Registering for the Mesh Conference this year, I was a little dismayed to see so little French content on their Web site. This opened my eyes to the lack of French language text on a lot of grass-roots and community-oriented Web sites in Canada. I think that the large (~25%) portion of the Canadian population that's lost by not having French text and community input in a site can be really damaging to a community effort. Especially for issues that are dealt with at a federal level (like information rights, open content, open source software, freedom, privacy) it's vital to get a cross-Canadian site developed. So I've written an essay (yes, again) about Bilingual Web sites in Canada and how they could be improved.
tags: canada quebec web freedom community online advocacy
Three décades of blogging
So, today completes three full decades of blogging on my part. OK, well, a décade in the French Revolutionary Calendar is only 10 days, so it's not really that remarkable an achievement, but I've been pretty happy about it.
Some things I've noticed:
- Blogging is hard. It's really time-intensive to write lots of stuff on pages and pages and pages. I think I set myself up for a difficult task because I keep trying to write past the bottom of my long sidebar to the right. That means about 10+ paragraphs of text every day; it's a lot of work.
- It's really ego-gratifying. I think the idea that blogging is only for egotists is right on the money; I feel particularly ego-gratified by the time I've put into this site.
- It's individualistic. I've only ever worked on Web sites with groups of other people, and I've dumped hundreds of hours of my life into work for which I never got recognition or credit. Working on something that has my name on the marquee is really kind of nice. I don't have to answer to anyone else for it either.
- There's a huge infrastructure. Most of the hard problems of blogging -- technical and social -- have already been solved. That's great for me; there's a ton of resources and tools and trends and social norms that have been established, and I don't have to start from scratch. Huzzah for that.
I think the big thing I'm going to concentrate on doing for this site in the coming three décades is to work on becoming part of the blogging conversation. I don't have trackback working in any way, so stuff I post here doesn't propagate out to the places linked (nor do links get back to me). Also, I don't have any way to leave comments; nobody seems to be wiki-editing the site, which is fine with me, but I'd like to allow some kind of feedback mechanism.
All in all, I'm glad I've been doing this, and I hope it continues to grow.
tags: blogs french revolutionary calendar ego trackback comments community conversation
I ☠ international shipping
OK, I don't really hate it, but I'm kind of bummed right now. I bought some nice schwag in the Creative Commons Canada CafePress store, including a little t-shirt for Amita June and a big one for me. The price was pretty steep -- about CDN$30 -- but I'm glad to send some ducats along to the good people at CC Canada.
Because CafePress is in Kentucky, the package was held at the border by the Canada Border Services Agency, which did me the border service of tacking on $17.84 to the cost of the package. That's about 60% duty, including a $5 handling fee -- charging me for the privilege of having them hold up my package and squeeze more dollars from my pocket!
So here's what I'm wondering: 1) what was that whole NAFTA thing about, if I have to get charged 60% on my packages coming from the US? 2) Is there a CafePress-like service that's on this side of the Longest Demilitarized Border on Earth?
tags: canada border customs cafepress cc merch
I ♥ Planet
So, at about the same time that I started this blog, friends Dan and Tjames both started their own -- entirely unrelated. Half as a joke, I decided to create a feed aggregator on this server, and just see what happened.
3 weeks and 10 blogs later, Piglog is cranking right along. It uses the fancy Planet software that runs Planet Debian and other such fine aggregation sites. I've found it incredibly easy to use and work with, mostly because the Universal Feed Parser it uses is so damn good.
I hope to aggregate more Pigdoggers's blogs as they come online or get discovered or re-commenced. Maybe it's the kick in the pants needed to get some of my favorite writers writing again.
tags: pigdog piglog planet blog rss universal feed parser
Captain Copyright
I saw the link to Captain Copyright, an anti-fair-use propaganda piece put out by the Canadian government, in an article on Michael Geist's blog. It's bounced around all over the place since then.
I'll say this, though; I haven't seen another reference as good as this Captain Copyright parody. Only... shouldn't that be Marcus Bornfreund?
tags: captain copyright copyright canada propaganda parody michael geist marcus bornfreund