Author: jbenton

What kind of jerk would get his jollies hacking apart opensourcecms.com? It’s a great site that provides a worthwhile public service: letting people try out various content management systems (like the aforementioned Textpattern or WordPress) without first going through the bother of installing them on your server. Someone decided, just for fun, to kill months worth of work. I hope he’s happy.

For those who have web hosting needs, Dean Allen — the savant creator of Textism (the blog), Textile (the web text processor), and Textpattern (the intriguing tho’ still-in-development blog authoring/content management system) — is launching his new project: Textdrive, a web hosting operation. If it’s anything like his other projects, it will be elegant, robust, and worthy of your attention.
Dean is charging $199 for a year of hosting (about $16 a month). Not a bad price for what appears to be a very solid setup. But the reason I’m pimping it here is the very special deal he’s offering to early adopters: Sign up now, pay your $199, and get free web hosting for life. Rather than go the venture-capital route, he’s counting on the early signups to provide a portion of Textdrive’s seed money — he’s calling them the VC200, since he’s limiting their number to the first 200 signups. (Plus, you get a free t-shirt!)
Now, with the vagaries of Internet economics, “for life” means “for the life of Textdrive,” and who knows how long that will be. But (a) Dean is a top-notch fellow whose business model makes sense to me, (b) he’s got some good people working with him, and (c) even if the life of Textdrive is only two years, you’re still looking at a hell of a deal. If it lasts longer, of course, it’s an amazing deal.
I signed up yesterday. Read the lengthy (15 screens at this writing) discussion to learn way more than you need to about the technical aspects. At the moment, there are 33 spots left in the 200 — they’ll probably be gone in a few hours, so sign up now if you’re interested. As I said, $199 a year is a very good deal, but there are probably better ones available if you dig. But $199 for life (or even two years) is essentially unbeatable.
(Update, 4:19 p.m.: The last space just sold out.)

Terry Fox, a great Canadian.

Alas, this edition of ChandaWatch has come to an early close: Chanda has withdrawn from the French Open, a victim of that knee problem I mentioned.

Regular ol’ toilet seats not doing the job for you? Thank heavens the Germans and the French have independently hit upon a solution.
True love isn’t about to be stopped by a simple knife to the skull. “I fell out of love with him for a couple of days afterwards, but I love him again now.”
Cooper Black: Behind The Typeface.

Just did a live shot on TXCN that will be repeating through the afternoon (and probably evening). I talked about the state’s test scores released today.

Another update on the Orange County gang rape case — this time on the victim’s cross-examination by Joe Cavallo, seemingly the most repugnant of the defense attorneys.
R. Scott Moxley, the reporter, reminds me in style of Mencken at the Scopes trial, back in the days when bias was expected from reporters. Unlike the folks from the L.A. Times and the other dailies, Moxley’s free to toss aside objectivity and report things as he sees them — in this case, coated with a thick layer of disgust.

Maybe saying this makes me a bad person. (In fact, it almost certainly does.) But fantasy WNBA? Fantasy WNBA?

Travis Morrison has posted his 100 favorite albums of all time. He does it in what strikes me as a fundamentally honest way:
It got me to thinking–hey, what the hell are my Top 100? And really, really, what 100 records have I listened to the most? Not the records I want everyone to think I listened to the most. Not Albert Ayler, although Live at the Village Vanguard is pretty unreal. Not the Nurse With Wound record I would love to claim to be my ninth-favorite of all time, in certain company. What records did I really just play over and over again? What got the most spins, regardless of any other factor?
The list shows him, surprisingly, stuck in 1987-1992. But you have to admire a man with the self-shaming capacity to name OMD’s Dazzle Ships to his personal top 20.

As some of you may know, Blogger recently redesigned. I wanted to see what it looked like, so I logged into my Blogger account for the first time in forever. And I realized that all my old posts from an earlier, non-public iteration of this weblog were still stuffed deep in Blogger’s craw.
Note: We’re not talking about the first iteration of this blog — that would be these two abortive posts from May 2000, back in my Toledo days. Nor are we talking about the first version of crabwalk.com, which was a modified version of this page. (Love that purple mug shot!) And we’re certainly not talking about my first web page, the enchantingly titled Cajun OnLine. (Love that capital L!) It was, I believe, lost to a tragic Yale server accident circa 1994.
But we are talking about my first sustained attempt at blogging, in December 2000 — nearly a year before the launch of the current site.
I know you’re all waiting with baited breath, so here it is. (The template is new, since the old one was lost long ago. But the old color scheme was red and gray.) I apologize now for that first entry on December 6.