I’ve turned off the nightly digest. If you want to follow my Twitter feed, you should either follow me at Twitter or friend me on Facebook.

While I don’t have any particular plan to take a break, it seem clear that blogging is on some sort of hiatus for me. I’ve been very busy and, when I have free time, I’m choosing to do other things.

Beyond that, I’ve also realized that I’m not sure what I want to have as the purpose for this blog anymore. Over the last 5-6 years of its existence it’s morphed a few times. It used to be fairly light-hearted with a number of voices and styles contributing to the blog. Over the last two years or so, it’s turned into a mostly single-author blog with a far more, let’s call it intense focus on politics.

So, a few things are in play. First, I just haven’t had the time to read much any more. Little things like eating lunch at the cafeteria with co-workers rather than at my desk make a huge difference in how much news I consume. Beyond that, I’m also fairly dispirited by the state of politics both at the local and national level. I have a decent amount of optimism in the President, but watching the debate around the issues I see the same stuff from the Republican side of the aisle that we have for the past 15 years. Gov. Jindal brazenly repeating well-debunked lies in a nationally televised response. Republicans complaining about high taxes when they’ve been the lowest they’ve been in 50 years or so. Locally, I see the same thing. Lots of arguing, very little in the way of listening.

I’m not sure how to fix it, but I’m certainly not helping by repeatedly pointing at it and getting annoyed. So, I’ve cut back writing about that stuff, just passing on articles with significant information or analysis. Those are few and far between so, combined with the time issue, this blog is more or less silent.

Those of you with keys to post, feel free to post whatever (even or especially if you disagree with me). If anyone wants to be added to the roster or writers, feel free to drop me a note. Won’t guarantee anything, but am open to adding more voices.

I’m sure I’ll be back soon enough, once I find time or figure out if I need to change the blog up a bit.

(PS. One intentional plan, though, is to disengage from local issues on twitter. I’ve been a bit of a jackass about stuff lately, mostly out of weariness of the local budget nonsense that’s happening locally and at the state level. Again, if I’m not helping, I’m hurting. Need to step back for a bit. Oh, and sorry to everyone for being a jackass. Mean that quite sincerely.)

Blogging will be particularly light because of certain changes in my life. Overall, things are good, though. For those of you not on Facebook or Twitter, I just thought I’d let you know.

On a totally different note, does anyone else think the Petrelli pere in Heroes sounds like John Wayne? I keep waiting for him to toss out a “Pilgrim” somewhere…

update: in case I wasn’t clear, I don’t feel like writing, not that I’m super busy. Looking for a job is still less busy than startup mode.

I have a wireframe I think I like, just working through the details. Real job and real life took up more time than expected, so I’m not done yet. I’ll keep working on it as time permits. Shouldn’t be too long.

By the way, raking leaves and doing a lot of fall cleanup this morning, plus a bunch of overdue chores in the house completely wiped me out. I’m not sore, just very, very tired. It’s a weird feeling. I might actually go to bed very soon.

I’m going to take a day this weekend and redo FM a little bit to incorporate Twitter more prominently in the design. I don’t like many of the existing Twitter widgets (or, at least the ones I tried a few months ago), so this will involve a little bit of coding, I think.

Those of you who are on Twitter already, you can follow the FatMixx account, which will probably be the hub account for how I incorporate Twitter into the blog. If you’re an author here (or are interested in being one) and use Twitter, let me know. Basically, I’ll have the FatMixx twitter account follow you, as well, and your tweets will end up on the front page.

If you’re not using Twitter, the one thing I’ll say is that Twitter combined with one of the many third party apps out there (I use Twitterific) make a good microblogging platform. I react to news more frequently (and have more conversations) through that than the blog these days.

I’ve added the TAC blog to my RSS reader a week ago after a Eric Martin recommended it in a post at ObWi. While I don’t agree with them on policy (generally), at least we seem to agree on basic facts. Good, principled disagreements I can handle. That’s what politics is about, after all. Recommend you give it a try.

If they continue to be good, I’ll include it in the blogroll in a few weeks.

Nick Beaudrot at Cogitamus sums up why giving to campaigns is worthwhile:

Contributing to campaigns isn’t “throwing money at the problem”. It’s trading your time for someone else’s time. After all, the dollar that you contribute is one you earned at some hourly or monthly rate. It’s going into a campaign’s bank account so that they can pay staffers to canvass neighborhoods, or buy food for volunteers to sit around the office and stuff envelopes, or to buy part of a 30-second TV ads that thousands of voters in the district will see all at once. This is a good trade, since you, the Cogitamus reader, cannot personally travel to every district in the country and convince voters to vote for Democrats.

This is why, in the emails I’ve sent personally to some of you, I’ve suggested giving and/or volunteering. For me, in startup mode, giving is going to be the only way I can really participate (aside from this blog, I guess), so that’s my emphasis. The Obama campaign is going to be doing something in your state, too, so if you can’t give or don’t want to, consider volunteering.

Just a quick note: I’ve added a few more links to the left rail. The first is to ProPublica, a new news organization that focuses on public interest investigative journalism. I’m reading them more now, especially since Paul Kiel, who used to be at TPM (easily the best of the new media journalism outfits), joined ProPublica.

The second is Cogitamus, a blog that comes recommended by several other bloggers I read. They’ve been good since I’ve started reading them, often bring a different perspective into the news. In particular, they have a couple of regular topics I don’t find in many other places, including just enough poll/stats geekery without going quite to the level of the blogs focused entirely on polling.

Good stuff, hope you like it too.

I’m thinking about putting an ActBlue or Obama fund raising widget in the sidebar. I’m thinking about setting an aggressive goal of about $10K. I figure most of the money is going to come from regular readers, so I thought I’d ask first before putting one up and getting 3 people donating.

This is an important election. For most of us in our 30s or 40s and younger, it’s arguably the most important election in our lifetime. I don’t believe that this is an exaggeration. Another 4 years of Bush style policies will set this country back in too many ways. We’re also going to see some ugly, ugly stuff this cycle playing on fears about race and religion. The best way to counter this is to have strong organizations on the ground in all 50 states, something that Obama’s campaign has just committed to. Talking to your neighbors, after all, is better than any advertising could ever be and Obama’s campaign is going to be the first in a while with offices in all 50 states.

We’ll talk more about other ways to help, too.

Anyway, just a quick post about this. Email me at sujal at fatmixx dot com or leave a comment if you’re planning on donating elsewhere, or if this wouldn’t appeal to you.

Looking at the users page on FatMixx for some reason and noticed the following posting statistics. Top 5 here passed on without comment:

These are posts written, not comments.

I’ve installed the WP-Cache plugin after looking into it some more to help keep the blog zippier for our users. I’m a little worried about things being sticky when comments are posted, so if you have trouble posting a comment, please get in touch with me. I’ll back the changes out if there are problems.

Thanks.

Wow, a third post in a day… this is amazing. I swear I’m working hard, too…

This is a quick note to say that I’m disabling pingbacks to FatMixx. The pingback spam is becoming a full time job to delete, and it seems to be getting through Spam Karma. So, they’re off.

If you know what this means, sorry I had to do this. If you don’t know what this means, consider yourself lucky.

if you had a FatMixx.com email address, or an alias set up, they’re going to stop working. Last night I moved all of the email for sujal.net, fatmixx.com, and the other major domains I own to Google Apps. If you still want the alias or the box, let me know and I’ll hook you up.

Just messing around with the TwitterTools plugin from Alex King.

For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s best described via analogy:

• Facebook Users: It’s like Facebook status, but you don’t need to use Facebook and it works with your IM client and SMS.
• Bloggers: It’s a micro blogging platform where you can put in up to 140 characters of text or urls and push that to everyone that’s using Twitter.

It integrates with IM so you can update from your IM client instead of having to log in, fill out the form, etc. (though that’s pretty easy, too). If you’re an SMS junkie or have a Blackberry or iPhone, you can have it work with SMS, too. It’s a pretty handy tool if you have friends updating their Twitter accounts. Like most social services, networks effects do make the service more useful.

So, as of today, for the foreseeable future, FatMixx posts will also show up on my Twitter feed. Enjoy!

http://twitter.com/sujal

Not sure why FM is messed up right now. I’ll investigate as soon as I can and fix… looks like something is corrupted in the DB, but that would really suck.

Update: Pair support comes through. We’re solid again, and I learned something new about MySQL.

This has been coming for a few weeks, just between being super busy at work and at home, but I hit the wall this week on a couple of points. First, I don’t think I’m being all that interesting for everyone to read, in large part because my disappointment, confusion, or outrage at the various things the administration does is predictable and obvious. This is the worst White House in my lifetime, and not because of partisan issues. Everyone knows I think this, and nothing they do surprises anyone anymore anyway. So, that’s one reason.

The other reason is (ironically) that I’m more or less speechless about what’s happening right now in Congress, in the media, and in the world in general. We get told that September is a key month, that General Petraeus is going to give us a report, and when he reports that, “Well, nothing has actually changed, but I really, really believe it will” the President announces he’s going to continue on the same path he’s been following for the last 5 years. Literally, he changed nothing. That’s simply unbelievable. The fact that the rest of the world, including the media, Republicans in Congress, and the public, isn’t excoriating him makes it doubly frustrating.

But, what pushed my decision this morning was finally reading the lead editorial in this week’s Economist. As a magazine I traditionally have respected, even if I often don’t agree, I don’t expect the magazine to go stupid on me. This week, the Economist has gone stupid. I don’t know what else to say. In an issue with the cover boldly stating “Why They Should Stay,” the entire argument of why we should stay is the following:

If America removes its forces while Iraq remains in its present condition, the Iraqi future is indeed likely to be disastrous. For that reason above any other, and despite misgivings about the possibility of even modest success any time soon, our own view is that America (and Britain) ought to stay in Iraq until conditions improve.

In a thousand-word editorial, that is the entirety of their argument for staying. There is literally not one other paragraph in the entire thing that makes a case for staying. Not. One. Paragraph. None. Not a supporting fact. Nothing. The bulk of the editorial then explains why, yes maybe, the folks arguing for a departure might have a point. In fact, the section that closes out the editorial has the subhead: “Not a must, just an ought” Why did they even waste the ink?

It’s clear to me that this war, and politics in general, foreign policy in particular is no longer about being right, or making the right choices. I expect politics to play a part, even a significant part, but it shouldn’t be the only consideration. Making the right choices, or trying to understand what the right choices might be, has been what motivates me to care, the understanding that this nation, yes, even through government, has the ability to do good by being smart, creating good policy, and stepping back when the government isn’t needed. None of this matters in our debate, and none of it seems to have any effect on anyone’s opinion.

So, I’ll continue to care about this stuff, but silently for a while. I’ll still be blogging, but hopefully more technology stuff and also the link posts I do (like the ones below). Just don’t feel like writing about politics right now. Knowing me, this’ll probably last a week, but I am going to try to stick to it to see how it feels.

Look who Joe met over the weekend!

Sorry about the look of the site for those of you using IE6. A 20 minute break from my work broke the layout for folks using Internet Explorer 6. I know what the issue is, vaguely, but can’t fix it right now because I’m busy with work.

On a side note, I hate IE6. I wish Microsoft would fix it so it worked like the other browsers rather than forcing everyone to upgrade to IE7. If anyone has any ideas on how to achieve the layout I’m going for (check the site out in Firefox or Safari), please let me know in the comments how I can do it.

I almost put in a table today so I could get those columns lined up. I also wish CSS had a notion for making column even.

A lot of folks have been asking what I’m up to and, especially for the last few weeks, I’ve been more vague than usual about things. There were good reasons, but today I’m happy to let everyone know some more details on where I’m at and what I’m up to.

My original plan was to build and launch a travel-related site that my cousin had come up with. In essence, I would’ve been my first customer. I wanted to do that to build some credibility and to have the experience of building a scalable web site up without Disney’s infrastructure and with modern open source tools (Rails, Struts 2, etc.).

The idea was good and it looked like it would be easy (or as easy as these things could be) to launch and gain traffic. Unfortunately, the idea was so good that others had thought of it (always a good sign) and at least one iteration had already raised money (not so good for me). In fact, of all of the related startups, TripIt was probably the closest to the same idea, and that was pretty crushing. I was behind these guys and a solo developer on a new technology stack (Rails). It did not feel good.

Around the same time I was reaching out to former friends and colleagues to build out the FrequentMod end of the business. One of those leads worked out. Short version, I’ve recently joined Fanzter Inc., a local CT startup co-founded by a former colleague, Aaron. I can’t say much about what we’re building (more on that some day soon), but the idea for the first product is deceptively simple and powerful. We’re hoping to launch in September.

I said when I left ESPN that sometimes you just have to take the first step off the safe ledge before the opportunities present themselves. This is one of those serendipitous things. Had I not left ESPN, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be here. Even better, Fanzter got their funding (and ability to hire me) right around the TripIt beta announcement. Timing, as they say, is everything.

On top of that, I had been working on a similar idea as one of my test/learn Rails and Symfony projects, and so I am coming into Fanzter with both a good understanding of where they’re going and what they’re trying to accomplish. To borrow a Disney phrase, there’s a lot of synergy here.

I won’t be blogging about the company much here. I’ll most likely be blogging about this at the Fanzter company blog. I’m excited to be working on this, and you should definitely sign up for the newsletter at Fanzter.com.

PS. To those of you who have reached out to me via LinkedIn or through email about FrequentMod, Fanzter is going to be my sole focus. I won’t be taking on additional clients or work until further notice.

…Not as much as I do, dear. Not as much as I do.

(sujal here): This is in reference to the current headline, which will probably be gone tomorrow, that says I hate weeding. To Heidi, I know you hate it more… that explains how little of it you actually do.

(Heidi here): I am officially turning in my gardening tools.

(sujal here): As if we’ll even notice… (And, yes, Heidi and I are sitting next to each other on the couch with two laptops typing this at each other… on FatMixx. Forgive us, we’re watching the Senate on CSPAN2)

Sorry, fixing a bug I introduced/found.
(Click here to read the rest of this post)

I’m starting to notice some issues with the redesign, specifically with the single post view. The balance of the page is just off and I feel momentarily lost trying to find the post amid the ads, sidebars, etc., especially for short posts. The content of the post, easily the most important thing on the page, has the least weight on the page. I’ll try to fix it over the next few days, though that might involve some major changes to the layout.

Here’s an opportunity to register any other comments or criticisms about the new look.

Heidi and I were away on our honeymoon (delayed from our wedding last year). That’s why our blogs have been silent for the last 11 days or so. Regular posting will resume some time later this week once we settle back in from our vacation.

Pics will be up, as well as a description of the trip, and lots of other interesting stuff. Looks like the Bush administration is about to face their first real investigation. Hope the Democrats do this right and run a good investigation.

It’s the holidays, so I’ll be offline for much of it spending time with friends and family. I expect the same to be true of the others that write here, so expect there to be little posting going on. Today may be an exception, though. Because of travel issues, today’s plans were disrupted and I’m sitting in front of the laptop. I could work on my project or I could write on FM. Guess which I’ll probably do.

Happy Holidays and, to those that celebrate, Merry Christmas! Enjoy the holidays and have a great New Year wherever you are.

If you’re considering giving money to charity this year, or if you’d just like to do some good, consider lending money to entrepreneurs around the world via Kiva. I’ve written about Kiva before, and that post included a link to a Frontline piece on the organization that you can watch online.

The box to the right features the four businesses Heidi and I have decided to lend money to. It will rotate randomly through them, highlighting the current state of each loan. Consider lending whatever you feel you can. The minimum loan amount from an individual lender is $25 and currently, Kiva has a 100% repayment rate. (It truly is a loan, though neither Kiva nor you will get any profit out of it…)

The box will remain up at least until the folks featured are fully funded or otherwise withdrawn for donations. They have dozens of other candidates around the world, so if these stories don’t get your attention, perhaps some others will.

(cross-posted to Heidi’s blog)

Update: An undocumented feature… the box to the right automatically chooses other unfunded businesses if the one I specified is fully funded. I didn’t realize that. You can find the people I’ve funded by looking here.

Update 2: I’ve replaced the box that features businesses with a generic image ad because the kiva.org box was sometimes making the page slow to load. This one is fast and focuses on why we donated to them.

FatMixx has just earned $100 in one month (first time ever). That’s more revenue than a lot of these Web 2.0 startups. Anyone want to buy FatMixx for a few million bucks?

Changes afoot. not quite finished yet (headline posts don’t do the collapsed display, for example), but feedback welcome.

Update: Switched back. Will test in IE tomorrow before launching.

Update 2: Switch to the new theme. Aside from the unfinished stuff, things look good.

If you’re reading via BlogLines or another RSS aggregator, you may have noticed a bug where old posts would appear as new whenever a new post was created. This was pointed out to me today and has been fixed. The problem was in the flash video embed plugin I’m using. It generates a random id for the swf and the div the swf is written into which caused the HTML to look different to BlogLines, so it marked posts as new. I’ve switched to using a deterministic id so this should be resolved.

Update: well, it will look broken for this post because all the ids changed again. Hopefully, the next new post will work as expected.

FatMixx, The Connecticutian, and Sirens & Lights have all been upgraded to the latest WordPress and Spam Karma. Hopefully, you won’t notice anything. Holler if you notice anything odd.

Here’s a classic video from The Daily Show:

Just doing some more testing, to be honest, but here it is.

Update: The next version of this plugin will make it easier to add the video, hopefully as simple as just cutting and pasting the URL out of your browser window for the video in question. The problem is that the plugin will need to be configured for each service, so initially we may just have YouTube and Google until I can figure out the rest. I’ve found a plugin (wpvideo) that does the same thing but actually embeds the OBJECT/EMBED tag instead of the SWFObject.js approach I like, so it might be time to mix and match the two. We’ll see.