Jon Stahl’s Journal

I’m now running WordPress 2.0. Upgrade was pretty painless. Biggest plus: a nice TinyMCE-based graphical editor. You probably won’t notice the difference.

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Molly and I were pleased to ring in our new year with the New Year’s Eve envelope in the mail informing Molly that she had passed the engineering licensure exam she took back in October. That means she’s now officially certified to practice engineering in Washington state — so all you machines, buildings, [...]

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Have a great Thanksgiving, y’all. Only 153,534 shopping minutes until Christmas.

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Nice story today in the New York Times about how nuts-and-bolts community organizers are helping Katrina survivors pull together to cope with disater and reconstruction: In the two months since Hurricane Katrina hit, the Metropolitan Organization, a group of professional organizers affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, a grass-roots network founded by the Chicago [...]

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Ok, I’m writing this from Flock, a new browser based on Firefox that incorporates a bunch of Web 2.0 goodness.  Clever idea.  Awful default font, though.

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The quality and power of Plone as a content management system is incredible. It’s got incredible usability, workflow, permissioning, document handling, search, extensibility, internationalization, accessibility — and more. We’ve launched over 40 Plone-powered sites for non-technical clients in the past year with a very small team of people. However, for websites that revolve [...]

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The Take Back Your Time Conference looks like a worthwhile event, coming up next weekend (August 4-7) here in Seattle. TIME TO CARE: Best policies and practices for work, family and community balance and personal well-being. Bringing together a diverse group of interests, experts and leaders of the time movement, [...]

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…Kathy Fletcher, of People for Puget Sound! Big congratulations to Kathy and the rest of her folks at People for Puget Sound, for recognizing the importance of the personal, frequent online communication that blogs allow. Executive Directors are busy folks, and it’s great to see Kathy taking the time to write from the heart about [...]

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According to the New York Times One of OPEC’s concerns is that oil prices will quickly climb to a level where many car owners decide to switch from sport utility vehicles to compact cars, or possibly, to public transportation or carpooling. Such a change in driving habits, while still considered unlikely, might produce a [...]

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Okay, I admit it. I played hooky on Friday afternoon to catch a matinee of Star Wars at the Cinerama. It was actually pretty good — if your expectations aren’t too high. The best line, and an obvious swipe by George Lucas at the war-mongering fascism of our Dear Leader George il-Bush: [...]

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Pure genius from my soon-to-be colleague Steve Andersen. One day it occurred to me to make grocery lists that matched the spatial layout of the store. When I am making a list of things to buy, I start by drawing a rectangle (the rough shape of the store) and as I think of items [...]

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Yep, our blog server was down for a few days, but it’s back in action now, and stronger than ever. (Ahh, Debian.)

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[Here's a letter written by my colleague Drew Bernard that was so good I asked him to share it more broadly here. -- Jon] Hello Friends and Family, You all know that I care deeply about the air we all breathe, the water our kids drink, and the land our great grandchildren will inherit from us. [...]

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The folks from SPIN Project offer some great thoughts for how nonprofits can prepare for the day after the election — no matter who wins. This type of scenario planning is all too uncommon in the nonprofit sector, and I’m pleased to see that such smart folks are stepping up to the plate in a very [...]

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Metafilter links to and discusses to an interestin g article in EE Times about a researcher at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute wh o claims to have invented a 99%-efficient omnidirectional reflector that will allow LEDs to replace light bulbs. Since lighting accounts for about 25% of US energy use, efficiency gains here can have a huge [...]

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In the piece Always contest the district, DailyKos contributor RonK offers some great wisdom that is extremely network-savvy. It’s a short post, and worth reading every word (plus the comments), but I’ll take the liberty of boiling it down even more: Despite these caveats, always contest the district … and with a re-electable candidate if at all [...]

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Winning Ways of Alinksy and Gandhi is a fantastic three-minute primer on the organizing strategies of two of the greatest organizers ever: Saul Alinksy and Mahatma Gandhi. This essay is the capstone in a solid ten-part series by Charles Dobson in The Tyee a new online progressive newsmagazine covering British Columbia. I had the pleasure [...]

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The Washington Times reports that the ultra-rightwing group the Club for Growth is currently running an attack ad on Howard Dean in which says that “Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” I guess it’s a good sign that the [...]

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Bullfighter is both entertaining, annoying and useful. And, it has the most gratuitous install “movie” of any program I’ve ever seen. Yes, but what does it do? It’s plug-in for Word and PowerPoint that measures the overall readability of your documents based on the widely-used “Flesch” methodology. And it highlights overused consulting [...]

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