I programmed this blog at Bureau Blank for Steve Goldsmith and the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
This is one of my best professional achievements! We built the whole platform from the ground up; meaning an extensive custom CMS backend that integrates between several related sites.
And because HKS has a staff of good people to keep the site growing, it’s getting a lot of traffic and attention.
I want to draw attention to a new addition to the blogroll at left right: Dear Leader Blog. Take, for example, his crush-manifesto on the subject of Rachel Maddow. Excerpt:
I think Maddow-crushing has more to do with the fact that she has intelligence, integrity, and most of all a strong point of view, which makes her so radically different from the dominant species of lame-brained fembots and money-honeys that men have grown so accustomed to being offered by TV producers. I think most of the women on cable TV are probably more familiar with what it feels like walking on Mars than expressing an original thought or opinion.
There’s a lot more, check it out!
The new WordPress is very nice! It’s almost a compete redesign.
How fresh is this thing on the sidebar? The six tiles are my most-listened-to artists of the week. The source data is courtesy of my last.fm music profile, which monitors the music I play in iTunes. The WordPress plugin is written by Gary Fenstamaker.
This is an example of the awesomeness of open source software and, in particular, the developers in the WordPress community.
(I should note that if you have a non-WordPress blog, you can still get the widget because the author also provides a standalone PHP version.)
I mean really? So many things are new right now on this here blog.
On top of all that, I think there will really be more content. WordPress makes it really easy to post. You can even use applications on your desktop or iphone to make posts!
Plus? It was pretty fun to do this little project! I got kinda obsessed with it on Saturday night and pretty much worked straight through on it until now. I love doing stuff like that.
Sorry people—I know this blog has been the opposite of exiting lately! Change is on the way though. And there’s a way you can help out: please update your feed! I’m going to be switching to a new platform soon and this feed will soon stop working. The address to which you should subscribe now is http://feeds.feedburner.com/jrdc.
What’s that? A new platform you ask? Why, yes! I’m tired of my DIY blogging platform, and I think that WordPress is the way to go. What does that mean for you? More posts! And comments! And probably some other stuff too. But you’ll never know if you don’t update your feed!
This is the first and last post about politics ever on this blog, and it’s only to say that I’m fed up with it, and am no longer going to follow it. I stopped watching the Sunday talk shows a few years ago, and recently I unsubscribed from all my news feeds (eg Yahoo, NYTimes) and also from political blogs that follow the news, such as Atrios, ThinkProgress and AmericaBlog. The only way I’m going to read the Times is if BoingBoing, Kottke or Gawker links to it.
Why? Nothing could be more frivolous and deceptive than the traditional, international news freakshow. Things that become ‘issues’ of the day (I’m thinking of Jeremiah Wright here because that’s what’s on right now) almost always turn out to be the exact opposite of the story that’s presented as news. Of course, you have to read the story to the jump page. (Usually I find the fragment of truth that invalidates the whole thing in the third-to-last paragraph of the story.)
No traditional news organization is exempt from this. People tend to blame Fox and say that NPR or the BBC is better. Well, it’s not. A comedy show on Comedy Central better informs its audience than any of them, every single time.
So, why the announcement? Because I think you should too! Strip that negativity away and you’ll be so much happier. Read the papers if you must. But keep it to yourself, ok?
