Jenn’s Other Blog

Ft. Hard Knox recently teamed up with with Web Warriors all over the blogosphere to take political activism online to a whole new level. Web Warriors of Ft. Hard Knox (WWF) is group is for those seriously interested in using Web 2.0 to further the conservative movement online.

One of our first projects was to develop a WWF Wiki (much like an online “training manual”) for conservatives who are wanting to be more active online. We’re happy to announce that the WWF Wiki is up and running. There is still a lot of work to be done, and we’d love to have your help and feedback. Or, feel free to use it as a resource for your own projects.

This wiki addresses the technical side of online activism, and should provide useful information for anyone who is getting started, or wanting to become more active online, with or without a background in computer programming. This is a “low-tech,” as opposed to a “high-tech” reference for political bloggers.

Revised and updated from 11/14/07

“Blogger’s Block” is the new “Writer’s Block.” You know that feeling…you sit down to write a blog post, and just stare at the paper - except, now it’s the screen. You wait for the virtual muse to visit, only to be stood up, again. Don’t worry. You’re not alone. Other bloggers have had that same problem, and have written about what has helped them overcome it. Here are a few ideas: Read more »

Several of my friends on Facebook have joined FriendFeed. I did, too, yesterday, and am very pleased with what I’ve found. For one thing, it distracted me from the frustration of playing with a bunch of Google Gadgets that won’t fit into my already-too-crowded sidebar; but mostly because this is a very cool network.

Mark “Rizzin’” Hopkins, at Mashable, explained it this way:

…What goes on behind the login screen at FriendFeed isn’t indexed by Google or publicly discoverable, either, so a lot of the comments get a much more ‘behind-the-scenes’ raw and uncut feel to it….This opt-in discussion, thus, is seeming to be a much more common theme in the social media/Web 2.0 world. I must say that I like it. While services like this can be a time sink, it doesn’t compare to the type of time-sink an actual web forum would be. In fact, forums, for the last several years, have been completely cut out of my surfing habits due to the fact that simply don’t have the time to commit to developing the relationships inside several small communities. With FriendFeed, though, it’s a place that I can go occasionally that is doing some of my posting for me (i.e. grabbing my feed items and republishing them), as well as allowing me a place to have short exchanges with a lot of the folks I know and read on a daily basis.

According to its “about” page,

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends…FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.

I’m able to view my FriendFeed from Facebook, or from any feed reader, or even by e-mail. I can even add “imaginary friends” - friends that aren’t signed up for FriendFeed, but have feeds elsewhere on the web that I like to follow. This is a big time-saver to me, as a blogger, because so much of blogging involves linking to what other bloggers are doing, and now I can see what they’re doing all in one place. Sign up for FriendFeed here.

Any of us that blog know there’s really not enough space in the sidebar for all the stuff we’d like to put there already…so why do we find new gadgets irresistible? I don’t know, and as you can see, there is no room on this blog for ANYTHING else in the sidebar, but…

I discovered a wonderful little time-waster today, called Google Gadgets for your Webpage (thanks, a lot, “Quick” Online Tips!) There are 40,156 of these little suckers - all pretty cool.

You can browse all 40K+, or use the menu and search feature to look for “Web 2.0,” or “political” gadgets. You can look for “FOX News” ones, or “conservative” ones (Be careful, some of those are liberals making fun of conservatives - but that game works both ways!). There are also all sorts of tools, financial tips, sports, fun and games, and tech gadgets, as well as a seemingly endless supply of quotes for the day.

The directions say to add the code to the html on your blog, but most of them also work in a sidebar widget (Be sure to size them properly, and check to make sure they look good in the smaller sizes - some don’t).

Some update daily and some update each time the page refreshes. Go ahead, you know you want to try it. And be careful…these are like Pringles (Once you pop, you can’t stop).

Remember how the calendar turning over to 2000 was supposed to bring on Armageddon? Then a few hangers-on said ok, that didn’t happen, but it was really 2001 when the world would be catapulted back in the technological dark ages?

Obviously, that didn’t happen, either, so now the virtual doomsdayers are warning us about the year 2038.

ReadWriteWeb, with tongue firmly in cheek, explains the theory:

The bug, being dubbed the “2038 bug,” arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number… Programs will fail…Since they will see times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901, erroneous calculations and decisions will occur.

This reminds me of a former boss, who (true story), called a staff meeting in early 2001 to help start the planning process to make sure that the glitches that happened in 2000 “won’t happen again, the next time.” The next time? In 3001?

Back to the 2038 bug, if anyone still thinks they’ll be using any of the same equipment, programs, software, or code in thiry years that we’re using now, then be afraid…be very afraid. Your only hope is that by then we probably will have melted from Global Warming.

The rest of us are going to lunch. Byeeeeee.

China has blocked the user-driven content site, YouTube after YouTubers began posting videos of the weekend’s protests in Tibet.

According to Bloomberg:

The government is also censoring Web sites with references to Tibet, and Tibetan Internet cafes have been closed, the newspaper said, citing a Tibetan journalist the Telegraph said wanted to be identified as Lhuboom.

Monday, FHK’s TXPoet wrote about the cyberwar that China has launched on the West, creatively hacking to “steal national security information, steal economic data, steal trade secrets and perform denial of service (DNS) attacks. (more).”

At what point do we admit we are at (cyber)war? Considering that having 3,000 of our people killed by Jihadists was not enough for the liberals in our nation to admit that we were in a war with Islam…it is unlikely that any loss of freedom online will bring about any such admission on the liberal-dominated internet. But their ignorance is not our bliss.

Visit FHK’s resist! red china Archive.

I’ve been looking for a new way to share Web 2.0 tricks and tips with other conservatives online, and I think Eric has done a great job with setting up this Blogivists.com community.  I’m looking forward to being a part of it!