December 2005

Boston Wireless Advocacy Group has a new look for it’s weblog and overall website powered by WordPress. I spent some time digging into WP 2.0 and especially appreciate the new admin interface. Hopefully I’ll have more time this weekend to look into the new Structured Blogging plugin.

BostonWAG is …

an organization of volunteers from the Boston area that believes open wireless has the ability to change the nature of technology and how people interact. Our volunteers are not just technologists, they are people involved in public policy, community organizations, and technology companies.

I received an email today asking what the font is that I’m using in “The Life & Times of Sooz” logo at the top of sooz.com. It’s Omnes by Joshua Darden. (Previously the logo was using Freight Micro, another one of his fonts.)

About Omnes:

Originally conceived as the brand typeface for a national retail chain, Omnes fulfills the need for a rounded typeface which is neither overly mannered nor excessively literal. A selective approach to rounding adds subtle visual interest, while a large assortment of non-geometric forms pay homage to 19th-century rounded Grotesques which appeared well before the crisp visual style of the Bauhaus.

Omnes is available in five weights: Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, and Black.

Disclaimer: I work with Joshua. So naturally I endorse his superb font products.

If it were up to me, Neil Finn and Jane Siberry would record a song together.

This week’s song of the week is “Last to Know” by Neil Finn from his One All album from 2002. If you don’t know his name, you have probably heard of his old band Crowded House. These days he records solo and with his brother Tim as The Finn Brothers.

The tune @ iTunes.

My landlord while Michael and I lived in Arlington Heights 1998-2003 is looking for a web designer to join his new company. He is a great guy with an impressive background in technology. If you (or someone you know) is looking for a web designer job in Boston, please get in touch with me and I will connect you with him. It starts out as contract work and could lead to a fulltime job. Their office is in the Fort Point area near South Station.

Here are a few tidbits about the job that he sent me in an email earlier.

This is for a start up that provides community/social networking websites that I am working on. I need someone:

• technically competent in current presentation technology, pure CSS layout, some exprience with flash will also help (for doing demos). Also have experience with both static site and web application (JSP, etc).
• artistically have experience in designing retail/end customer (intead of corporate) websitse and web apps.
• If things work out, will become part of what we think is a very cool and successful start up.

For the past few days I’ve been receiving emails from my web host (DreamHost) alerting me of a problem with the amount of CPU usage on my shared hosting account. I’ve never had this happen before. The resources report shows that php5.cgi is using up 3548.7700 seconds of CPU time. Dreamhost tech support has advised me to optimize my php scripts to see if that helps. Unfortunately I have no idea what that might involve. I’m waiting to hear back from someone at DreamHost for a followup; but in the meantime, I thought I’d post my dilemna here. I’m not doing anything all that special on any of my websites: a few WordPress sites, a MovableType site and a Drupal site. I had PHP5 running on a couple sites (probably for no good reason other than clicking on the little checkbox on the web admin panel) and I’ve since unchecked that upgrade but I’m not sure if it reverted back to PHP4.x or not.

I’m stumped! Here’s a screenshot of the most recent resources report.

Update 12/20/05 @ 9:19 PM EST: DreamHost replied to my latest email asking for more help about this issue. This is what they had to say.

You received the email because your site does appear to be a bit busy.
You can safely disregard it for now, as it is only a warning. We will be overhauling this system, however, as it has caused a lot of confusion. You shouldn’t hear anymore on this subject unless there is a major problem and you are close to needing to be moved to the evaluation server.

If there is anything more we can help you with, please let us know and we will be more than happy to accommodate.

Thanks!

Michael Oh of Tech Superpowers and fellow co-founder (along with Patrick McCormick and myself) of Boston Wireless Advocacy Group is quoted in today’s Boston Globe article about the lack of a city wireless initiative.

”No one’s stepping up,” said Michael Oh, a local technology executive and cofounder of the Boston Wireless Advocacy Group, a loose crew of volunteers pushing for more wireless access around town. ”Boston is behind the curve on this compared to other cities.”

Read the full story at boston.com.

I recently came across an excellent WordPress plugin called FAlbum that allows you to display your Flickr photos and photosets on your site. I need to tweak the CSS, but you can see the plugin in action here on the main photos page.

Scott Johnson left Feedster recently and has something new in the works called Ookles. Feedster first came to life almost three years ago. I helped Scott name the company in an IM conversation during the Spring of 2003.

Tamye Riggs (conference organizer for TypeCon) is in town this week. A group of humans are getting together for dinner tomorrow night, Thursday, December 15th. If you’d like to join us, please do! The plan is to meet 7PM at Fajita & Rita’s at 25 West Street in downtown Boston. The restaurant is a couple blocks from the Park Street Station (Green Line, Red Line) and Downtown Crossing (Red Line). If you can make it, mention it in the comments of this entry or email me. The food is good and reasonably priced plus the margaritas are super tasty. And for those of us who don’t sit still very well, they put a big piece of butcher block paper on the tables so you can draw and doodle.

I’m trying to convince TypeCon to use Wordpress for their 2006 conference website. The conference is taking place in Boston next summer (August 9-16, 2006). Their website will possibly have a blog but there is a lot of other content beyond that (of course) for hotel information, speakers/panels, registration, Boston tidbits, etc. I’m looking for websites that use WordPress for more than just a blog. And I’d love to know about conferences that use WordPress, too. If you have URLs to share, please post them in the comments of this entry or email them to me. Thanks!