. So my problem was not that the database was gone – it was that Movable Type somehow couldn’t access the data. I backed up the errant database and went poking around.

I tried re-installing Movable Type from scratch, using the original install files I had stashed away. Still no dice: “invalid login.” I did a new install of a blank Movable Type setup – worked like a charm. That told me I definitely had a database problem, not a problem with the install files. The Oracle of Google told me that others had suffered the same problem:

• http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t25580.html
• http://www.djchuang.com/b2/blog.php/2004/05/18/
• http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/forums/index.php?showtopic=41725

One of the posts I ran across recommended the MT-Medic plugin. Sounded great – I installed it, then configured and ran it. Same result: no authors, no weblogs. But I knew, having seen the data, that it was all still there. The same post that mentioned MT-Medic also contained the following nuggets of information:

This can be fixed by converting the DB files over to the format used by the new library version; please review the Knowledge Base article on Converting Berkeley DB Files To New Version for more information.

It linked to an entry on upgrading the database version. “The easiest way to convert the DB files is to use the db_upgrade program.” Great! I could just run the “db_upgrade” command. Except… no such program existed on my server! So I then tried the burdensome “dump and reload” method at the end of the article. After laboriously typing in

$ db_dump -f author.db.data author.db
$ mv author.db author.db.old
$ db_load -f author.db.data author.db
$ chmod 666 author.db

…for more than two dozen files, I thought I was ready to go. I fired up the login window… INVALID LOGIN.

Now I was mad. But one guy, Dylan Parker seemed to be having the same types of troubles I was having, and he was equally determined. I re-read his article for clues. Ultimately, I never had to try his solution of upgrading Perl modules, because this paragraph gave me all I needed:

First off, my web hosting site didn’t appear to have db_upgrade, db_dump, db_dump185 or db_load installed. I hunted all over the directory tree and eventually found them in /usr/local/bin but they had the prefix db3_ instead of db_. Be aware your hosting company may have renamed these utilities. Remember… the locate and whereis commands are your friend.

Db3? Locate! Five seconds later, I had found the “db3_upgrade” program that had eluded me while I was searching for its little brother without the 3. Ran it, went to MT-Medic, waited with bated breath for it to load, and magic! The database spilled its guts across my screen: authors, blogs, everything. Moving to the login window, the entire Movable Type installation was back at my fingertips, fully operational.

My next item of business? Export! You’ll soon be seeing some of the old blog entries nestled in new blog homes. Hopefully no other Movable Type users have to go through what I went through, but if they do, I hope this note helps.

Remember, back up your data often.

UPDATE: I’m not the only one.

Five years on, one year off.

When I shuttered my weblog a year ago, it was because I no longer cared, no longer felt like I had anything I wanted to say. My old blog had faded into weeks or months of silence punctuated with short bursts of posting. Announcing my hiatus was just a formal way of saying the old site had faded away.

This is my formal way of saying that I’m back.