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B-L-O-G-S "Bequeathed Legacy Of Guaranteed Speech"

By Katherine Lawrence
29 Jul 2005
I asked a historian of women's issues, "in the 1920's, and recently, there were great strides for women's rights. Why did it fade away?" The answer got was not one I expected. "It didn't. The media merely stopped reporting it." Whether it is Tiananmen Square or Washington Square, if people can communicate, they can rally around a cause. When there is a coup, what's one of the first things the leaders take over? Radio and television stations. In China, Internet phrases are banned. "Tiananmen Square" itself is forbidden speech. This nation's founders added the First Amendment to the Constitution which, among other things, guarantees freedom of speech, the right to petition, and the right to peaceably assemble.

I was blogging before blogging was cool

By Katherine Lawrence
28 Jul 2005
On July 9, 1978, a Women's Suffrage banner that had rarely been seen outside of a museum since the 1920's, once again saw the light day. Old and venerable, the purple and gold colors of the National Women's Party moved down the Capital Mall as over 100,000 of us stepped into herstory. Dressed all in white-the suffragist colors-we marched to peaceably ask for an extension on the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The Mall was filled to capacity. Surely the numbers were enormous. There were those who had rallied there the day Martin Luther King had declared "I Have a Dream." These witnesses were sure that this day would equal that one, but the Park Officials said otherwise.
Drupal thank you poster

Drupal.org movin' on up

By Laura Scott
13 Jul 2005
After its unfortunate site outage (due, apparently, to another site's being hacked on their shared hosting account - ouch!), Drupal.org raised over $10k in a weekend fundraising drive, and is using the money to obtain dedicated servers.

The fixed-width design dilemma

By Laura Scott
17 Jun 2005
Perhaps the biggest thing that every web designer has to grapple with is the fact that each website visitor might have any combination of web browser, browser window size and screen resolution. In other words, ten different people visiting the site might might have ten different website experiences. Site A viewed on Firefox for Windows on a screen with 1600x1200 resolution will look much different than the same site as viewed on, say, Internet Explorer for Mac with a screen resolution of 800x600. (Why any Mac user would even consider using Internet Explorer, I don't know. This is just a fer instance thing. Go along with me here.)

Site redesign, and "working with Microsoft"

By Laura Scott
6 Jun 2005
This past weekend we updated our site to Drupal 4.6.1, which institutes some minor functionality and security fixes. In addition, returning visitors will have noticed that we redesigned our website. Those keeping track will note that this is the second major redesign since we launched pingV.com. We do what we can when we can. It's hard to find the time, though, when client work keeps things busy. What I find especially frustrating, though, is how Microsoft forces me to spend so much time pampering their software. Yes, I'm talking about Internet Explorer, the iconoclastic web browser that refuses to acknowledge web standards. How much online productivity is lost trying to get websites to look and function properly on Internet Explorer?

Yellow Pages, the Internet, and Browsers

By Katherine Lawrence
1 Jun 2005
Some people might say that the yellow pages are the original business data base. Researchers of business history find these time capsules buried in such places as Baker Library at the Harvard Business School. They are a fascinating snapshot of what people once bought and sold. The Yellow Pages, a history The first yellow pages were not yellow at all. They appeared in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878 and contained no phone numbers. At the time the operator simply connected the caller. The first yellow pages contained fifty names and consisted of one sheet of paper.

Which is really the bubble? (And is it bursting?)

By Laura Scott
28 May 2005
So are blogs just a passing fad, as Kevin Maney claims? His USA Today column stirred up a minor tempest in business blog circles, mainly for assertions such as:
So, yeah, blogs are cool. Anything that gives people a voice benefits society and makes us all better and smarter - and, as bloggers have proved, makes established information outlets more accountable. But blogs don't seem to be the second coming of the printing press. They're just another turn of the wheel in communications technology. More likely, a few years from now, after the blog bubble has normalized, we'll look back and say that this technology made a difference and that our total fascination with it seems quaint.

Which is really the bubble? (And is it bursting?)

By Laura Scott
28 May 2005
So are blogs just a passing fad, as Kevin Maney claims? His USA Today column stirred up a minor tempest in business blog circles, mainly for assertions such as:

Their food wasn't bad...just their web site

By Katherine Lawrence
15 May 2005
No one in the market square shouts, "Sour wine! Rotted fish." - proverb of India
We stumbled on a wonderful restaurant. What a find! Someone with an eye for decoration knew what to do. Beautifully appointed to the last detail. Spacious and grand. And the chef...wow. And affordable. It was a light lunch, so the bill did not come to much, but the service! I tipped 35-percent. I could hardly wait to tell my friends about it. As we left, my colleague took one of their eye-catching business cards and said, "I wonder what their web site is like?" Yes! I quickly followed suit and I look at the lovely card here on my desk as I type this.

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