Recently in Housecleaning Category

I think I've spent more time fixing my blog this year than actually posting anything to it, but now that it's been fixed AGAIN, here's hoping that changes...

After an inadvertent nearly year-long blogging hiatus, I'm back. Or, rather, my blog is back.

It began by accident: at some point last year what had been a perfectly stable Movable Type 4 installation suddenly stopped working. ("Stopped working" means scripts stopped executing, which degraded the user experience and made it impossible to maintain.) Initial troubleshooting got me nowhere; it was clearly going to take more time -- and patience -- than I could muster right then.

Or in the months that ensued. My time (and especially patience) mustering skills are clearly lacking when it comes to frustrating technical troubleshooting. But thanks to Twitter, that was ok; my communicating-to-the-world itch got satisfied that way. (It also probably caused the further atrophying of my time-patience-mustering skills... hmm.) But Twitter is limited; it can't replace everything that the long-form style of a blog enables, and eventually I came to miss that faculty so much I had no choice to bite the bullet and try to troubleshoot it again.

Which is what I finally did this weekend. I'm still -- for the moment, at least -- on Movable Type, even though it is the most cryptic blog platform to maintain, maybe, ever. Now that its contents are stored in a database it's actually a teensy bit easier to install than it was when I first started using it way back at version 2, but the way layout is controlled has become extremely opaque. After staring at it long enough it starts to make some sense, but the whole enterprise really taxes dusty HTML and UNIX skills that usually lie dormant.

Nonetheless, success! My blog is now live, and upgraded to the latest version, with only minimal loss of content and styling. Note: I have only resurrected my more recent "Statements of Interest" blog. I am not sure I will ever revive my old "Great Change" one. I remember a time when I would have thought killing my blog a horrible prospect, but after nearly a year of it being essentially lost to the world I find myself a lot less panicked by the idea of it staying broken. In some ways I'm finding myself feeling grateful that the Great Blog Breakdown is forcing some simplicity -- it's something of a relief not to have to keep it alive too. My current thinking is to clean up and repost some of my favorite posts from it here and then let the rest fade away. I'm finding myself feeling surprisingly at peace with that idea.

In the meantime I do expect more tweaking will need to occur, and I will do my best not to have it destroy the blog that's left in the process. The biggest project will be to try to get a grip on the comment situation. One of the reasons I stuck with MT, instead of fleeing for the greener pastures promised by WordPress, is that the world's best anti-spam plugin exists only for MT. However, that may only be MT 4.x, and I'm on 5.x, so until I figure out if I can port it over, or find another solution, comments are off until I can deal with spam attacks. I do welcome feedback, though, so please feel free to email me and I can post updates to my posts if necessary. And if MT doesn't break again...

My earlier-professed interest in English law is under fire from the rather horrific state of English law. Every day it seems I read about some new ghastly encroachment of civil liberties in the UK that even Orwell himself couldn't dream up on his most cynical day.

Fortunately there is "Geeklawyer," a UK technology and civil liberties lawyer, to fight the good fight, however drunkenly and/or pseudonymously. This week he is the host of Blawg Review #203, a Bacchanalian tribute to the latest in law blawgs. Including mine, despite my recent lack of prolificacy. He was kind enough to include a vaguely recent post, the one on contract lawyering, whose relevance increases with each passing week as more and more Big Law firms lay off even more of their lawyers. The legal business model is very broken, and I'm increasingly convinced that contingent arrangements are the key to the future.

But more on this and other topics later. Although hopefully not too much later, as I'd like to be able to make the next Blawg Review...

About that new year's resolution to blog more... Let's just pretend that February didn't happen, ok?

Because it's obviously time to get back on the blogging wagon, seeing how Eric Goldman's terrific blogging round table is convening again next week. I plan to attend, as usual, and ideally with the credibility of being an actual blogger. Thus it would probably help if I were actually blogging...

Interestingly, the theme for this round table is blogger burnout. Why are some people who blogged prolifically a few years ago now suddenly silent?

My silence, however, has nothing to do with burnout. I'm as committed to blogging as ever. Rather, my silence mostly has been due to life taking some interesting turns lately, and wanting to focus on seeing where they might take me. Still, I know that where I want to go blogging will help me get to, so I hope to return to more prolific posting here shortly.

In the meantime, if you're a Bay Area Blawger, please drop by the event next week at Santa Clara University. Further details can be found at Eric's site.

I was starting to do so well, living up to a 2009 resolution to write a lot more. Why, right here on this blog I almost got up to a post-a-day average. But then my laptop broke, so here I am, sitting at home in the dark, curled up in a fetal position and shaking from withdrawal...

OK, that's not technically true: I've found intermittent Internet access through other means, and I hope to have my own machine back shortly. But until then, and until I can catch up on writing about all the interesting things that need to be written about, I wanted to thank "CharonQC" (aka Mike Semple Piggot) for interviewing me for his podcast for his blog and Insite Law Magazine.

We talked about English and American law and practice, the economy, the presidency, and, uh, me... And yet somehow managed to avoid any mention of Stephen Fry, which seems odd because we managed to work in references to David Tennant and Edward Fox, yet Mr. Fry has had a greater influence on stoking my interests in UK law than either of the others. Oh well, for a future podcast perhaps...

The other day I prepared a lengthy post declaring how Twitter doesn't really do anything for me. Then my ISP had a hardware crash that killed my website, and suddenly it became my only outlet to the world.

So I find myself with mixed feelings. On the negative side, I hate being limited to 140 characters to express my thoughts. I hate that URLs chew up great swathes of those precious characters, and I hate that the limit forces me to suppress my pedantic self and instead employ all sorts of obnoxious abbreviations and acronyms rather than gloriously full spellings in order to economize.

I also hate that Twitter doesn't really solve the problem I want to solve. I've been looking for a technology that would allow me to quickly and easily post interesting links I stumble across through my blog with enough commentary to give them context but without needing to draft a full-fledged essay around them. So far I've tried and rejected Del.icio.us, and Twitter's not looking much better either.

But let's face it, all the cool people are twittering, so might as well give it a try.

I've added a new main category, "Travelogue," because it's time to face it: I write them.

Sorry for the extended pause. That busy-ness I earlier referred to has not yet abated (soon, though, I hope... I miss having enough mental cycles to write).

But I do now have a new post, only it's over at the old Great Change blog. I realize that I still have a few things to add to that story, things which I don't really want to mix up with what I'm trying to create over here. (Well, when I can get to it...)

I apologize: I've been terrible at posting updates lately. My excuse naturally is that's it's been a hectic and jumbled bunch of weeks. For instance there's been some travel, lots of work stuff, and I've also been teaching swimming lessons again on the weekends. I do love the teaching -- I can hardly believe this is my 20th year doing it! -- but this spring I'm doing it at TWO pools, which means that every week both my Saturdays and Sundays and most of the writing and/or recovery time they'd otherwise afford me get consumed.

One of the pool's classes will wrap up in about two weeks though (the other's will in June) so hopefully by then I'll have more time for posting, which will be opportune since on May 20th I'll be attending the third Bay Area Blawgers event. This time it'll be held at Berkeley, co-sponsored by the Santa Clara High Tech Law Institute and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

Details as posted on organizer Eric Goldman's website:

When: May 20, 6-8 pm
Where: Goldberg Room, UC Berkeley Law School. Directions and parking.
Who: Everyone is welcome, but this event principally will cater to active legal bloggers. Bloggers and friends who have said they plan to attend include: Tsan Abrahamson, Jerry Bame, Robert Barr, Larry Downes, Eli Edwards, Bob Eisenbach, Cathy Gellis, Eric Goldman, Beth Grimm, Greg Haverkamp, Cathy Kirkman, Kimberly A. Kralowec, Ethan Leib, Cathy Moran, Joe Mullin, Deborah Neville, David Newdorf, Dana Nguyen, Aaron Perzanowski, Elizabeth Pianca, Mark Radcliffe, Colin Samuels, Jason Schultz, Tim Stanley, Stacy Stern, John Steele, Kevin Underhill, Fred von Lohmann, J. Craig Williams and Cicely Wilson. (This list will be updated as new blawgers and friends RSVP).

As in the past, the first hour will be a structured round-table discussion and the second will be for shmoozing. I really enjoyed the previous events, and if you are in the Bay Area and either like reading legal blogs (you're reading this one, right?) or writing them you probably will too... RSVP to Eric Goldman (egoldman@gmail.com) if you're interested in attending.

It's also good for an hour of general CLE credit, which I find particularly exciting, seeing how although this will be my third Bay Area Blawgers event, it will be the first where I've been eligible to earn it...

This year for April Fool's Google announced their "Custom Time" feature for Gmail that lets users to send their emails ... before they sent them.

In other words, Gmailers can roll back the timestamp so it looks like their email was sent on time. They are, however, only limited to 10 of these a year, lest "people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless."

Of course, this announcement was just an April Fool's joke -- or was it?

I'm writing this post for the benefit of anyone trying to reach me. I'm not sure where the breakdown has been occurring, but lately I've not been getting some of the email sent to me. Or if I do get it, it's three days after it was sent. Even the US Postal Service can beat that kind of speed.

The 148th edition of Blawg Review is out, at Brad Trout's BlawgIT blog. It always seems to work out that the weeks Blawg Review is hosted by cyberlawyers, I end up talking about something else... In this case I sent in my Kosovo post, as I'm interested in getting feedback on it from a wider audience. It is a little sad, however, that my "I need a husband" post did not get picked up yet again. After all, I still don't have one, and how will I ever if the blogosphere isn't constantly reminded that I'm looking?

I noticed the other day that my blog was ranked higher on Google blog search for "Stephen Fry" than Stephen Fry's own blog was.

It seems weird to be considered more of an authority on Stephen Fry than Stephen Fry himself, but I'm sure Google knows best...

At the moment my blog is back down to a more respectable level of authority, but I suppose that may soon change again. My blogging does seem to lately be veering into an "All-Stephen-Fry-All-The-Time" motif (notice this post?), and there's reason to suspect it may not be letting up in that respect any time soon. Not only do I have bunches of his books, movies, and tv shows to still work my way through, but some of his work (e.g., Kingdom) happens to directly correspond to the kinds of topics that already generally interest me.

For instance I've lately been nurturing a particular interest in international law, and more specifically English law. (Remember those English law books I bought on a whim in London in December? I've been working my way through them...) Not that this interest should be too surprising; I've always tried to develop expertise in international matters whenever possible (see, e.g., my previous job in France, semester of study in Germany, summer internship researching international IP treaties, etc.), but if Stephen Fry wants to help make my further study more engaging, then so much the better...

And then of course there are the numerous other subjects of mutual interest, in areas like technology, language, society, and even the philosophy of learning itself. Already I've stumbled upon several more interviews with him that have raised plenty of food for thought. So what if he's a celebrity? Such status hardly disqualifies him from providing fodder for intelligent discussion. Indeed, as someone more informed and thoughtful than most, to say nothing of more articulate and prolific, it's quite the opposite, as he is able to publicly call attention to certain worthy ideas that might otherwise have gone uncontemplated.

But never fear, loyal readers, that I will allow myself to be so starstruck as to abandon my own, native blogging sensibilities. After all, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before my blogging goes back to being the usual All-Huey-Lewis-All-The-Time you've all come to expect from me...

Blawg Review #144 is up, over at Kevin Thompson's Cyberlaw Central blog.

For those unfamiliar with Blawg Review it is what's known as a blogging "carnival." I don't know who came up with the name, "carnival," which always struck me as kind of ridiculous, but the idea behind them is nice. Bloggers are hard at work all over the blogosphere, creating their posts, but what fun is it to write if no one ever comes by to read what you've written? Blog carnivals help solve that isolation problem by creating meta posts that contain links to lots of other bloggers' posts, thus providing them with much-needed exposure.

In the case of Blawg Review, various legal bloggers sign up to "host" an edition of Blawg Review, released on Mondays, which contain links to some of the best posts from other legal bloggers the previous week. Bloggers who would like to be included can either nominate themselves, or hope that someone else might have nominated them (Blawg Review likes to encourage people to nominate other bloggers who've written things worthy of attention). It's also possible that the host may include posts that he himself has seen over the previous week sua sponte, as they say in the law.

I myself have long planned to participate in Blawg Review in order to help attract readers and raise the profile of my blog, but I never really got around to it. Jeremy Blachman as a host did once link to me sua sponte, as did the mysterious figure (and very nice albeit anonymous guy) known as the Blawg Review Editor, but this week marked the first time I've ever managed to get it all to come together, having an appropriately meaty post to submit and remembering to do so before the deadline.

The understanding among Blawg Review participants is that when the new edition comes out you provide a link to it. I'm not sure it's a strictly enforced policy, but it certainly seems like the neighborly thing to do. And there's no real cost. If you like my blog, you may well like any of those other blogs linked from it. And an edition of Blawg Review is not just a page listing a bunch of static lists -- Blawg Review editors are encouraged to use their creativity in how they present the work of their peers. This week's, for instance, used Lord of the Rings as a vehicle for tying together these links. One page to link them all...

If you've been checking back here incessantly you may have noticed some changes as I've begun to wrangle the cryptic mess that is MovableType 4.01. Now that I'm getting into it I'm beginning to understand it a little better, but it's still extremely unintuitive and/or poorly-designed outright. I just can't wait until MT4.1 comes out -- and the upgrade manages to destroy what I've finally managed to figure out...

While I wish I had been able to get the blog all set and ready to go before announcing the move, I really needed to start publishing to it in order to have something to work with. At this point though I think many of the major decisions have been worked out. I may still tweak the stylesheet, but I've decided I can generally live with this one without making too many changes. The biggest pending decision is whether the front page should have two columns or three. At the moment I only have enough content for two and the third column is blank, but I wasn't happy with how it looked when I set it up to only have two columns, like the old site has. I was sort of surprised by this: my writing tends to be dense, so I thought that if it appeared in a more narrow column it would force too much scrolling. But on retrospect I think downward scrolling is better than forcing the eye to scan nearly all the way across the page. Even I found the amount of words I was forcing myself to read that way to be intimidating. Instead the smaller column makes my paragraphs look like much more manageable bites. So, now it will be a question of how to fill the third column. I have some ideas, but no time frame for trying them out, as I'm not sure when I feel like scheduling in the inevitable frustration pursuing them will inevitably cause....

As always, feedback is welcome, but I think at this point I'm pretty much good to go.

In launching this blog as I have I have committed the cardinal web development sin of releasing a live site before its construction is complete. For that I apologize and point an accusatory finger at SixApart, makers of the MovableType platform I've been using since 2003, for having released its 4.01 product before sufficient documentation was available to support it. Persuaded as I was by their hype of how wonderful it would be I had gone ahead and upgraded to it several months ago. Doing so was generally not a problem for my pre-existing blog as all the templates and styles I'd made for it when it ran on version 3.x still worked, but when it came to launching a new blog it made sense to use the new MT 4 templates and styles in order to be able to take advantage of all the snazzy new features SixApart was bragging about it having.

Unfortunately it was impossible to figure out how to in any sort of timely way. The 4.01 system is very different than the 3.x systems, and it's pretty confounding. My choice then was either to continue to blog at the old site, which I felt I had outgrown, while I tried to figure out how to build the new one out over here, or go ahead and move to this new forum where I could write with my new voice -- and then beg for the forgiveness of my readers for the inevitable UI changes I will inevitably inflict upon them as I figure things out. Obviously I opted for the latter avenue, and so I want to apologize in advance for the extensive changes that will likely take place over here over time.

The upside to this decision is that you all have a chance to weigh in with what you might want or not want to see in the new design. Let me know if there are any sites you particularly like or find usable, and I might be able to adopt some of those features if they'll work for me. A few "improvements" over the last site are already in the works, like using the "extended entry" feature to break up long posts so that the front page won't seem so dense. I'm also going to try out using the "tags" feature instead of relying so heavily on categories. The upside with tags is that its easier to assign multiple topic labels to each post, and it will be easier to draw them out of the database when wanting to see what I've written on any particular one of them.

Otherwise I suppose everything that you currently see could change. I do kind of like the blue color, so perhaps I'll use it in the final palette, but I may switch back to two columns, or move things around, or add features or get rid of features, etc. Sorry, I know this is a very, very user-unfriendly thing to do to one's website, but it's the best I can do for right now. At least while I'm not playing around with HTML I should be able to focus on my writing, and isn't that what's really important? Besides, with the new site my RSS feed finally has carriage returns. Hooray for legibility! So, please, go ahead and subscribe!

(And let me know if anything seems to not be working. I'll try to fix that stuff first.)