The most fruitful era of this blog, as I suppose many of you long-timers would agree, was around 2001, when I would take Amtrak from Berkeley to Santa Clara and back every day. Two hours of watching the world go by, armed with an ipod and a laptop -- but no network -- made for the most inspirational environment. 600 words each way every day was a breeze, a torrent. Stream of consciousness joining the slipstream of the train racing through urbania.

Now it's four years later and living close to work (and being pretty well-connected to the net at all times) has done more to staunch the creative flow than anything else. Yesterday I was at a friend's housewarming and I had the opportunity to see a lot of friends I haven't been in contact with in a long time. Blogging friends mostly, I was much closer to their circle when I'd attend SXSW; when I'd regularly make weird sites that would grace the pages of slashdot and BoingBoing; when I'd... you know... blog.

I talked about my block with Kevin Smokler, whose book sits on my nightstand even at this moment. He told me that David Mammet writes nearly two plays a week. Most of them are crap and David knows it, but rather than craft gold at every sitting Mammet chooses to write quickly, only panning the text for gold after the generation is complete.

In my heart I've always known this. While working on the redesign (and I have been, for the last several days) I took a peek in the database at all the entries that I've written and never posted, either because they weren't finished, or were waiting for some other bit of info and were eventually forgotten. Now I have experiences and have stories to share, but they always come about when I'm doing something else, and by the time I should blog it, I have other things to do. There's never that time to breathe, to acknowledge that I'm in the place and time reserved for creating personal content.

So how did I manage to write even this much, with all the distraction and pressures all around? My DSL connection is down, and there's nothing else I can do.

I suspect Ali or Ammy.

Comments?

Spamming (commentspamming, email spamming, junk-mailing, etc.) is all about economies of scale. Commentspamming itself has exploded in the last two years because commentspammers have identified the proper URLs and methods for sending to different types of blogging software. If you use Movable Type for example, your comment entry form probably has the parameters of the default installation, so it's trivial for someone to write software where they simply add in your site's URL to their target list and their spamming software does the rest, adding comment after comment after comment.

Though I wrote Fury's blogging software from scratch, when I decided to add comments four years ago I took a public domain PHP text-file solution and plugged it in to my own code. Fast and easy to be sure, but once every blog became a target it was only a matter of time before spammers wrote a plug-in for my little comment program. Where a year ago I never got commentspam and six months ago I would get about 10 spam comments a day, last Friday I got 960 commentspams, and that's pretty normal. I regularly get about a thousand a day. It's time to do something about it.

Like I said before, it's all about economies of scale. It's in a spammer's interest to go after the biggest targets, the lowest hanging fruit. The first step toward freeing yourself from commentspam while still maintaining an open commenting system is to write one yourself. Don't use the same fields as everyone else and a spammer will have to do extra work to make their spamengine work with your li'l ol' blog. For most spammers it's simply not worth the effort.

I could see a cottage industry of coders who write anti-comment-spam solutions for weblogs. In a way it's a magnificent throwback to the days before standardized parts; for maximum effectiveness, each solution should be different from those before it. Taking it a step further, they should be different in different ways. It's not enough to just change field names, because sooner or later someone will make a program that recognizes the rest of your code and deduces those field names on a per-site basis. It's not enough to introduce a CAPCHA (picture containing a word that the human has to enter) because if you do it often enough it's worth a spammer's while to make an AI that can deduce your CAPCHAs (and they have).

What's needed is good old-fashioned craftsmanship. In a way, it's a great way to hone one's coding skills. I started down that path tonight by making a small change to my own comments engine. I don't expect this patch will keep the spammers at bay forever, and I'd be disappointed if it did, because then I'd lose the opportunity to keep innovating against them.

The trouble with writing this post, of course, is that it's a gauntlet of sorts. By declaring that I will out-innovate, my dare turns their attentions to me and makes my work that much harder. To that, I only have three things to say:

1. Commentspamming a Google employee's blog is about as smart as abusing the sherrif's daughter.
2. The spamfighting enhancements I incorporate into this site will only be implemented on this site and no others, so the efforts you expend to defeat them will only afford you the opportunity to spam this one site, and no others.
3. All comments on Fury are served on pages that are blocked from all of the web crawlers via the robots.txt specification. Even if you do manage to succeed in commentspamming, it's not going to do you any good and while you don't care about a few dead-ends when spamming half a million blogs, it's counterproductive defeating a system when you have nothing to gain in the first place.

In the last 90 minutes this change has blocked 67 commentspams. It's a good start.

Comments?

The latest photography meme is to take a picture of what's behind your computer monitor and make it your desktop picture. In addition to what a cool effect this is, it's another example of the power of Flickr, that I could just go there and find a collection of transparent desktop pictures that people have made in the last two days. I recommend the slideshow.

Also of note is that Flickr has added a 'popular tags in the last day' and 'last week' list, so you can get a sense of what's going on in the blogging world, and see the photographic evidence. It makes things like today's Playstation Portable release into a communal event.

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I wrote two blog posts about Yahoo today, but decided not to post either of them because neither one ended up saying what I set out to say, and both sounded strangely bitter.

I have to say, I admire Zawodny and Scoble because while I often disagree with their views, they're very true to their own feelings, even when they may favor 'the competition' or be critical of their employer.

I think the biggest difference here is that I feel closer to the general population at Google than I ever did at Yahoo. I feel completely free to go to anyone's office and talk to them about what I like or don't like about their product, so I'm less likely to go to my blog and spout off when I could just as easily go straight to the people that made the thing, and know my words will have a real impact on the product. I never felt that at Yahoo, where business units were feifdoms and the competition was all too often the people on the other side of your floor.

Damnit. I did it again.

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The rumors are true: Bloglines is now part of the Big Butler. The grand internet land grab continues...

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I feel the urge to blog something, I don't know why.

There's this corner on the way from my cube to the snack center where I can trim four or five steps from my path if I walk through the 'copy center', an oompa-loompa tv-studio white-linolium flourescent copy room/avenue that cuts the corner. Every time (every single time) I walk this path I have to make the decision 'do I cut through or do I go around the corner?' On one hand, if I cut through and someone else tries cutting through at the same time from the other direction it's a slightly narrow hall for two people. Also, if someone's actually performing printing, copying, or faxing tasks, I'm getting in their way. This is the most minor decision I'm conscious of making several times a day, and yet it lingers.

Yesterday I was walking the path (I went around because I was carrying lunch back to my desk from the cafe. I always go around when I'm carrying food (I've found that my subconscious doesn't count chai as food) because food is messy and the room is clean) and I was thining about how I never blog stuff, and how I could blog this. No. That's stupid. There's a whole subscript of things in my life that are only of marginal interest to me and don't affect anyone else at all. That would be the worst kind of thing to blog, worse even than talking about having gone to see a movie with friends the night before. At least that matters to the friends.

Then I did a mental accounting (ironically due to time afforded by the extra 4 or 5 steps I had to take back to my cube) of the posts I'm more proud of, specifically the Laundry Story, and how there's a Seinfeldesque quality to blogging about nothing.

I ought to go blog about the corner, I thought.

But looking back, it looks like I blogged about the second-order experience of blogging about nothing.

This post is less than zero.

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One of the most interesting blogging-related queries you can do on Google, Why I blog gives a great deal of insight into both our online culture and the nature of our individual needs for self-expression.

I've been questioning my own blogging needs a great deal lately, as a result of having not blogged very much in the last few months. It's not the other way around, deliberately weaning myself off the blog or anything; rather it's that many of the outlets satisfied by blogging over the last five years are being satisfied in other ways.

As Fury's audience has both broadened and become more focused (more people, but falling into sharper distinct buckets (eg work people, friends, google searchers, family, and randoms) I have more trouble self-justifying posts I think about writing. I don't necessarily want to talk to people at work about random dermatological issues (not that there are any, really. Just a hypothetical example). I don't want to talk about upcoming vacations because now that I own my own house, I somehow feel that a cyberstalker breaking in and stealing from me is a greater violation than if they broke into a place I rented, and as the holidays approach, I'm reluctant to have the more personal aspects of my life become kitchen-gossip when my family comes together for Christmas next week.

All in all, I'm coming to terms with the fact that most people who I read online have either migrated toward the livejournal model intended to disseminate relevant life stuff to friends for whom it is actually relevant, or those more highbrow bloggers who have, whether they've noticed it or not, excised their literal personal life from their online presence, showing themselves only through inductance, choosing to pass on this interesting thing on the web, or providing social commentary on this other thing that happened to someone else.

I'm not sure where I fit. Fury has always been about a lack of focus, and whenever I try to narrow the blog, even if it's by splitting it, readers have said the wandering nature is one of the more appealing things about the blog.

So, in the spirit of wantering, I leave you without a conclusion. I hope you'll comment with whatever thoughts this meander sparks in you. I'm still working on the next iteration of Fury, which will be as drastic an information-architecture redesign as it is a visual shift. I'm hoping to make a good balance between the 'inverse-chronological log of compositions' and the more static structured heirarchical site. Think of it as the stage that follows the path from archive-by-month to categories to multiple-categories (or tags). Anyhow, hopefully I'll be able to stop rambling soon and once again produce meaningful work.

Till then, it's your turn...

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I love that my friends have weblogs. I love it because I keep in touch with friends who might otherwise slip out of mind for weeks at a time. I love it because reading about each others' lives helps us keep the common experience so important to keeping relationships alive across distance and time. I love it because there's nothing like sitting in a cabin on a cruise ship coming into port (and cellphone range), logging in to Bloglines on my Treo, and seeing a close friend's blog post with a title like this: There's really nothing like vomiting on your own toes in a BART station to make you feel like an alcoholic. Then, for completeness, the very next post was from Ammy's blog: And then there was the flu.

Blacksheep insists that she was 'with alcohol' and not 'with virus' but I'm going to ask her how she feels today. To top it all off, at the time of reading these posts I was 'with seasickness' but not to so large a degree that my own blog needed adding to the annals of upchuckiness.

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Blogger suffers burnout.

Don't worry, it's not me. Stories need to be told, and so I'll tell them one by one.

My blogmind is just waking up again.

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A freelance journalist from the UK flies to Los Angeles to do an article for the Guardian, and ends up with a very different story when she is imprisoned for 26 hours and deported for not having a little-known journalist visa.

The idea of deporting someone for not having the proper paperwork is annoying, though not reprehensible, but her experiences of being treated like a criminal are terribly worrisome. Is this the cost of promoting democracy around the world? What happens when immigration officials tag webloggers as de-facto journalists?

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As I constantly iterate on the design of Fury in my head, I'm influenced here and there by things I read or anecdotal experiences I have. Today's post by Phiipp Lenssen, Context, not Navigation, is having a big impact on the virtual-Fury in my head.

Most importantly, it resonates with my awareness that the experience and motivations of the everyday reader are completely different than the google visitor, and the look and feel should reflect that.

Categories were all the rage, and are de rigeur for most blogs nowadays, but they don't scale well at all. They tend to work best when the branching factor is constant, that is when there are roughly as many items in a category as there are are categories in total. Another way of putting it is, if each post is only in one category, then your number of categories should be roughly sqrt(number of posts). This doesn't scale well when you reach 2000 posts and 45 categories, with 45 posts in each category. I actually have 91 categories, because I'm inefficient, and because many posts are in multiple categories, and, well, I am a freak.

Anyhow, the article's very thought-provoking, and I'll have to see how it impacts my twin desires to further granualize and consolidate Fury's organizational structure. I should talk more about this soon. Maybe I'll even have a demo.

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It's so frustrating when webloggers ask questions but don't facilitate a way for users to provide the answer. Today's example compliments of Dave:

Dave Winer: "Google knows I'm in the Netherlands. This is irritating. I may be in the Netherlands, but I don't speak Dutch. How do I tell it to stop being so smart and just give me Google-As-Usual for a guy from the US who likes the Mets."

Dave's blog doesn't support reader comments and doesn't appear to contain his email address. A feedback-email page (three clicks away, it appears) to contact the Blog author yields a 'relaying denied' failure after I tried to submit.

Dave, I hope you get this. In answer to your question, you click on the link that says "Google.com in English".

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I now have 90 sites in my daily (nee multi-hourly) RSS readthrough. At the moment they're all in a flat heirarchy except for a folder of sites pertaining to Gmail (Battelle, outer-court, etc.) and I've been meaning to sort them into folders by topic, 'friends', 'blogosphere', 'news' etc., but I just realized the important categorization I should make is 'sites where I'm expected to have read every post' and everything else.

For example, I have about 14 friends who, when they post on their blogs, have the same expectation that their friends will have read the post as if they had sent the post in email to the friends. While skimming through the roughly 400 posts a day, it would be nice if I had this 'must' list so I could stay in low gear in one folder, then return to 'skim' gear for the rest.

Then again, maybe I should set up Bloglines to email new items in the 'must' blogs to me, where I can filter them to a 'friendblogs' label and address them as if they really were emails sent to me.

This would also let me search past posts, restricted either by label, by specific friend, or both, so I can 'catch up' quickly when I missed something important...

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So I've been good for the past couple days, setting aside some time in the evenings for project time. I have so many cool things that I want to build, update, or expand on, that it's been crippling for the last few years. Loads of creativity don't mesh well with a gnat's attention span.

Nevertheless, I've been refocusing, telling myself "yes, and we'll get to that new idea when it's turn comes" and concentrating on the oldest of my projects. I should have something out by the end of the week, if I get another couple evenings of work in on it.

Then of course there's also all the things I want to blog. The real problem is that I now read, via RSS or otherwise, over 100 sites daily, above and beyond the computing I do at work. I have this tide that flows in and out on roughly an annual cycle, flowing between being a consumer of information and being a publisher.

Inside there's this concern that if I take my fingers off the heartbeat of the blogosphere it'll run off without me, but at the same time I'm too busy counting beats to report my findings. Then there's the worry that a reporter of findings just becomes one more bare wall in the blogworld's already hollow echo chamber.

New content, fresh content, content from outside the digital realm...

Anyhow, I'm hot to finish this project, but I've also got to run to work. I have almost as many meetings as fingers today. If I'm destined to have those numbers equate, I wouldn't mind another few meetings.

Hope everyone local's enjoying the weather, and I hope those not in California are enjoying the promise that the arrival of Spring bestows, even if it's still, as yet, a promise.

Comments?

Hot on the heels of releasing her photo site, Rachel (aka 'the grrlfriend') has finished construction of her weblog at phoenixfeather.net.

Cool design (getting cooler all the time), great photography, prose, and all the features Ben and Mena can churn out.

Of course she's also got an RSS feed, and I encourage all of you to subscribe. Rachel's turning into a more frequent personal blogger than I am, and if you read both, then we don't have to do double-duty posting on the same things, though I'm sure we sometimes will.

Go there now and read about our trip to Death Guild's 11th anniversary party, complete with photos of me dancing in the cage.

Yes, really. Go. Now.

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Wired has an interesting article on lack of attribution in weblogs, and how many large blogs 'steal' ideas from smaller blogs without giving them attribution.

This certainly happens, and with the rising popularity of RSS feeds, it's easier and easier to read a few hundred blogs a day and pass along the interesting content, without attribution. For many sites, like Metafilter and BoingBoing, this is exactly the point, though Cory (Boingboing) does an exemplary job at citing sources. Since I'm currently working on building out my own 'meta-site' this is a subject of particular interest to me.

The argument's failing, and I freely admit that I need to dive deeper to determine whether it's a weak point of the article or of the underlying research, is that it assumes webloggers predominantly get their content from other weblogs. While that's often true, it's certainly not always the case.

Take for example the 'furry germs' example given in the Wired article: The author claims this is an example of a blog meme with a point blog source and dozens of copycaters blogging it on their own site, without attribution to the original blogger. This is absolutely not the case.

Having blogged about the "plushie microbes" four weeks ago myself, I know exactly where it came from: A monthly advertisement sent out to Think Geek customers. The Wired article's argument is that the specific term "furry germs" is a unique identifier, proving that any two bloggers using the words have the same blog source. In fact, the term "furry germs" is a fabricated example for the article that, at the time of this writing, doesn't exist anywhere on the web except for in the Wired article and in this one (so far as Google can see). More likely the actual example is the term "plush microbes", the term that is used in the marketing email, and on ThinkGeek's site itself.

It's small wonder that bloggers would use the same term when writing about the product, and isn't any evidence of 'blogstealing'. On the contrary, this example raises awareness that we, as bloggers, use the whole world as our source, and that often the same part of the world is shown to many of us at the same time (e.g. through advertisements, the news, terrorist acts).

It's only natural that advertising would raise awareness of a new product, and the far more accurate implication that bloggers don't feel compelled to cite a source when the source is an advertisement that shows up in their inbox is much less insidious than saying we all read each other's weblogs to pilfer content and self-aggrandize.

Just for fun, it might be interesting to have 'attribution week' in the blogosphere, where we carefully document the source of every idea we blog, in as detailed a form as possible.

I propose the week of April 18th, when we're all done with taxes.

[thanks to Amit Asaravala at Wired News, a member of the Terra-Lycos Network]

Comments?

It's funny that most of the unsung (or at least unposted) content I have is in the form of memes and links, the things that weblogs were 'supposed' to be, before the term matured into much more.

As part of the trifurcation of Fury, I'm going to split off the Meme-o-matic into its own, entirely separate site. I'll probably keep the sidebar here, driven by an RSS (or maybe Atom?) feed, but will have another site, updated several times a day, for slightly more robust pointing.

I'm looking to BoingBoing and Gizmodo as examples of this genre of blog. It's really more of an aggregator than a community, and probably won't have comments.

So now, while I've learned the hardships of desgning by committee, I'd like input on which domain to use for this new site. The candidates are designfoo.com, outgeek.com, memeomatic.com(/net/org) or voxen.net.

Ready? Set... Opine!

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Sometimes I'm blocked by a lack of direction. It's not so much ambivalence as a tugging of several ropes at once, going nowhere.

Reminded by Danah's blog, Apophenia, I often ask myself these same three questions about Fury:

1. What is the writer trying to say?
2. Who is the writer speaking to?
3. What level of expertise is the writer trying to assume?

I really need three different blogs. Maybe then I'd write in at least one of them.

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It's tempting when designing a page to just design 'above the fold', that is, the things that the user sees without scrolling. The term comes from the newspaper industry, where half of the front page is 'above the fold' and the less important half is 'below the fold'.

It's interesting because in newspapers it's a 50/50 split. In tri-fold letters it's a 33/33/33 split. On web pages though, especially weblogs, the majority of content usually exists below the fold.

Sippey gives a great viewpoint of exactly what several popular weblogs look like if 'the fold' didn't exist. It's got me thinking about how the value and function of sidebar navigations changes as one descends into the depths of a page.

Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame) uses this perspective extremely well in his online comics, starting from the beginning.

My mind boggles at the possibility of melding Scott's comic model with the inverse chronology of a weblog...

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Happy holidays to everyone! Ugh, so much to do. Holiday shopping is all but done, with hyoooge props to Rachel, for taking on more than her share of the joint gifts!

I'm sitting in the 'old house' in Carmel, typing in what is essentially a renovated stable, bought by my uncle 30 years ago and serving as the base for the 'main house' built a decade later. It's after 1am and I'm sitting in front of the TV watching Runaway Bride, sitting next to my cousin Ingrid who's talking on the cellphone. After 11pm or so, this is the only place in the house for the night-owls to congregate.

So now I'm rambling. The feeling here in our 18-year tradition of Christmas is clearly different for my dad's passing nearly six months ago. He was a ringleader, an instigator. His absence has created a bit more chaos, a bit less coalescence of activity. Of course, such words don't tell a tenth of it, but that's not what I want the post to be about.

We got DSL here in the house for the first time this year. Without even a second phone line, past years found the techies in our 30+ person group up after midnight to camp out on the dialup line. Now thanks to DSL and a wireless base station, the 6 or so of us with laptops, for better or worse, are wired. Now Christmas doesn't offer a respite from email. Well, maybe I'll have some sort of moratorium tomorrow.

I'm about to go to sleep, but I just wanted people to know I'm still around during the inevitable holiday slow season.

Oh, and I want to give shouts out to Mutant and Blub, holed up at home. I hope you're not floaters by the time I get home.

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So there are things I keep meaning to post, but never get around to. Some are a few weeks old, others may have been sitting in the hopper for a year. This week is Backlog Week, and now all that stuff is going to get posted! (The stuff I've finished and just haven't posted, that is. I still have projects that need to be implemented, of course.)

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Total (approximate) number of visits to the front page since October, 1999: 424,443

Total number of words written in Fury posts since October, 1999 (excluding comments (and this post)): 350,828

Visits per word written on Fury: 1.21

I don't know if I wish this number were higher or lower.

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So with the rash of blog comment spammers (where Movable Type based weblogs are particularly succeptable) I have all the more reason to implement my new commenting system. I have it all spec'ed out in my head, and it's my next Fury project, hopefully to be done in the next few days.

As usual when I change Fury, I strive to solve a problem at the same time as increasing functionality, so there will be some other very cool features to the commenting system as well.

You can see them all implemented by next week at the latest, or you can wait a few months until they get copied into Movable Type, Livejournal, and the other main blogging tools. :-)

'till then, feel free to ignore the silly spammers who can't even type a url right.

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So I have a confession: Like several of my friends this year, last month I joined FlyLady, a mailing list whose whole intent is to help you keep your home clean and under control.

It's been funny, being subscribed to a list that sends you 20 messages a day, giving you support, tasks, and ideas, when I was still living in Ammy and Rick's guest bedroom, but they were energizing to read nonetheless.

One of the things they write in nearly every message, 20 times a day, is the mantra: "You are not behind! I don't want you to try to catch up; I just want you to jump in where we are. O.K.?" As little direct impact FlyLady has had on my apartment cleaning (because first comes the unpacking, rebuilding, sorting, etc., then the maintenance cleaning) I've taken the quote to heart re: blogging.

I have a lot of cool ideas. When I used to ride the train every day I'd get to document at least one neat idea every morning or afternoon. Now I have a scrap of paper in my wallet that's rapidly running out of room, and just knowing I'm so far behind makes it hard to even start blogging things, because I feel I have all this chaff to work through before I get to write about today's stuff. And so: "I am not behind! I don't want to try to catch up; I will just jump in where I am." Of course, by doing so, I get to go back and blog the things I wanted to, after I release the pressure of not having blogged by blogging what I want to and not playing catch-up.

Paradoxical, nu?

And I know I've been blogging last week, but a lot of it is 'blogging' in the sterile crosslinking sense, not 'this is what I do and think' sense which I'm self-centered enough to think is more interesting than just pointing at politics and asking people to discuss.

So anyhow, I'm just jumping in where I am.

( Oh yeah, and the Alaska pictures are coming... :-) )

Comments?

I watch my traffic logs. It's one of those things bloggers don't really talk about. There are those who try to keep their blogs quiet, a small publishing venue for friend and family. There are those who don't care who reads, but aren't out there trying to get the world to read them. These are the ones who don't look at their server logs, don't have webmonitor bugs on their pages, and don't really look into the audience while they're speaking to the world. Less catwalk, more mountaintop.

I'm one of the other kinds of bloggers; the ones who have their stats page bookmarked, the ones who can tell you without skipping a beat that their weekend traffic is 2/3rds of their weekday traffic, the ones who feel a pang during Thanksgiving and Christmas because they know they'll see it as a dip in their weekly traffic.

There are a lot more of us than you'd think. It's one of those things a lot of bloggers do, but none of them really talk about. What's a lot of traffic? 10 people a day? 100? 10,000? It's like talking salaries. If you do it to make yourself feel better, you'll easily find someone who's got you beat, and so much for that (strangely, I don't feel that way about salaries, but I figure some people do so maybe it's a useful analogy).

Back to traffic though. It's tough. Keeping the daily watches on where people come from, and how many people come by gives me a good read on the pulse of the site. I know that it takes one particularly good story to increase my daily traffic by 80%, but that it'll fade back to normal within 4 days. It takes about three weeks of consistant above-average content to start building my regular rolling average, and about two weeks of poor or no content for the numbers to start dropping, but when they drop, they have inertia.

I have two lists, one in my pocket, one in my head, of things to do on the site to double my traffic. Part of me wants to do it for the egotism, part for the knowledge that I must be doing a better job of content creation if I get more visitors.

But the other part worries.

Traffic is more than eyeballs. It's people. One surprising and valuable thing I learned these last couple years is that simmering the pot makes for a great soup of users. If I post things that might get a little bit of attention outside the regular readership, they'll come in and take a look around, read the comments, post a little, and stay if they feel like this is a place for them. This tends to create a relatively like-minded group.

On the other hand, when there's something that gets a lot of attention, a lot of traffic, the whole culture of the site gets overexposed for a few weeks or a month. First time visitors read the comments of other first-time visitors and the maturity of the site folds in half. Some of the regular readrs get discouraged and drop off, and some of the newbies stick around, thinking this is the norm and liking it. This is a full boil, and it can scaldan otherwise great soup.

I've been reluctant to bring the site up from a simmer, mostly for fear of scalding the pot, and to a lesser extent because I'm worried of failure; that I'll do amazing things and nobody will care.

I'm working on solutions to the first, one of which is to create less tenuous ties with you the reader. I'm working on making very easy logins, (possibly passwordless) and letting anyone leave comments, but those comments only appear on the site once they click a link in an email the site sends to their stated email account. The email account can be totally anonymous on the site, but it'll stop the user who just wants to graffiti, or who cares too little about their own content to click the one-time verification link. This site-reader relationship would have a lot of advantages to the reader as well, but we'll get to that later.

Another possibility is something more along the lines of Derek's POWlist. I love ths list because sometimes Derek's site falls off my radar and once a month or so I'll get an email from the list with a particular good or important post, and I face the decision of unsubscribing, visiting the site, or keeping with the status quo of getting these periodic updates. I love it because it's push without being pushy, and I can't even tell how many readers I've lost from Fury when their computer crashed, they switched browsers and lost their bookmarks, or gradually forgot to check Fury, when they never really intended to leave. It's a wonderfully soft way of keeping friends.

I want to cut loose with some bigger projects that would get attention from outside the blogging community. I'm sure that coming across AOLiza articles from the Wall Street Journal while moving yesterday is no small part of this resurgence. So I'm thinking about the best and fastest ways to cement the readers I have, in a worse-comes-to-worst eventuality, I can whisper to you "Psst! Let's ditch these new folks and make it like it was! The new site's over here!)

Or I could just put the new stuff on one of the domains I've owned for years and haven't gotten around to utilizing yet.

Anyhow, it's another late night at the Googleplex, and I should probably call it a night. I'm deciding whether to go to my new place with my newly-purchased bedding, make my bed, and sleep in the new place that feels so empty of both stuff and spirit, though an excellent canvas for both, given a little time, or trod over to Rick and Ammy's, where my toiletries and their guest bed are.

Heh. Ammy? I'm comin' over. The new place will wait one more day. Just so long as I put some things away before the second wave comes from Pittsburgh.

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Am.. blogger.. therefore... must... post!

I'll confess it's been hard to get back into the blogging mentality. Maybe it's that I've been holding my thoughts too close to my chest, or that I have such an amount of things to do, or that with all the emotional colors in my spectrum so intensified, not blogging is the equivalent of mental sunglasses.

Whatever the reason, I'm back to the blog. Maybe one of the things I like about living alone is that I'm not really alone. my 'alone time' is really time for the blog, and those who I only communicate virtually, be it through the web, IM, email, or the telephone.

Right now anyone I'm going to communicate with will be via sleep.

Night, night, and good luck to Karen tomorrow or Wednesday with her Google interview. In the words of the MCP: "All my functions are now yours. Take'em."

End of line.

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Know that I suck.

I plan to stop sucking tonight. Got one of those backlogs of too many things to write, making initiating a daunting task...

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You know, I have about 30 DVDs, and I rarely go through them and sit down to watch one. I guess with a few exceptions, most don't have replayability for me...

Most of them I'll want to see again maybe every two years or so, even (sometimes especially) the movies I really, really love. Tonight I pulled off the shelf one of my top ten, that gets more interesting each time I watch it.

Pump Up the Volume should be watched by everyone who's ever kept a weblog, or wondered why we do. It predates the web by a good long way, but the message is powerful, and more than anything else I've read or seen, gives a convincing why to self-publishing on the web. I won't try to explain here.

If you haven't seen it, go rent it. If you have seen it, but it was a while ago, watch it again. You might get as much of a retrospective kick out of it as I did when I watched Tron after 10 years and the onset of an internet revolution, only to find it more relevant (and relevatory) than ever.

Does anyone else have a movie that they watched a decade later and got something completely different out of it? Is this the place where you can finally admit how much more sense The Big Chill makes now that you're older?

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I think I mentioned something like this last year, but I find it funny that out of Google's sites related to fury.com lists 15 weblogs, 13 are friends of mine I've met in real life.

It's slightly comforting though that these are almost all people I met through my weblog. Google hasn't found my 'real world first' friends... Yey, anyhow.

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March 2003: Google buys Pyra (Blogger)
April 2003: Six Apart (Movable Type) unveils TypePad
August 2003: Yahoo buys Six Apart

Just you wait...

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I have way too much latency in posts. Things happen to me, and I ruminate, think of ways to relate them to the greater experience of life, decide what to blog, but then something else happens and the post is relegated to a pocket of neurons in my brain, never to escape.

Karen, on the other hand, is a good, responsible blogger. I'm glad I've spent the last week with her for a lot of reasons, but the relevant one right now is that she has been giving a good day-by-day account of our Los Angeles adventures, from Magic Mountain to the Oscars to Citywalk to movies, and all the rest. So without further ado, I invite you all to her blog to check out what we've been up to. ("Check out to what we've been up"? I figure I should watch my dangling participles when linking to the site of a writer.)

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Irony abounds today as Dave Linabury, owner and operator of Davezilla and Fucked Weblog, discovered that his ISP had not only not performed a backup of his server in six weeks, but proceeded to take that server down and reformat the hard drive.

Dave has asked that his blogging friends make mention of this, as he finds a new ISP and begins to recreate his sites to be faster, stronger, and better backed up than before. Davezilla is down for the next few weeks, but will return. When it does I'll doubtless make mention of it here.

The funny part is that Fucked Weblog is the perfect site to make pronouncements like this, if only it wasn't one of the victims of formatting.

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I'm sitting on IRC, watching the IRC simulcast of the 2003 Bloggie Awards, being held in Austin at SXSW...

I'm up against Metafilter, Kuro5hin, and a few others, so my chances are slim, but here's to watching, anyhow!

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Looking back five years from now, this will probably be the single event that will have changed the face of personal communications more than any other event in 2003.

Google has purchased Pyra Labs, providers of Blogger.

Oh, and I'm not sure what my intellectual property dealio is with Yahoo, so please don't ask me why Yahoo didn't buy Pyra a year ago when I was UI designer for GeoCities and Pyra was inches from insolvency. It's a painful memory anyhow...

Okay, to elaborate more, I think Google is the perfect Pyra buyer because their user-driven mentality is right in line with Evan's mentality. Google Labs is full of cool ideas that three-person Google teams come up with, and the ones that get a lot of user attention and use get funded further and get ramped up for mainstream use. It makes perfect sense to me that Google would be attracted to the best extra-googliar example of this mentality: Blogger, the first large-scale hosted blog application.

I can't wait to see where this goes! I just wish I was a part of it.

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Looks like it's that time of year again: Nikolai's posted the finalists for the 2003 Bloggie Awards.

I completely missed the whole nominations process, living in my own little world, but apparently a bunch of you didn't miss it, as Fury got nominated for 'Best Programming of a Weblog Site,' alongside Textism, ScriptyGoddess, Metafilter, and Kuro5hin.

I remember when this happened last year I felt compelled to quickly introduce new functionality, to prove (to myself more than anyone else) that Fury was worthy of competing with MF and K5.

So of course this year's no different. I've got some functions I've been working on for a few weeks and I'm about ready to incorporate them anyhow, and the unexpected Bloggies is just a convenient motivator.

Okay, enough of that. Go vote!

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One thing I've found blogging in the last year: Too often I'll have an emotion and a seed for how to form it into a blog entry. Sometimes I'll just tell myself to remember to blog it later (hah, right) and sometimes I'll write down just enough of it so I can remember it. A scrap of paper in my wallet, a sticky note on my desktop, virtual or physical, sometimes my hand, and sometimes money, if that's all available. Worse is when I leave myself a message on voicemail, because I never go back and check my saved messages, to gather the seeds and grow them into posts.

The main problem is that the particular emotional passion is fleeting, and if I hope to capture it in prose, it has to be in the moment I'm experiencing it.

To go on a slight tangent, this is one of the reasons I really liked the Two Towers: While most sequels call on actors to reprise their roles, and the actors review the original work to 'get back into character,' the three LotR movies were all completely shot before any of the cast got a chance to see themselves on an an edited reel. This (and the fact that they weren't shooting linearly, and might shoot a Return of the King scene the day before shooting a Fellowship scene at the same location) meant that the actors had to call on the memory of themselves actually playing their characters, not the memory of them watching themselves playing their characters. In a sense, it's the difference between making a second identical printout of a document, instead of just photocopying the original and getting a fuzzier copy.

Tangent done. My point is that trying to write a blog post based on a scrap of paper means trying to recreate the thought instead of simply relating it. No doubt this has resulted in a few posts with a softer focus than I'd have liked, and a good number of posts that simply were never written.

One of my New Years resolutions for 2003 is to be better about this. If I don't have time to write a full and complete 1000-word post on something, I'll just put down what I can. On the flipside, I rarely edit my posts nowadays, even the ones that are upwards of 2000 words. Since I'm restructuring the site to make themed content (dotcom storytime, project posts, movie reviews, etc) easier to find, both for the regular visitor and the googlists, I'm also trying to create different quality levels. I need to know that posts don't have to be perfect (or even necessarily cogent) to go up on Fury, while at the same time I should have a higher standard above a 'post' more like an 'article,' 'story,' or 'paper' that stands well on its own.

But more than anything this post is a requiem for those posts that were and yet will never be. It's hard enough to write from the heart; writing from a memory and an obligation to your former self is a lot harder.

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I feel the obligatory need to post something today.

Dickens Fair was great, danced a lot, ran errands in Berkeley, came home, and will be going out to Gaskells Ball in about an hour.

I got so many warm fuzzies today, and I'm not even at the Ball yet. It's a good day.

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This post made my day. Read the comments to understand why.

Actually, lunch with Dawn made my day. But this was great dessert.

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Wow. real-life blogging emotion can come from the most unexpected of places. After 25 years, I truly feel for Wesley, or rather, Wil Wheaton. After being snubbed at various reunion events, after being invited, then cut, from Star Trek Nemesis (he got the phone call from Rick Burman after his scenes were shot), now he's been surruptitiously excluded from the premiere.

Despite Wil's personal log (hah. He should call it 'personal log, stardate blah-de-blah') that's been running for over a year now, this post more than any other makes me see him as just another real person, fragile and hurt.

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In honor of a good, geographically distant friend of mine, I just have to share and say how intriguing she is. Who is she? Well, yes. that's the mystery, I suppose.

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Well, maybe not. But I could.

Combine a close lightning strike every few seconds with an apartment with ungrounded outlets (despite being 3-pronged), and the reasonable thing to do is turn off and unplug the computer, and so I have.

Let me just mention how cool my hiptop (err, 'sidekick') is, that I can, with no modification, browse to my weblog's composition page, and hammer (well, thumb) out a blog post, despite not having a computer turned on anywhere around.

There will be a hiptop review and, after spending a week or two with it, I'll be able to go into so much greater detail than I could have with 15 minutes in a conference room.

I love it, and there are a lot of areas that need improvement, almost all software, thankfully. The biggest testament for the hiptop interface may merely be that it isn't a pain to use it to compose a post of this length!

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It's no secret that Fury is highly rated on Google. For dubious reasons I'm currently the #1 entry for "Strongbad", not counting the Strongbad site itself. I also get a bunch of search requests every day for things I mention on the site in passing. Most of the time they're relevant, but now and then I notice funny bits.

For example, the ever-changing tagline just under the main page header is responsible for at least a few google hits every day. I have about 40 different taglines that are rotated randomly, and so the googlebots get a pretty wide range of them, index them, and feed them to users searching for who-knows-what.

I am, for example, currently the 6th and 7th hit for 'I am currently away from the computer'. (this is where I was going to go through a bunch of my other taglines and show how highly they're ranked, only they're not. Mweh; how anticlimactic.)

Carry on!

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Well, first off, RSS is (as of October 13th, 2002) the most recent feature addition to Fury.com. More importantly, RSS is probably the optimal way to track all the sites you read (that have RSS feeds), seeing what new items have been posted since your last visit, and getting a quick look at the headlines and excerpts before jumping over to the site.

Don't get me wrong, I like people hitting the main page as often as possible. In fact, I regularly check my stats page to see just how many front page views there are on any given day. Keeping that number up is one of my motivations for making sure I don't go more than a day or two without posting.

Nevertheless, there are better ways to surf the web than jumping back to the same sites a couple (or couple dozen) times a day, just to see if anything new has been posted. This is where RSS comes in.

It doesn't have a catchy name. In fact, there's not even agreement on what 'RSS' stands for (but the same argument rages about 'PHP', not that it's hindered PHP's popularity. Most of the descriptions you'll find if you search for 'What is RSS' are at least two years old. Worse, they're written for people who might want to create an RSS feed, instead of those who might want to read one. Even worse, it talks about RSS in terms of XML, and I know there's no faster way to make a non-geek's (or even a lot of geeks') eyes glaze over than to even mention XML.

RSS is just a protocol, a format. Several really good programs have come out recently that will take the RSS pages for the sites you regularly visit and check them once every hour (or 30 minutes, or 4 hours, or whenever you say) and it'll tell you how many new articles have been posted. Even better, it'll give you a list of those articles' titles, and even give you a description of the article. This description is usually the first paragraph or so of the article. sometime's it's a bona-fide synopsis, and sometimes it doesn't exist at all. It all depends on how the site's creator set up the RSS feed.

But a picture's worth a thousand words, and my thousand's almost up. This is a screen shot form NetNewsWire Lite, easily the best RSS viewer currently out for OS X:

NetNewsWire Lite in action...

For the PC, there are a few good RSS readers, and some not so good ones. The most recent, and the one that seems to lead the bunch in terms of looks and functionality is NewzCrawler. Trillian, the AIM/Y!M/MSN/ICQ überclient, also supports RSS feeds, and I'm sure some people using RSS feeds now probably have some good insights into good Windows clients, so you might want to check the comments.

I hope this explains a bit about what RSS feeds are, but I understand if it doesn't. I expect that this page will probably make it to the first page of hits for the google search linked above, and if that happens, I'll feel obligatged to make it a little more holisitic, so please let me know if, after reading this post you 'get it' or are still backing away slowly...

Now, if you're sold on RSS, have downloaded a reader, and are good to go, then the icon links to the RSS feed, so you can right-click (option click for macfolk) to copy the url to the clipboard, and then paste it into the appropriate spot on your RSS reader program.

Give it a go... RSS has been around for over 3 years, but only in the last three or four months has it really been starting to pick up steam. Most of the news and community sites you might read (news.com, bbc, msnbc, slashdot, metafilter, kuro5hin, wired, plastic, etc.) already have RSS feeds, as do a lot of the blogs out there, since both Blogger 2.0 and Moveable Type 2.5 offer RSS feeds with the check of a checkbox, alongside a regular blog. If your favorite site doesn't have the XML button, ask them if they have an RSS feed. You might get a pleasant surprise. If not, they might decide to check that box (or write that code, for us loners who write our own blogging software), and join the coming wave of RSS-savvy folk.

Incidentally, this also spells the official end of Metacookie because, while it was a great idea, RSS feeds have already reached the tipping point, and actually provide a better solution to the problem of keeping current with a site. That admission alone should tell you just how viable I think it is.

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So for those of you who have been watching Firefly, I feel your withdrawl pains this week as it's preempted by Major League Baseball (though I can't mind TOO much, as the Giants look to be headed to the World Series). For those of you who haven't watched Firefly yet: you really, really should.

So, in lieu of watching tonight's (non-existant) Firefly, I recommend visiting the Official Firefly Website. Like verything Joss touches, this is pretty remarkable. It's far more than just a cast gallery, episode guide, and screensaver distribution point.

Of course it has all that stuff, but the high point is that they really let you in to the production process, showing the life-cycle of episodes, from initial script drafts to special effect comp quicktimes, to changelogs, and more.

The high point is a weblog maintained by Kelly, one of the production assistants (yes, a real person). The whole thing really has the buy-in from the cast and crew, and they're smart enough to realize that letting devotees behind the curtain is vital for the initial kick the show will need to make it through the difficult first season.

So go check it out, have fun, root for the Giants while muttering under your breath that two weeks is too long to go without a joss fix, then guiltily remember that Angel is on Sunday, and Buffy is on Tuesday, so there's always some joss around the corner...

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Heya, how many of you use RSS feeds? If you do, please leave a comment here, and maybe a little bit on how you use them. I'm thinking about making an RSS feed for Fury, but I'd like a little more perspective on how people use them.

For those who don't know what RSS feeds are, or don't use them, you'll probably want to check the comments. They're really cool, and I bet a bunch of your fellow readers swear by them.

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I have so many stories and ideas, little ones and big ones, piled up, so many 'things I need to blog' that it's hard to even start on one of them, because to do so is to use some of the little time I have outside of classes and assignments to write one story, while putting off the others.

Hey, I know that doesn't make sense, but that's brain-stem logic.

I miss the trainblog. When I worked at Yahoo, I'd take the train as often as I could, usually 2-4 times per week, and every day I took the train I'd have more than an hour each way to write. It was just me, my powerbook, and the flying countryside. I was a more prolific writer than I'd ever been, partly because of the constant inspiration flying past Amtrak's huge windows and partly because I was working without a net.

My default state when I run out of things to do on the computer is to surf. I haven't used a bookmark list in a long time, so I recall URLs in my head and type them in. This usually means I sit there for a while each day, thinking 'what else haven't I checked in a while?' Sadly, it's clear that the net is too big, and my memory to perforated, for me to get anything done as long as this modality persists.

There's a folder on my powerbook, ~kfox/Documents/Writings/Trainblog, that has close to 500 posts in it (almost all of them later made it up to this page). Even after I stopped taking the train, I still put my posts in that folder, its real meaning surviving the termination of its original purpose. Late last night I was thinking about the trainblog, and how with wireless access available at home and at school, the net demons don't give me that isolation that breeds my favorite writing,. that, and I never seem to make the time.

I need to make the time.

So I'm trying something new. I've been going to sleep around 3am lately as a matter of course, watching TiVo, working on homework, surfing the net, or talking to my timeshifted leftcoast friends. I think I'll try and recreate the trainblog here in my bedroom, at 11pm every night, until I go to sleep.

I'll take my powerbook to be with me (heck, the weather's finally starting to turn, and I need something to keep me warm!) and write from 11pm until sleep. I'll only use the net to look up URLs for the stories I write.

It's either that, or start going to New York, Boston, Philly, or DC every weekend, just for the train time...

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(with apologies to Fiona Apple)

Blogging (for me) is tidal. There are times when every little thought gets blogged (had pizza today. It was good, but not enough sauce), and there are times when Fury turns into a more 'traditional' web log, full of external links, and devoid of internal epiphanies...

Sometimes it's not that things are slow internally, it's the 'if you can't do it right, don't do it at all' mentality. Every story requires back-story, until the task is just too daunting.

Don't worry. The good news is that when I start blogging every little thing, it makes it easier to blog other little things, because the foundation of context is already laid.

so I'm playing intramural volleyball in 45 minutes. We lost our first game, but we'll see what two hours of practice (and literally swollen forearms) will garner me and my teammates tonight.

And don't worry, blogging 'every little thing' doesn't mean compromising the sanctities of friendship (whatever I mean by that).

At any rate, the tide is turning. Sure I can say that, but just watch.

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I'm really starting to settle in to Pittsburgh. Not that I don't miss home, but the apartment's really come together nicely. I'm making a lot of friends, and even the weather's been cooperating, with humidity in the 30s instead of the 80s. Even so, it's supposed to be 90 degrees out today.

So in addition to the eternal classwork, this is a week of web consolidation (where have we heard that before?). As soon as I tidy my apartment, I'll shoot some video, which should give a better feeling than photos of exactly how everything's laid out, and what it's like.

I'm also working on the cross-country travellogue, starting with a brief 'farewell to the Palazzo' video I shot in my completely empty apartment, moments before Ammy and I hit the road on our journey.

Don't worry, the stories will all be told...

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It's pretty sad when you hit 'refresh' on your own blog, just to see if, somehow, new content has posted since you last read it.

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The word of the day is: Assuage.

Specifically, 'Assuage guilt."

I just got back from Columbus, Ohio, from the Buckeye Invitational Chorus competition. Mom did fabulously, as did the other 63 members of the Verdugo Hills Chorus, taking the grand prize for entertainment, boards, and overall. I'm really goad I drove out to see them. They're a really great bunch. It doesn't hurt that it serves to assuage future self-inflicted guilt for not being a good son.

Right now I'm writing to assuage my other guilt, writing on the weblog. It's really frustrating that every minute is occupied with something, most things of which are directly related to making my existence on this distant not-quite-coast habitable, both physically and emotionally. At the same time, I need to post because I want to write the trip up, day by day, and post the pictures (which I know Ammy is waiting for (even though she has other things on her mind at the moment)).

My fear is that you guys, my bit of social live that's ultra-mobile, happy to jump online for the journey, will get bored and drift off. Don't do it! Give me a couple days and real content, real stories, and real insight and imagrey (the kind where I know I'm doing something right because Trisha calls me on a sentence and asks me if I knew that sentence was great when I wrote it). It's all in me, and the strain of it bursting to come out is just even with the strain of improving my physical surroundings, not to mention spending time with Mom, who's here (helping with the aforementioned physical surroundings tasks) until Tuesday morning.

So, I hope I've successfully assuaged my blog-guilt for another day or so, but I'll only know by your comments.

It's amasing how isolation fosters insecurity. Pathetic, huh?

Oh, and my cellphone's dead. No explanation, and so far no resolution, so if you know my Pitts phone, I'll try to remember to plug the phone in when I get offline, and if you want the # and should have it, email me.

Take it easy. It's Sunday!

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Ammy posted some more trip details.

I'm still settling in to my apartment, but will be writing on Friday or Saturday, as well as organizing photo galleries.

Video editing will commence when my desktop (firewire-equipped) computer arrives via UPS. Definitely sometime next week.

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Okay, pity my lack of posting, but revel in Ammy's.

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Current Location: Chicago

Expected arrival in Pittsburgh: Sunday, around 6pm

Where's the content? Ammy and I are blogwriting on Monday morning. I'll probably be consolidating pictures and text into galleries for several days, including video when my desktop machine arrives via UPS early in the week. Day-by-day installments will be written and posted on Monday and Tuesday, with a more complete and permanent sitelet being assembled soon after.

Suffice to say at present that we saw many, many amazing things, have a lot of great pictures, and will be sharing them all as travel, sleep, and writing allow.

It's been a great week, and we're almost home (err, my new home, that is).

Oh, and that SMS message-to-my-phone thing? The handshaking between Cingular and Voicestream sucks, which in practice means that I've only received three SMS messages, but have received each of them over 12 times. (David: Yep, Georgia's a bit out of the way. Trisha: Good morning!, Dave: Legoland Rushmore? Maybe, but the one at Wall Drug is cool too. And they've got an 8-foot Jackalope, too.)

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After several days of long driving and post-midnight hotel check-ins, Ammy and I realize that the only way real blogging will happen is copilot composing, so starting tomorrow night both our blogs should have more real blow-by-blow content.

In the meantime: Still no cell service, but there should be tomorrow in Minneapolis, and I also added our stops to the 'Look Ahead' nav on the left, so you can see where we've been and where we're going!

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Okay, so after a lot of packing yesterday, today's the crunch day. Right after finishing this post I'm packing up the computer, so you know I'm getting close to leaving!

Ammy and I will be setting forth on Saturday, and I'll try to blog each day from the road, internet-access-willing. 'Data-port' is just as big a pull when deciding which 3-star Best Western or Motel 6, 8, or 9 to stay at, though my secret plan is to spend a little time every few days driving through a suburban area, wardriving for high-speed wireless access, and parking in front of someone's house while we document and check mail.

So we'll be taking the I-90 northern route, from Yellowstone on to Chicago, and we've got lots of places on our list to visit, so be sure and check back, becuase while one person drives, the other can blog. We've got digital cameras and wanderlust, and know how to use both.

So I'll be a little slow to respond to email from this moment forward until around the 11th or 12th, and if you know my cellphone number, that's the best bet.

Augh, so much nostalgia, and so little time to blog it...

Bye!

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So I haven't talked enough about it here, but I'm frantically packing up my apartment into boxes, sorting through the stuff I own, in preparation for the big move into storage, and across the country.

That's right: As those of you who take notice of the 'Look Ahead' calendar on the left, Ammy and I are starting the drive out to Pittsburgh this Saturday. The big furniture move will be happening on Thursday, and I should have everything in boxes by EOD Wednesday.

I still have some important errands to run though, and I've consolodated several of them into one sojourn to the South Bay today. I'm meeting up for a last huzzah with ex-co-workers at Yahoo, I need to get my transcript for the Spanish class I took at De Anza last quarter, so that I might deliver it by hand to the College of Letters and Science here in Berkeley, and finally (ahem) graduate, before I start in on that Masters degree, I have to go to Fry's and fulfil a shopping list that includes, among other things, a spindle or two of CD-Rs to back up my system, and a car power adapter for my Powerbook... And I'm going for a las