Well, I did the big nasty — I submitted this weblog to 20 blog-specific syndication sites or so. I’m still arranging things (like the template) and you should be expecting a new look/feel throughout the coming week. I’d prefer a Three-Column design with a white background and black text. What I have found so far has missed the mark mostly with colors — I found a few templates I was looking for over at BlogStyles but I didn’t care much for their color schemes.
One of the main reasons I’m starting to blog is to show proof-of-concept. My current employer is a new dotcom I helped create called Collectrix.com. There we host both normal websites and what I like to consider: Automated Sites for the Rest of Us. What I mean by that is the simplicity and ease-of-use content-management systems (CMS) have evolved into.
Most particularly, I’m refering to PHP-based websites that streamline the publication process to where semi-computer literate users can install and run a website without having to hack out lines of html code. In the past I have used PHPNuke and PostNuke. We used PostNuke at the original Movementarian.com site that was launched last August. Dave, my co-partner at Collectrix, and I decided to try out a new CMS called Mambo Server.
I had never heard or seen this CMS before, but one of Dave’s co-workers at his Real Life Job ™ insisted that Mambo has been around for year — in fact, he claims that it was one of the original ones. If you want to do some sleuth work, goto their SourceForge subsite. Now look at the updates and you can see that version 3 came out almost two years ago, and version 4.0.12 was just released. Based on that interval I believe it is safe to conclude that Mambo has indeed been around for many years. Also note, one of the more well-known CMS’s around is Slash. You may recognize the format because it is the same code that the infamous nerd site Slashdot.org uses.
Speaking of Slashdot (or as the community calls it /.), I have visited that site everyday for nearly 5 years now. And yes, I disagree with some of what they decide to report, especially JonKatz. But that is a story for another post.
Be sure to visit Collectrix.com and research the new niche market of Blog Hosting. Oh, and take a look at one of the neater features of this blogging software I’m using, called TrackBack.
I was reading the column by a friend, Matthew Barganier over at Antiwar.com. In early February he wrote a guest letter which was published by one of the editors (presumably Eric Garris or Sam Koritz) in response to a surprising (to myself) piece written by Reason Online’s prolific columnist: Ronald Bailey. Mr. Bailey, whose columns I usually enjoy, penned a rather disappointing essay justifying the State.
Anyways, I enjoyed Matthew’s piece a great deal and promptly sent him an email saying:
I dunno about being “little-read.” Most of the people I’m in contact with have either sent it to me or messaged me about it. Feel free to send me any of the flames you get, so I can parody them mercilessly.
Since then we’ve chit-chatted a bit and he now has a regular appearing column.
Last week he sent me his comical parody of the weblog at National Review Online. Be sure to check it out — so true.
This week his column was lampooning the inane (yes, that is spelled correctly) justifications that various Statists such as Bush have for conquering portions of the globe. A quick and easy read.
What I thought was interesting was his link to Panama. For those of you who might have forgotten, on December 20th, 1989 Bush Sr. issued the “go ahead” to launch an invasion of Panama, to apprehend Senor Manuel Noriega (research the School of the America’s too), who is yet another tin-pot dictator initially propped up by politicos on the Beltway years earlier. I faintly remember hearing that Manuel Noriega was on the payroll for both the CIA and the Columbian drug cartels - playing a quasi-double agent.
This was called Operation Just Cause and I was in elementary school at the time, but remember the incident briefly - I recall the Special Forces being used and how there were communication problems with the Navy SEALs and some injuries (or deaths) resulted from “friendly-fire.”
Now in yet another tangent, I remember reading how at the same time the Operation (see below) to oust Noriega commenced, investigators from the IRS found their way into the “private” files detailing information of Americans that had placed their assets in Panama (Panama was and to an extent still is an offshore ‘tax haven‘).
Also, one more brief point - during the invasion the new HARM missile was field-tested in a real battle scenario. The reason I point this item out, is because the contractor for the missile is Texas Instruments, and my father worked on that project (the project is almost 20 years old now, if the State prosecutes him for telling me that, they have some serious issues, but then I repeat myself).
And I leave you with an easy way to remember the capitol of Panama, just add the word City to it. My free geography lesson for today.
