Feed

  • Twitter

    I logged in the first time soon after it started in 2007. I did my ten years and then mostly logged off by 2017. I’m not likely to start using it again regularly although I still use it occasionally as a people bookmarking service of sorts. I logged in last week to get an ‘archive’ of all of my data and publish it elsewhere1,2.  I tweeted 828 times and based on the IDs in the data, I’m guessing that I was the 950,535th person to ever tweet. The process felt achingly familiar3. I’ve had some discussions with others about it recently and it reminds me to think about how I use the web. Per the course… I like to flush it out, write it down, and publish it so I can send a link instead of hashing it out in an email or text thread.

    Twitter was built as a MicroBlogging service. Microblogging as a type of broadcast medium was the forerunner to social networking platforms. Social networking existed from the moment the first network computer connections were made. Twitter had a good name and was the best breed of something not unique amongst the landscape at the time. The fundamentals of Twitter already existed elsewhere. The Twitter idea originated from Odeo4,5, a podcasting company. It was just a means of having an SMS group chat.  Evan Williams created Blogger which was sold to Google and was the basis of the ideas behind both podcasting and blogging. Before Twitter, social media meant connecting with others online primarily through email and RSS, both of which could be read from the same client and in a browser. Some folks worked out unique ways to notify others via email for pingbacks and trackbacks6. I was a fan of Friendfeed because it supported pulling feeds from various sources. Facebook acquired it for $15 million and shut it down7.  Similarly, Pump.io, StatusNet, and identi.ca were using the open-source Activity Streams format which was a precursor to the ‘Fediverse’ or federated social network terms tossed around today. 

    Inter-Net-work….the web was inherently social long before the media part. In Silicon Valley’s race to capitalize, proprietary methodologies were created because open standards hinder income potential. Even the data archive I got from Twitter last week isn’t exactly portable. The WC3, who sets the standards has recommended Web Mentions, Activity Streams, and Activity Pub9 standards which is the protocol that makes Mastodon federated. I migrated most of my Twitter follows over to Mastadon while I was at it last week. Watching the other platforms pivot to gain new users is amusing. Substack has added ‘mentions’, ’cross-posts’, and ‘best seller’ badges10. Tumblr rolled out a $7 badge and the owner insisted they would be implementing the activitypub specification which I noted appropriately11. I’m sure folks will figure out a way to spam those protocols too as long as there is a way to profit from them. Twitter turned to bots after it gained popularity and the account APIs were introduced. The bot, spam, link farms, etc were online long before Twitter too.

    Elon Musk recently tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” likely in reference to his surveys on reinstating previously banned accounts. It translates to the “Voice of the People is the Voice of God”,  but the full context of the most cited reference to that term is:

    Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.  “ And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. 

    ~ Alcuin in his letters to Charlamagne Epistle 127 in 760AD12.

    The riotousness of the crowd is Twitter. And Twitter is just a bellwether for the internet as a whole as we adapt to new communications mediums. Those first couple of years were just techie types tweeting because those were most of the same folks with websites.  Then came the journalists, media, celebrities, publishers, and internet celebrities. Then everyone’s uncle had it installed on their phone.  When those other folks started rambling on about their other interests, I lost interest. And then they started to monetize it all with adverts, tracking users across the web, and rewriting shared URLs so they could track those too.  The most retweeted thing ever was a pyramid scheme offering a reward for retweets. The web was already decentralized and will likely always be outside some platforms’ walled gardens. I just hope that the efforts to improve the open standards aren’t sabotaged by private interests.

    I’m sure in the coming year we’ll end up hearing a lot more on free speech and social media. I have a very simple minded approach to it which I wrote about pretty extensively in my article on Section 23013. I think that you’re welcome to espouse your opinions, ideas, or theories however you’d like but not entirely without consequence if they are damanging to others. I think that the main product of social media platforms, aside from usability, is sorting and moderating that information so that it’s vaulable to it’s end users. A platform like Twitter is a private company and can make itself reponsible for moderation however it best see’s fit to it’s own business model. And likewise, I can excersize my own liberty to not pay it any attention.

    I’d use social media again if I had something to promote and I suppose I’m lucky not to have the need. Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams apologized saying he was “wrong to think that an open platform where people could speak freely would make the world a better place”.  I wouldn’t completely agree with him on that because I believe there have been some good things gained through social networking platforms.  I read an essay recently fed to me, not via social media but my handy dandy good ole’ fashion hosted RSS reader…  entitled A Tweet Before Dying that said “What then? We’ll all move over to some Twitter replacement like Mastodon, hundreds of millions of us, and ruin that too? Sigh.”13. Other than echoing my sentiments here, whatever happens with Twitter means very little to me because I choose to rely not on the platform itself but on the interoperable standards of the internet which were social from the get go. 

    2022/12/03 Update:

    Right on Cue… Matt Taibbi, the investigative journalist published a series of tweets he’s calling the Twitter Files15 yesterday afternoon looking into the content moderation efforts of Twitter during the last election. Main takeaway for me was the fact that, imagine this… people are sending emails around requesting removals and questioning various policies. Sometimes just having an audience has it’s own consequences.

    2025/11/15 Update:

    The thing is… all this new reporting on foreign spam accounts seems so obvious to me, I can’t even really understand how it’s news other than the fact that they added the ‘about this account’ features showing country of origin16. The new reporting did kinda touch on something I hinted at here and that America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle17. Perhaps I’ll log in again and leave this as my only ‘tweet’ since I previously deleted all of the others… na, ole Space Karen isn’t getting any eyeballs from me.

    1. @windhamdavid tweets – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/tweets 
    2. @windhamdavid follows – https://davidwindham.com/til/lists/people#i-follow-on-twitter
    3. Windham, D. 2020. Dirty Algorithm – https://davidwindham.com/dirty-algorithm/
    4. Odeo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odeo
    5. Twitter History – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#History 
    6. Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback
    7. FriendFeed – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed 
    8. Silicon Valley – S3E10 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)
    9. W3C Social Web Protocols- https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ 
    10. Substack – https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-mentions-and-cross-posts
    11. Tumblr –https://windhamdavid.tumblr.com/
    12. Alcuin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcuin
    13. Windham, D. 2021. Section 230 – https://davidwindham.com/section-230/
    14. Ford, P. 2022. A Tweet Before Dying – https://www.wired.com/story/tweet-dying-revolutionary-internet/
    15. Taibbi, M. 2022. The Twitter Files – https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
    16. Elon Musk’s Worthless, Poisoned Hall of Mirrors – https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/x-about-this-account/685042/
    17. America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle – https://www.404media.co/americas-polarization-has-become-the-worlds-side-hustle

  • David Byrne

    I went to see David Byrne in Asheville a couple weeks ago. We were in the first rows and the audience started following the performers dance moves. It was like being in some sorta intimate line dance with the band. It was stellar. Watching him perform is more akin to watching a preacher than a rock musician. I’ve had a long held fascination with David Byrne and I think it began in August of 1981 when MTV first went on the air and I saw this video.

    I would have been just under 10 years old the first time I saw the video, but I remember quite vividly the debut of MTV on our console television in the living room. MTV aired a bunch of the same videos1 over and over, but none of them grabbed my attention the way Once In A Lifetime by the Talking Heads2 did. In retrospect, I believe the innovative use of film editing was just the product of the art school background of the Talking Heads band members. At that age, I didn’t really understand the meaning of the lyrics and it was only the motion that intrigued me. Regardless, the song reappeared in a 1989 film entitled Down and Out In Beverly Hills3, which gave me a bit of insight into the meaning of it. The theme of the film kinda nailed the existential crisis of the song lyrics. About that same time (1989) I owned exactly two concert films on VHS: The Song Remains the Same by Led Zepplin and Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads4. Both of which are two of my all time favorite concert films. I bought up about every Talking Heads and David Byrne CDs I could get my hands on. And I played them non-stop. I had a couple friends who also enjoyed them, but they were few and far between.

    Skip ahead fifteen years or so, when I met my wife in college. Two things really stood out about our first date from my other gal pals. The first is that she had a really good sense of humor, not just the giggle type, but the dark and cynical gut rolling humor I like. The second thing is that she really liked the David Byrne and Talking Heads. It wasn’t just the ‘oh yeah, they’re cool’ type of like. She knew all of the lyrics to most of the songs and understood them. The first birthday gift I ever bought her was a talking heads CD box set. We played that thing out on every trip we took. I’ve since read How Music Works6 and followed about every recording project, film, or book he’s been involved with. I’m also particularly fond of his internet radio station7 because of the way he curates the playlists. I can’t say there is anything he’s created that I don’t like. I am particularly fond of a couple though… the film True Stories, Look Into the Eyeball, and Uh-Oh. I also really like the soundtrack to The Last Emperor and it was nice seeing him play himself on the Simpsons Dude, Where’s My Ranch? and in This Must Be the Place.

    Neither of us have ever seen David Byrne in concert. I bought the tickets as soon as they went on sale and put us in the second row. As with what has been noted the style of that original video in that he studied archive footage of “preachers, evangelists, people in trances, African tribes, Japanese religious sects” to see how he could incorporate them into his performance… the live performance we watched wasn’t too far off. The way he engaged the audience wasn’t that of a rock star, but of an evangelist. Because the set design was so simple and the accompanying band members engaged in a rehearsed synchronized dance routine, the first ten rows of the auditorium were completely engaged in the performance. Him and his crew were working hard breaking a sweat, and had obviously spent countless hours rehearsing the material and choreography. Like I said… it was top notch. We already knew the lyrics to the new album so we listened to the Imelda Marcos inspired musical Here Lies Love5 written by Byrne on the way up, while Ginny researched the Marcos’ real life. On the way back we listened to Brian Eno. I’d give the American Utopia concert a 10/10. And I give David a 10/10 on being an artist and a decent human being.

    Here’s the setlist for the show (Asheville, NC – May 8th, 2018):
    Here – Lazy- I Zimbra (Talking Heads) – Slippery People (Talking Heads) – I Should Watch TV (David Byrne & St. Vincent) – Dog’s Mind – Everybody’s Coming to My House – This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) (Talking Heads) – Once In a Lifetime (Talking Heads) – Doing the Right Thing – Toe Jam (Brighton Port Authority) – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)(Talking Heads) – I Dance Like This – Bullet – Every Day Is a Miracle – Like Humans Do – Blind (Talking Heads) – Burning Down the House (Talking Heads) – Encore: Dancing Together – The Great Curve (Talking Heads) – Hell You Talmbout (Janelle Monáe)

    25/12/04 Update: We saw David again last night in Atlanta for the Who Is the Sky? tour8. The thing is I’ve seen a lot of concerts in my lifetime and it’s definitely different. David takes a bunch of highly trained dancers, musicians, and vocalists and puts em through their paces in a thematic visually stunning choreographed set. He gave em what they wanted on this tour, yet the set list of songs somehow still felt like a tightly planned concept album. It’s really about him as an artist. It’s kinda hard to explain, but it’s like he’s floating up above it to steal a line from his song. He’s not rooted in any physical place or timeline even though several of the songs have very physical references. The lyricism is timeless and abstract – he blended a setlist that spans almost fifty years. Here’s the setlist:

    • Heaven ( Fear of Music )
    • Everybody Laughs ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • And She Was ( Little Creatures )
    • Strange Overtones (Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today )
    • Houses in Motion ( Remain in Light )
    • T Shirt ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • (Nothing but) Flowers ( Naked )
    • This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • What Is the Reason for It? ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Like Humans Do ( Look into the Eyeball )
    • Don’t Be Like That ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Independence Day ( Rei Momo )
    • Slippery People ( Speaking in Tongues )
    • I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • My Apartment Is My Friend ( Who Is the Sky? )
    • Hard Times ( Paramore cover )
    • Psycho Killer ( Talking Heads: 77 )
    • Life During Wartime ( Fear of Music )
    • Once in a Lifetime ( Remain in Light )
    • Everybody’s Coming to My House ( American Utopia )
    • Burning Down the House ( Speaking in Tongues )

    Anyway, you can go find the tour show reviews out there so I’m not going to sum it up. The Fox in Atlanta is wild with its mosque design. All I’ll say is if you haven’t seen a performance – it’s good – definitely worth the effort. Seeing the show is just a reminder of possibilities.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_music_videos_aired_on_MTV
    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_in_a_Lifetime_(Talking_Heads_song)
    3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Beverly_Hills
    4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Lies_Love
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Works
    7. http://davidbyrne.com/radio
    8. Who Is the Sky? – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_the_Sky%3F

  • Man from Plains

    All this talk of politics has affected my netflix lineup. Last night we watched the documentary “Man from Plains“2 about Jimmy Carter3 and his most recent book. I’ve got to say that Jonathan Demme4 is one of the better filmmakers of our time. Ever since Stop Making Sense5, a video concert of the Talking Heads was released I’ve been a fan. What I like about Demme is the unbiased and personal approach. I’ve always said of good photographers and painters whom work with portraiture that the best approach is to be as transparent as possible so as to not influence the subject in any manner. This film does just that as it documents Carter’s travels to promote his most recent and controversial book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid6.

    The film gives an honest perspective on the man and his principles as Demme was obviously given good access the former president during the filming and what impressed me most was exactly how candid and emotional Carter was during the filming. He is obviously a very intelligent man in the way he handles conversation and which may also explain why he is a physicist by trade. What is controversial about the book is that Carter is trying to explain that perhaps the Palastinians have been wronged which is very bold and politically incorrect these days. But Carter does it with eloquence and good rhetoric in the face of staunch adversaries.

    After the film, I followed up with some research on Carter and his policies. What amazed me is how strong his opinions about peace and energy conservation. He actually reduced the dependence on foreign oil by half during tenure as president. He installed solar panels (which were later removed) on the white house! It’s amazing how we continue to repeat ourselves in history as I think my third grade teacher began the first history lesson i remember with that exact phrase. President Carter had some interesting approaches to energy policy that may hold in todays atmosphere.

    Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a political or economic expert, but I can tell you a good deal about the Laffer Curve7 and supply side, trickle down Reaganomics including the fact that Author Laffer and Wanninski, credited with coining the term did so over a meeting in 1974 with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld present…so I’ll let you do your own research8. But I am a good with the study of human character and I can tell you that I am compelled to believe that Jimmy Carter is a good man with honest motives or at least the film did an excellent job of concealing anything otherwise.

    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library
    April 20, 1979, White House photo of Carter and rabbit from the Carter Library [1]

    I can whole heartedly recommend that you see the film for yourself. The photo above is of Carter fishing when a swimming rabbit “attacked” his boat.. lucky the secret service was there to capture it on film.

    23/12/06 – The rabbit incident came up in a conversation likely due to conflict in Gaza9. I replaced the missing photo and added the references. I didn’t replace any of the original links, correct any of the grammatical, or fix the spelling errors.

    25/01/09 – I referenced this essay in a recent conversation with friends since he passed away at age 100. He was the longest-lived president in U.S. history. I read quite a bit about him recently and I watched the service on C-Span 10 this morning. The Carter Center published a tribute site 11 that’s worth your time. I left a condolence message. The more I learn… the more I like.

    Jimmy Carter is an inspiration for a life well lived. I told my friends I’m gonna pick up some tools in his honor and to handle some carpentry work for myself and I might even go so far as start working on the solar thing. I’ve referenced the Crisis of Confidence speech12 a number of times recently and I suggest a revisit. I first picked up on it in the film 20th Century Women and rewatching it had profound affect. I sympathize with Jimmy Carter’s tough mind, soft heart mentality and I hope that his work to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering is an inspiration for generations to come14.

    1. Jimmy Carter rabbit incident – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
    2. Man From Plains – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_Plains
    3. Jimmy Carter – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter
    4. Jonathan Demme – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Demme
    5. Stop Making Sense – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Making_Sense
    6. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine:_Peace_Not_Apartheid
    7. Laffer Curve – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
    8. Reaganomics – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics
    9. Israel – Hamas War – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Israel–Hamas_war
    10. President Jimmy Carter Funeral Service at National Cathedral – https://www.c-span.org/event/public-affairs-event/president-jimmy-carter-funeral-service-at-national-cathedral/429876
    11. Jimmy Carter Tribute – https://www.jimmycartertribute.org
    12. President Carter Address on Crisis of Confidence – https://www.c-span.org/program/american-history-tv/president-carter-address-on-crisis-of-confidence/154404
    13. 20th Century Women – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_Century_Women
    14. Carter Center – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Center

  • Easter Moodle

    easter
    easter humor…
    …and today i put up a moodle site on a server for testing and customizing… and i’ve decided to try my hand at writing a graphing plugin as my good deed for easter..
    Moodle is a free software e-learning platform (also known as a Course Management System (CMS), or Learning Management Systems (LMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)). Moodle is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design means that people can develop additional functionality.
    easter

    Personally, i like to see open source used in education.. especially since companies like blackboard pocket millions of dollars of taxpayer monies for what amounts to quite amateurish applications.. here’s a comparison of Moodle vs. Blackboard
    blackboard

    Some of the other applications that you see in schools are questionable at best.. and i don’t see how a school district could possibly trust these web enabled sql driven apps for the security of school records.
    eagle aeries

  • Fonts

    on a recent project.. i ran into some font troubles and learned some stuff along the way.. i’ve heard it again and again from various computer users… and on this particular project …when i was handed the eps files to convert to adobe flash files… there was a note that said oh.. by the way my system fonts are messed up… so i didn’t get copies of the font.. (side note: i prefer Adobe InDesign Files vs Quark or EPS files) and i used the font documented… well well.. the agency says it’s not just right. and they were right as the font i had installed as a bodega sans was actually an italian knockoff of the original that you can see here. Well this area of web design is often misunderstood and can easily bog down a work flow of a traditional print advertising agency moving to digital.. if you don’t understand fonts in websites.. here’s a quick primer just on digital fonts as the type face and font business is another beast all together where each font is copywrite to it’s founder and the foundry which produces it.
    Digital fonts store the image of each character either as a bitmap in a bitmap font, or by mathematical description of lines and curves in an outline font, also called a vector font. In terms of how your website type looks you are dealing with several ways of displaying it. System fonts represent 90% of the fonts you see in websites and are given simple css tags to define the particular system font… what sucks about them is that while you may have a particular font, another use may not and they will default to their prefered font in the browser window.. this can be uncool if the font moves you text alignment and or sizes..

    bitmaps
    * Portable Compiled Font (PCF)
    * Glyph Bitmap Distribution Format (BDF)
    * Server Normal Format (SNF)
    * DECWindows Font (DWF)
    * Sun X11/NeWS format (BF)
    * Microsoft Windows bitmapped font (FON)
    * Amiga Font, ColorFont, AnimFont
    * ByteMap Font (BMF)
    Postscript fonts – Adobe
    True Type Fonts – Apple
    Open Type Fonts – Microsoft
    Font Foundry
    * American Type Founders (Kingsley/ATF)
    * Ascender Corporation
    * Berthold
    * Elsner+Flake
    * Emigre
    * Font Bureau
    * FontFont, a division of FontShop International
    * Hoefler & Frere-Jones (H&FJ)
    * House Industries
    * Paratype
    * T26
    * URW++ (URW)

    In Flash websites the fonts can be embedded as vector so that you may vary the kind of font you are displaying
    [kml_flashembed movie=”https://davidwindham.com/media/fonts.swf” height=”600″ width=”800″ /]
    [kml_flashembed movie=”https://davidwindham.com/media/draw.swf” height=”450″ width=”800″ /]

    so this is going to end up being a very long post to summarize digital fonts so take an intermission to draw or grab some free fonts from these guys

    really nice free fonts from Eduardo Recife

    misprinted

    from and Tom Murphy who is another whole article in himself.. pls visit Tom Murphy 7’s Invincible Web Page and i was particularly amused by his Illustrated Notes from Computer Science

    tom murphy
    tom murphy

    Serif

    Here you can find a graphical version of this table.

    Sans serif

    Here you can find a graphical version of this table.

    Semiserif

    Monospaced

    Here you can find a graphical version of this table.

    Script

    Here you can find a graphical version of this table.

    [edit] Brush Scripts

    Calligraphic

    Handwriting

    Miscellaneous

     

  • Advertising and the Idiot Box

    let’s face it.. that computer screen you watching as you read this post and it’s parent network of millions of servers are full of junk and in many ways not to different than our old idiot tube. It’s all in how you use it that makes it different… and the primary difference is dynamic data. You can ask you computer questions in the form of “search” and this is why we’re seeing the shift. We aren’t only being entertained by our computers, they’ve become a invaluable communications tool for information and business, but it seems that the focus on revenue online has been entirely through advertising in one form or another. The billions spent by banks, hospitals, manufacturers and distributors on internet enabled software and applications goes mostly unpublished excepting in the trade magazines. The shift to new media for advertising dollars is getting reported everyday and i figured i’d share these tidbits with you.
    ad graph
    ad graph2
    ad share
    from silicon valley insider… see the spreadsheet data… and i believe that Newscorps MySpace will lose users and push them below Google for 2008… and this is coming from “no” valley insider or Google bull fanboy.. just the average computer user who knows that orkut or facebook are much better and less spammy than MySpace, and that Google’s search is still the fastest way to get where i think i want to go online.
    And while you may already know that Clear Channel likely owns most of your local radio stations..If you’re in South or North Carolina, you may want to note that the Mclatchy Corp owns most of our newspapers.. The State – Columbia, The Sun News – Myrtle Beach, The Herald – Rock Hill, The Beaufort Gazette, The Island Packet – Blufton Hilton Head , The Charlotte Observer, The News and Observer – Raleigh…
    youtube tive
    and on another note.. last week tivo announced that they would be adding a internet video to it’s content lineup.. no computer or equipment needed.. just the the broadband connection, the tivo box and your television… and with the advent of digital broadcasting and the federally mandated switch.. you can bet that your internet content is going to move to your tv screen without the addition of a slingbox, apple tv, or other specialized rig… Ginny and i saw a commercial recently from some pharma company on our Direct Tv Satellite.. and sure enought.. the click now button that appeared during the commercial took us to an interactive direct tv page.. it looked like crap but it had more info on the product.. and if this train stays on the track .. i should be very busy in the coming years hosting, creating and linking digital content to the traditional advertising streams, but i’d rather be playing super smash brothers… which seems so much more indicative of the idiot box i know. 🙂

    super smash brothers

  • Harbourtowne – 30th Anniversary

    Correction: 44th Anniversary

    Update: 22/01/25 – I reworked these websites this week. I’ve always promise that I’ll take care of anything that I build for the life of it. These sites were originally built in 2006 so they’re almost twenty years old now. I scaled up the images from the originals I had taken and modernized the site to accommodate 4k screen resolutions. Otherwise, it’s still basically the same with both domains running from one WordPress Multisite giving all of his agents individual sites to edit and post listings. While talking with Fudgy, he told me the previous one’s were like a Ford Model T because they were still running after all this time. It’s now his 44th Anniversary in business and I’d like to see him make 50.

    https://hbrtwn.com & https://tridentcharleston.com

    harbourtowne real estate

    Fudgy Brabham, the broker in Charge of Harbourtowne and Trident Real Estate is celebrating thirty years this year. Fudgy and I have mulled over the impact of the internet to real estate in the last three years. I met Fudgy through my father four years back when I was getting my license from CTAR in order to download data about real estate for other websites and subsequently have had my license with him since. He is a ‘larger’ than life man.. with great ideas about politics, cooking, people, and novels. I began doing home tours for real estate several years back with the spinning pictures and all :)… video, maps and all that good stuff. I burned out doing it fairly quickly but since then.. i’ve had some solid opinions about marketing properties online. It’s simple.. get your listing to look as good as possible online and get it everywhere with your name on it and then point all of your other marketing collateral there too. So we (kris and i) began syndicating real estate listing data for brokerages using a bit of rb, php, sql, and google base… we’ll, recently Fudgy and I went over the common misconceptions and problems that agents have with online marketing and I decided to see if I couldn’t tackle those for his agency.

    1) email.. how do i manage 100+ email accounts (easy dependable and inexpensively)
    2) website.. how do i manage a website (easy dependable and inexpensively) without learning to use software.. how do i add/edit pages what do i do with my current hosting and domains?
    3) some agents want to use their own websites and listing pages.. do they work? who should do them? single property websites? virtual tours? email blast?

    and voila… case study #2 in two weeks.

    the answers
    1) email.. for any size company… unless you have your own IT guys to troubleshoot and admin email accounts on your own properly configured servers with backup recovery .. don’t be dependent on some third party web hosting company who is likely dependent on another party.. ie the hosting company who admins their servers to handle your email accounts.. and while godaddy and other hosting domain companies are fine as an email host, your ISP (internet service provider) is also fine (although i find comcast, time warner and the like spammy… and what do you do when you want to switch service providers.. give up your email?) so here’s what i find works well.. I move all the dns records to google apps for domains. This solves all of those problems… it’s mobile, plays well with crackberries, it’s spam resistant and it’s easy, cheap, and dependable… and now they’ve added backup recovery from postini for the larger (legal, medical, .edu) outfits..

    login

    2)Fudgy had been using microsoft frontpage and his home brewed copy and paste html skills to edit the roster and listings online. He told me that quite frankly he wanted to spend less time doing this.. so what i did is make it so that he can import or export excel spreadsheets for his roster pages and he can copy and paste listings from ctar onto his listing pages. With WordPress controlling/editing/adding images and all that jazz isn’t in code.. it’s copy and paste.. and expanding or adding pages and features to the site doesn’t require a web development company.. just a couple minutes of his time.

    3)agent website stuff… there are a bunch of pre-fab ways to market online.. but let’s face it.. every brokerage and agent wants them leading back to their domain, url, name and logo and sending clients to www.thissite.com/somepage/someotherpage/ect.com isn’t a good practice, even though sometimes these places can work for you like google base, oodle, craigslist and vflyer… they will generate spam to your email and you should want those places generating traffic for your site and not vice versa..

    so here is what i did (don’t try this at home unless you add all of the proper precautions).. i put in a multi user wordpress install on a grid server at media temple.. i customized the back and front end, removed the bulky features, removed the wp-signup.php for security and spam reasons, added a bunch of security measures and only allowed users will emails from @hbrtwn.com, put a single sign on service to the google apps, gave every agent their own websites to control http://name.hbrtwn.com and added enough functionality so that listings can be copied and pasted into pages from ctar, galleries of images can be uploaded and put onto and page… and began a training page to teach all of these folks to use the site.

    **the best part about a multi user site instead of individual sites is that everyone who works with their webpages will actually benefit everyone else in the group search engine-wise..

    and ps… i took all of the images excepting one http://hbrtwn.com (a friend of fudgy’s took the shem creek at dusk images)

    wpapps
    wysiwyg

    The Result:
    www.hbrtwn.com
    Timeline: – exactly one week start to finish.. email addresses were up and down with no lag time or lost email. Every agent gets their own website that they can design with all the bells and whistles and multiple email addresses with less spam.. and Fudgy can spend less time on his computer.
    Price: 40hrs x $35/hr ($1400)

  • Facebook

    david windham
    gotta love it.. i was dragging this morning.. opened my email at 6:30am and sure enough there was my high school prom picture (thats me in on the far left with the strange expression) staring me in the face some 15 years later. (how about this one – with some sort of blasé 80’s attitiude) Nostalgic.. yes and cool for the fact that it’s so easy to network with anyone nowadays. I get emails from the most random people just google-‘ing’ my name and for the most part my brother always accuses me over researching into prospective clients ‘files’. But I think it’s good to keep everything in the open as it makes everyone accountable for who they really are and have been… it’s always the transient types that sketch me out, or the LLC that has was just created by a guy who’s had twenty of them in various states. I like being able to find out about a persons past and i think most people will agree.. just remember that if you put it online.. it may go down in your “permanent record” as i like to tell people. I have a great respect for a master craftsman of any trade and it really shows when someone has been focused and successful with only one thing for years. That’s all i need to know about a person. And what is networking anyway? I got a note under my wiper blade on my windshield after work one afternoon that said something to the tune of “former scad alunmi.. call me we’ll network” .. what is that? is that like being business friends or something.. network. I don’t want business to ever dictate who my friends are and i say to myself…self “my friends are just progressive.. ahead of the curve, it’s just a matter of time before fishing, gardening, art, bicycles, woodworking, organic farming and teaching really will stand a chance of being as profitable as legal, health care, insurance, hedge funds, ceo, lobbyist, stock option having, oil money, banks, developers, agencies, offshore manufacturers, investment groups, and box franchisees suck us dry”… then i wake up and smell the coffee…and read my emails.. and remember that ‘social networking’ site as folks like to call facebook is no different than the “who you know, not what you know” adage of days past.. I think i’m going to dig through my old photos and move them all online just for fun… so i’ll go ahead and take the glory on my teenage looks with this one before i put up everyone elses pictures… and for those of you who actually need to get some work done online… try this link

    face book developers
    REST and FBML (facebook markup language) has me a bit taken aback .. i’ll try to make the time.
    facebook ruby
    facebook app

    and for those of you skeptics about facebook… here’s a quote from yesterday’s Business Week.
    facebook businessweek
    These edges are fertile with innovation because participation requires such a small investment in time and money. Last fall, psychologist B. J. Fogg taught a class at Stanford University in which he assigned students to develop Facebook applications. During the 10 weeks of the class, 73 students developed applications such as Kiss Me, Oregon Trail, and Secret Admirer, that have since resulted in 25 million installs and, by the end of the class, were attracting about 1 million daily, active users. These applications have generated more than $500,000 in ad revenue since September. At least three companies were formed by students in the class.

    see also: 11/11/2015 – Facebook Weirdness – https://davidwindham.com/facebook-weirdness/

  • Native Orleanian

    native orleanian

    Jerry Moran is a photographer in New Orleans that i had met while in a gallery there. He takes a lot of images of musicians from in and around norleans. he contacted me after we had left new orleans because he was in need a of new website and i was happy to help as he had given us some great advice about what to see while we were in town.

    and viola – case study… and this is pretty typical of my work.

    problems
    1) a way to design and build a website without any knowledge of programming or code or hosting.
    2) a way to showcase his photography and keep up with gallery shows.
    3) a way to retail items on his site and control the images including downloadable stock imagery.
    4) a way to keep up with all of the content himself in an easy way.
    5) a site that is excellent with search engines and works properly and easily.
    6) a way to keep it and modify it long term without worrying about me.

    solution:
    1) jerry emailed me a photo of a pencil sketch of what he wanted as a website. gave me the colors (#e1b500) and fonts (teckton Pro BoldExt). We talked on the phone three times in a week discussing some advice and options and we just published a moment ago.
    2) i copied the old website, moved to gs hosting at mediatemple, renamed his dns to point to new server. i added a new directory where i put up the new site and he could preview and learn to use the content management tools.
    3) i added a content management suite for images, video, audio, design, content, pages, private urls (to share downloads and proof sheets with clients), and with all of the content from his old site. I added an e-commmerce solution that is highly configurable with images including exporting reports to quickbooks.
    4) i customized portions of each content management solution (slideshowpro director, google apps and wordpress) to work with one another peacefully and included the some security measures and only the most effective and useful add-ons.
    5) i added sitemaps, submitted to search engines, set up analytics, used friendly code and urls.
    6) and since the site is already there and running on his own hosting.. any half-wit of a developer will be able to work with or modify the existing design or code. I keep it up and running for a $200/yr retainer and i only bill out $35/hr for any associated elective work.

    The Results:
    http://nativeorleanian.com

    The Timeline:
    2/22/08 – 2/29/08
    exactly 1 week from start to finish

    The Cost:
    $1200 = 30/hrs @ $40/hr or 40/hrs @ $30/hr or 35/hrs @ $35/hr.. (which is actually $12 more).. but either way.. to field the calls handle the request, setup hosting, move domain, go through several edits, explain how to use it, setup email, install databases, install apps, customize.. voila. approx 35hrs. I can do the whole thing in a single sitting (day) if you don’t need any help with the design aspects or any additional features or flash design..but it usually takes me 2 weeks to get it all right and the client another month of questions until they’ll feel entirely comfortable using the site to it’s potential.

  • Web Design SC

    web design sc

    Over the last three years working with the web, designers, and developers (interactive agencies or what ever you want to call yourself….i’ve made mental notes on some of the best web development and design firms in South Carolina and some of the best practices of those developers or agencies (as far as i can tell) trying to be as impartial as possible and taking into account that it’s not just valid code and design on a page that works online publishing work …what makes me qualified to make such a statement? a firm knowledge of hosting, seo, web standards, search engines, effective sites, flash, mysql, javascript, design, email, etc.. a background in media, the arts, and two years in the pits.. business experience. Considering every company or person may have differing needs. And many companies may underestimate the potential for using the web (for instance a small company may not think that they could put all of their forms online for clients to prepare before the meeting or purchase..and some people and companies may overestimate the importance of the web (for instance a company or person may spend thousands of dollars into building a website that will almost never generate a valuable lead or any good branding image or spend tens of thousands of dollars on internet enabled software or applications that are sketchy at best).. and don’t underestimate the value of a full service ad agency to manage all of your marketing assets with one point of contact. What i’ve found is that quality and price certainly don’t reflect one another from agency to agency and typically you find the real talent for programming, hosting, seo, and design working behind the scenes.
    (in no particular order so don’t email me and tell me that you should be number 1)
    1. Fuzzco – Charleston
    2. OrangeCoat – Greenville
    3. Blue Ion – Charleston
    4. Metatation – Charleston
    5. Brains on Fire – Greenville
    6. Scully Group – Asheville
    7. Fuel Interactive – Myrtle Beach
    8. Web Station – Charlotte
    9. Period Three – Columbia
    10. Josh Skidmore – Charleston
    11. Perrin Hall Brunson – Columbia
    12. True Matter – Columbia

    1. always own your domains
    – you may always move your domain to any host and work with any company at any time.
    – there will be strings attached to your web developer or hosting company.
    2. consider very economical solution options before employing a developer/consultant
    – get a free typepad or wordpress website.
    – consider doing it yourself with help from your kids or someone elses
    – yahoo small biz hosting, google sites, godaddy shared hosting – site builder.
    3. there is no “make money now” button and you will get out of it what efforts are put into it.
    – adding more content, making the site valid, and accessable via search engines doesn’t happen overnight
    – you or your agency will have to devise and implement methods to drive traffic to your website.
    4. there is no one size fits all and prefab solutions are not the way to go for 90% of you.
    5. make sure that you developer is accessible and accountable to support your website
    6. know what your hosting arrangements are and consider getting your own hosting
    7. use existing dependable solutions for email. (ie.. google apps) for your domain.
    8. fancy is not always better – consider usability and simplicity
    9. keep all of digital assets and marketing materials in one place.
    10. use dependable content management solutions that can be upgraded

    worth a mention
    1. sciway.net – almost as much traffic as major newspapers on a good day.. a value for effective online ads.
    3. swampfox.ws – one of the most impressive and coordiated marketing and communications websites around.

    if you can give me some compelling reasons to change any of this info.. please email me.

  • Saint John Coltrane

    saint john coltrane
    i’ll be… ginny got me a really cool shirt since i have expressed on a number of occasions that ‘lush life’ by john coltrane would be my favorite album of all time if i had one. Anyway.. i opened the mail today and i saw.. 1286 Filmore, San Francisco as the return address.. The Saint John Coltrane Church is really a church.. and they have some interesting swag to boot.. they were featured in Time Magazine as the hippest church in America. I’ll give a hallelujah to that.
    john coltrane lush life

  • FITC Amsterdam How Boston

    fitc

    i’ll take a moment of silence to wish that i was in amsterdam starting tomorrow for the FITC conference.

  • wiki leaks

    wikileaks.org
    i had read this on friday in the nytimes and did some follow up.. wiki leaks is ordered to be shut off.. the judge orders the domain registrar.. they comply and thousands of people like me immediately begin posting this link.. http://88.80.13.160/ so in return it got more press articles like this from CBS news.

    “Last week, under pressure from a Swiss bank which said a disgruntled ex-employee had posted stolen documents on the site, Wikileak’s San Mateo, Calif.-based hosting company, Dynadot, agreed to turn off the site and prevent Wikileaks from transferring its domain name to another host.

    The Zurich-based Bank Julius Baer & Co. claimed in court papers that a former executive stole the documents, and in some cases altered some of them, though it gave no details. It said the documents were illegally posted to www.wikileaks.org.

    The papers allegedly point to money laundering and tax evasion schemes at the bank’s Cayman Islands branch. According to Wikileaks, they refer to “extremely wealthy and in some cases, politically sensitive” clients from the U.S., Europe, China and South America.”

    What i find most interesting is the fact that it is very easy to offshore servers in France, the Cayman Islands, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere and it is also very easy to mirror these sites with multiple domains registered in multiple countries, so any organization that is publishing materials from another country will certainly have some blurred legal boundaries here in the states. However, our courts could always decide to regulate the network providers. Since Reagan deregulated the FCC in the 80’s I don’t think we’ll see that sort of thing here. If anyones running the show there, I think it’ll be the providers and I think they’ll self regulate and tax certain networks and servers differently.

    And to think we don’t have little popup characters like they do in china to tell you when your looking at something they don’t want you to see…
    china virtual cops