Category: blogging

Anon on the U.S.

Our Founders and the Constitution – Why history matters.

I saw this posted to CraigsList and thought it worth sharing:

“When the founding fathers stood up to the king of England, and against all odds won freedom for the people of the United States of America. They took a lot of time, negotiation, and argument to create a Constitution guaranteeing freedom and liberty for the citizens of America.

They created a constitutionally limited republic form of government. Not a democracy as we have now. The president was not elected by the people, but instead by the electoral college. Our United States Senators were placed in office by our state government, and the highest office that we the people were supposed to vote for was was our representative in congress, and our states governor. The democracy that most love was left to the states.

The federal government was given only a few areas of authority by our Constitution. They include a defense of the union (not offense as we have today), a common currency, a court system to settle disputes between the states (not settle federal issues or civil litigation), and a post office. The rest was left to the states.

Why would they do that? Because they knew that an unbridled federal government would eventually grow into what they left in England, and much like we have today. They also knew that the best way to control a government was to keep it as close to home as possible where the citizens would be involved with it and control it.

They also left the role of the state government up to the people of the states to decide. If the people want social programs that take care of them from cradle to grave, they can have that. But if the people of another states don’t they can have that too. The federal government was never supposed to provide social programs for the people, that was left up to the states.

So what would it look like today if the Democrat and Republican parties and the PAC’s and Lobbyists that own them were never allowed to abandon our Constitution? Well, Washington DC would be a nice quiet place in the country except for the few weeks out of the year when congress was in session, our Department of Defense would be home defending our borders, not the borders of every nations that we control or want to, we would not be the target of terrorists around the globe, there would be no IRS and April 15th would be just another day, we wouldn’t be almost $34,000,000,000,000.00 in debt, and who our president is wouldn’t be that big of a deal because there wouldn’t very much that he or she could screw up.

So, if you like fighting about which party or president is better than another, please continue. But if you think America deserves better, please join me in NOT voting for Democrats, Republicans and the PAC’s and Lobbyists that own them. If you value freedom and liberty it is your only choice.

I wish you well!”

So This Is Happening

For the last seven years I’ve offered a website service wherein I provide a year of hosting, a domain name search, and the latest WordPress installation with theme configuration and initial SEO settings, for $180.00.  That’s super cheap and I believe it is a quick way for a person or business to achieve a web presence without the learning curve of doing it themselves.

I’ve had clients come and go, and those that let the hosting lapse have done so because they don’t see their site appear on Google.  Invariably, the lack of search engine traction is due to a lack of regular content addition.  Now, I do include training on the use of WordPress with my package, along with a discussion on the importance of posting to the site on a regular basis with two to three paragraphs of relevant, truthful, useful information in the blog section.  Without fail, it is that section of their site that remains fallow.  It seems that spending an hour a week adding something to their site is just not a priority.  And that’s a shame as no one would know more about their site subject than the owner, and spending four to five hours a month on self-marketing the business is far more cost effective than paying someone else to do it.

However, it seems that content creation and management is a viable service and one that I can provide.  For as little as $250.00 a month I will research and create content for your website for regular updates and posts.  I can also offer video creation in a range of production values for reasonable rates.  If you have an interest, see my pricing list here.

 

From Start to Finish: Why We Won and How We Are Losing

I don’t always share this type of article here (this would normally a Facebook blather), but the points made are very worth the time it takes to read. My apologies if you are a tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) type of person, but if you were you wouldn’t be here anyway (back to 4chan with you!).

From Start to Finish: Why We Won and How We Are Losing.

Importing Delicious tags into MarsEdit

MarsEdit

For some time I’ve been wanting to move my blogging efforts over a desktop app, to be able to control multiple blogs from one place, and to search through and manage the content more easily.

The 2 main contenders that I could find for the Mac platform were Ecto and MarsEdit.  The latter seems to be considerably more actively maintained, has a slicker interface and was available for download on the Mac AppStore so I went with that.

The main feature I was missing in MarsEdit was the fairly comprehensive tag handling offered by WordPress.  The fact you can type only a few letters of the tag you need and it auto-completes is something you can’t do without once you get used to it.  The Delicious website and similar desktop tools all offer this functionality.

The first challenge was to get my data out of Delicious, not the links/bookmarks that are offered as their only export option but the actual tags.  Not surprisingly there’s a WP plugin for that, enter EG-Delicious Tags.

Once your tags are copied over to your WP installation you can access the data as a serialized array from the WP database, it’s in the options table under the key _transient_egdel_tags.

Then the data needs to be integrated with MarsEdit.  The app’s author, Daniel Jalkut, kindly explained which plist file within the app needs to be updated to enable the search auto-completion feature.

A simple PHP script was sufficient to deserialize the data and wrap it in XML tags:

<?php
$data = <<<DATA
a:773:{s:7:”_blogit”; …
DATA;
$struct = (unserialize($data));
$keys = array_keys($struct);
$out = ”;
$out .=”\n”;
foreach ($keys as $tag) { $out .=”<string>$tag</string>\n”;}
print $out;
?>

Add the XML to the relevant key and save out the DataSources.plist file and you’re done.