Everything In Between

For those who have been wondering what is keeping me so busy these days, the answer is that I’m working on the final stages of a book that is getting published as one of three co-authors. Not only am contributing three chapters (the technical chapters on (X)HTML and CSS, specifically), but I am also technically reviewing the entire book.

My co-authors on the book, called Foundation Web Standards Foundation Website Creation (you can pre-order now) and published by Friends of ED, an Apress company, are Jonathan Lane of Industry Interactive, Inc. and Joe Lewis, who blogs at Sanbeiji.com. I’m not going to say much more until after the book is released in late July.

For the eager, here’s the description of the book posted on the Friends of ED website:

Foundation Website Creation explores the process of constructing a web site from start to finish. There is more to the process than just knowing HTML! Designers and developers must follow a proper process to flush out goals and objectives and determine requirements both prior to, and during project development.

Large Web projects are rarely completed by a single person. Producers, project managers, designers, developers, writers, and editors all play critical parts in a project’s evolution. This book provides an overview of the entire process, and also shows project development from the perspective of these different roles. It introduces the key concepts and duties performed by every member of such a team, and gives you the skills necessary to tackle projects like a professional.

It’s quite exciting getting a book out, and it’s quite a bit more work than I’d have ever originally thought. That being said, it’s extremely rewarding. There’s a lot more work I need to do on it between now and the time it gets released to publishing, so, well…back to work I go.

Now you all know where I’ve been spending my time writing.

I think it’s important—for a lot of reasons—to let people do what they want rather than to try to force people to do what you think is right. Ning is a company that gets it:

In a nutshell, we aren’t pro-porn, but we are pro-freedom.

To prevent porn, you have to take an activist stand against freedom of expression — you have to get in there and judge content, judge people, judge intent, and take action based on your judgments. I would never criticize a company for doing so, but I don’t want to do that, and we as a company don’t want to do that.

We think a better approach is to let people fundamentally do what they want, as long as it isn’t illegal and doesn’t otherwise violate our terms of service.

A heartfelt applause to Marc and everyone at Ning for putting their user’s personal choices ahead of their own. It’s not only good social justice, it’s excellent business.

Marc even provides some history:

From the very beginning of the Internet as a mass medium, porn has been present, and all of the Internet companies that have come before us have had to figure out where they stand.

[…]

[D]uring my time at AOL, I was fascinated to see how AOL dealt with porn. AOL had to balance two facts. One, their entire marketing thrust to be a mass market service meant that they had to come across as — and be — highly family-friendly. And in fact, they did a lot of work with parental controls and other features to make sure that families would use AOL safely. But the other fact was that a huge part of AOL’s actual usage all through the 90’s was for adult content — chat rooms, bulletin boards, and all the rest.

In practice, I think they balanced those two facts quite well — AOL could be used as a family-friendly service or as an open environment for people to do whatever they want, and it worked quite well for everyone.

This is a model that Yahoo then followed, and Google more recently.

Yahoo has always had an enormous amount of adult activity and material — some estimates are that as much as half of Yahoo Groups’ activity is adult in nature, for example.

And Google of course famously crawls and serves up search results and images for all kinds of adult topics, among every other topic in the world.

In light of many high-profile anti-porn practices by social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and to a lesser degree, LiveJournal, it’s great to see that at least one company has put its own business ahead of other people’s politics. It’s precisely that sort of thing that’s made Marc an entrepreneurial blockbuster time and time again.

And frankly, I think the social agenda called freedom is just as important.

Via Susan Mernit

This video, which is one of the recent TED Talk videos, is of Steven Pinker’s talk called The Stuff of Thought. This is simply brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that those who know me well are about to be utterly astounded by what I am going to say:

I now understand the value of indirect communication. And it is immense.

I also understand why I never saw it before: the benefits are reaped solely through language’s social applications, not its analytical ones. See for yourself by watching the video.

An incredible interview with this Harvard professor is available on Google Video.

Time is a limited resource. That’s why patience is a virtue.

If

By Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Baby steps have always been really hard for me to take. I am defined by extremes, my life a struggle to find a balance between two opposing influences on more scales than I could count.

Today, I resolved to clean. It was not easy, but I succeeded a little bit. I cleaned the floor of my kitchen and the living room, removed clutter from the coffee and kitchen tables, washed the dishes, cleaned the stove, and even folded a few clothes.

This makes me feel at least a little better.

In my inbox I see a confirmation from Amazon.com informing me that my order of “What Color is Your Parachute?” a book recommended to me by Kate Bornstein, is on its way (as are How to Write a Book Proposal and When Someone You Love is Kinky).

One step at a time, right?

From the everything-you-say-can-and-will-be-used-against-you department:

• Computer scientists will almost always be able to de-anonymize “anonymous” data, in this case thanks to movie ratings,
• Google offers users another way to store personal data,
• and all of this is old news

I’ve been doing this for years, and my solution is pretty simple: no regrets.

As an aside, these days when you punch in “privacy concern” into Googlepedia, you get the Wikipedia entry for Facebook. I was kind of expecting the entry for “US Government,” but whatever.

If you are wondering why it seems that everyone today is so defensive, you need look no further than your own television set, or newspaper. Bruce Schneier says it best: stop the war on different. And, going hand-in-hand with that slogan: refuse to be terrorized.

• This story of air pollution from leaded fuel sources being linked to violent behavior is eerily similar to the Reapers of Joss Whedon’s Serenity.
• GMail gets IMAP (finally!).
• I really am not that all different; I’m just ahead of my time. From the article:
  

  “Young people aren’t choosing computer science majors because they take technology for granted — it’s something to use not something to make a career. “By and large, this generation is very fluent with technology and with a networked world,” according to James Ware, executive producer at The Work Design Collaborative LLC, a Berkeley, Calif., consortium exploring workplace values and the future of the workforce. That future may be in managing technology, which requires skills today’s college students don’t have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up. One of their primary concerns is a flexible schedule and healthy work/life balance.”

  (Emphasis added.)

I went searching for a WordPress widget that enabled me to place a collapsible archive control much like the ones available in Blogger blogs “archives” widget a while back. With a little googling, I found a plugin that did almost exactly what I wanted in Ady Romantika’s Collapsible Archive Widget.

After a few days of playing with it, I had a working copy that reproduced the original behavior or, optionally, exposed each month’s individual posts inside each month’s own collapsible list.

The patch I submitted to Ady is still awaiting integration with the main plugin, so in the meantime you can download the plugin here.

The full description follows:

Collapsible Archive Widget 2.1 BETA is an update to the Collapsible Archive Widget for WordPress that includes a new option in the widget’s settings page that allows you to display links to the individual posts inside each month. With this setting activated, the year is expanded by default to show a list of months. Each month is another list, collapsed by default, that expands to reveal the individual post links.

Update: A new version of the plugin that incorporates the options I’ve added can now be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory.

Something from tonight that I said that I want to remember:

The thing about being strong is that being strong means not getting what you want or what you need and yet being okay anyway. When I was young and, of course, even these days, I don’t always get what I want or need. I can do it, but I don’t like it. When I was young, my father would regularly tell me to be generous. The thing about being generous is that it makes it easier to be strong. That’s what my father was trying to teach me, I think. That’s really a very smart thing to teach a child.