The Ft. Hard Knox Project

The goal of the FHK project is to assist politically-conservative bloggers, social-networkers, and citizen journalists to navigate the wild, wild world of Web 2.0 more effectively.

If you're interested in learning more about the Ft. Hard Knox Project, here are the links:

• Ft. Hard Knox Main Page and Blog
• Ft. Hard Knox Discussion Forum
• Ft. Hard Knox Discussion Forum Chat
• Ft. Hard Knox Wiki

"Wiki...What?" A Wiki is a user-supported and continuously-evolving hypertext encyclopedia. Thus, by definition, a Wiki is always "under construction." The Ft. Hard Knox Wiki has recently been established within the Wikispaces environment, and it already has some useful articles. Its purpose is to offer an easy way to access tech tips and information, to help conservatives use the Web more effectively.

Using the FHK Forum and Chat Room:

The Ft. Hard Knox forum is hosted on Delphi, so you'll need to register for a Delphi user ID if you don't already have one. Registration for the basic functions is free, and that's all you need to leave messages on the forum or to use the chat room. Prompts will appear when you click on the link. It takes just a minute to sign up!

Updated 7/17/07:

Meet with us on Twitter!

• The Monday night FHK forum chat has been discontinued for now. That's because it's too difficult to get everybody in different time zones all over the world to meet at the same time, especially in the summer when so many people are traveling.
• Instead, we're encouraging fellow conservatives and antijihadist activists to meet with us on Twitter. You can use Twitter both in "real time" for chatting with people who are online at the same time, and as a forum for communicating with people who will be online at other times.
• Click here to view all of our articles about Twitter. We'll have many more articles about Twitter in the future!
• So how do I get started on Twitter? The easiest way is to ask an established user to introduce you to other Twitterers. Whom to ask? Me, of course! Don't be shy. Just go to the Twitter site, register an account, click on my profile at 1389, and add me as a friend. I'll "friend" you back soon afterward. Then send me a message introducing yourself, and I'll begin introducing you to others. I hope to see you there soon!

Updated 7/2/07:

• We'll be discussing the Ft. Hard Knox Wiki during tonight's Forum Chat, so please stop by if you'd like to know more, or if you think you might be interested in working with us!

Updated 6/26/07:

• The main page and blog for the Ft. Hard Knox project have moved to a new address, http://forthardknox.com/
• From the new URL, the Ft. Hard Knox blog can be accessed via a cellphone or PDA browser as well as from a conventional browser.

Stumble It!

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TinyURL for this blog post: http://tinyurl.com/yo8og9

Announcing 1389 Message Blog - Open for Public Access!

For quite a while, I've been keeping a separate "scratch pad" blog, called 1389 Message Blog. Throughout the day, I post various links, along with comments and messages, sometimes through the blog editor, but mostly by cell phone. I use this later on as raw materials for other writing that I do, including articles on 1389 Mobile Blog, the Ft. Hard Knox Wiki, and other places.

Well...I finally realized that I am not going to get around to using all of this material myself, so I've decided to open it up to public viewing.

Please don't expect anything fancy! I treat 1389 Message Blog as a workspace, so it's always "under construction." The posts that come directly from my cell phone might not have titles or tags. If I happen to be testing something new, I might change or delete a blog post. If I've used the material in an article, I may move everything to another blog or to a Wiki page and link to the new article from the post in 1389 Message Blog, so that I don't have to update it in two places.

Thus, if you find a link on 1389 Message Blog to something interesting that you want to do some serious writing about, I suggest that you link directly to the source, not to the post in 1389 Message Blog.

Here's the 1389 Message Blog Atom feed.

Other 1389 Message Blog features:

• Both 1389 Mobile Blog and 1389 Message Blog are on Technorati. However, individual posts on 1389 Message Blog are not tagged or labeled by subject matter. In fact, the subject matter on that blog can be literally anything at all!
• Comments on 1389 Message Blog are open, so feel free to communicate!

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Tools for WordPress Bloggers - With Rolling Updates

Here's a roundup of tools and techniques for bloggers who use WordPress.

Rolling updates follow the main body of this article.

New items are being added to the list as the information becomes available. Your comments and suggestions are invited!

• Economy Size Geek offers Postie, an add-on for independently-hosted WordPress blogs. It lets you e-mail blog posts, including photos and video clips.
• Andy Moore offers a downloadable plug-in to create a mobile web interface for your WordPress blog. WordPress Mobile Plug-In works well with PDAs and ordinary cellphones, and even allows editing through the mobile web interface. (Stein hoist and lots of good tweets to fellow Twitterer WiredPig for telling me about this and the above plug-in.)
• Alex King offers a collection of WordPress tools.
• eMoms at Home explains how to future-post blog entries in WordPress.
  
• William Teach at The Pirate's Cove offers several blog posts that discuss WordPress tools:
  • List of Plug-Ins
  • Blog Post Editors
  • WP-PDA and Kate's Sideblog
• Imthiaz Blog offers WP-PDA, another downloadable plug-in that lets PDAs and cellphones access your WordPress blog through your existing blog URL. This is the interface used at The Pirate's Cove.
• Bill Hartzer describes One Simple Way to Protect Your WordPress Plugins.

Rolling Updates:

• Dev.Mobi plug-in for WordPress (Posted 6/30/07)
• Caveat: Make sure your plugins are installed correctly, so that search engine crawlers don't receive error return codes at your site.
  WordPress Plugin Hurting Google Rankings? (Posted 6/30/07)

TinyURL for this blog post: http://tinyurl.com/26gdu7

Stumble It!

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Updated: Use the little orange square to get your news anywhere!

You may have seen this little orange square with rounded corners on many of the blogs and news sites that you visit. This orange logo is the unofficial Web logo for feed access.

Alternatively, as on many blogs supported through Blogger.com, you may have seen a line that says:

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Either of these indicates that the website or blog offers an RSS or Atom feed syndication.

What does this do for you? It gives you a quick and easy way of keeping up with many blog and news sites without having to navigate to each one to see if there's anything new.

In a nutshell, here's how it works:

• Whenever there is new material on website with an RSS or Atom feed, the website sends those new items along to a feed server that you can access.
• You can bring up a feed reader in your browser and use it to select and subscribe to as many RSS or Atom feeds as you want.
• Every time you recheck your feed reader, you'll see a menu that lists all of the feeds to which you have subscribed.
• For each feed, the feed reader shows you the headers of all the recent news updates or blog posts from that site that you haven't seen yet, so that you can click on whichever items you want to read.

There are plenty of feed reading options available, but we'll keep it simple here.

A quick-and-dirty way to see what feeds are all about is to let your browser serve as your feed reader. You can do this simply by opening the news website in your browser (Internet Explorer or whatever else you might be using on your own computer), clicking on the orange button, and selecting the "Subscribe to this feed" option when the next screen comes up. Your computer will download the feeds automatically at regular intervals, provided that your computer is on and can access the Internet; the browser window need not be running. But there are some big disadvantages here. The downloading takes up a noticeable amount of resources on your machine, and you can read the feeds only when you are able to access your own computer.

A more practical option is to set up an account with a Web-based service such as Google News Reader. If you haven't already signed up for a Google account for Gmail or the like, Google will ask you to set up a free account using your e-mail address and a password of your choosing. This distinguishes your list of news subscriptions from everybody else's, and lets you access your account from anywhere on the Web, not just from one particular computer.

Once you've signed on to Google News Reader, you can subscribe to new feeds by clicking on the Add subscription button. This opens up a search box that invites you to enter either a search term or a feed URL. In other words, you can use the same search box to look for feeds with subject matter that interests you, or to subscribe to a feed that you already know about.

Example:

• To subscribe to this blog, you would copy the feed shortcut directly from the Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) line.
• Then, paste this URL, which happens to be http://moblog1389.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default, into the search box.
• Click the Add button, and you're good to go.

Every time you sign on to Google News Reader again, you'll see all the new posts that have appeared on your favorite blogs and news sites. You can also click on Google's Manage Subscriptions option to group your feed subscriptions conveniently into folders, or to delete any feeds that you no longer want.

Finally, you can use Google Mobile Reader to check your feeds from your cell phone or PDA. Bring up the Web browser function, go to http://www.google.com/reader/m/, and sign on with the same email address and password that you used when you set up your account. You'll see a downsized, mobile-web-friendly version of your Google feed menu.

Stumble It!

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Update: Click a button to add a subscription to 1389 Blog to your favorite feed reader!

XML

Click here to get RSS buttons for your own blog!

How often do you look at your own blog?

"Why would I want to do that? I haven't forgotten what I wrote last week. Besides, I'm busy. It's time for me to get out the next blog post!"

Do you know how well your blog is working?

There's no substitute for bringing up your own blog in your own browser and taking a good look at it on a regular basis. It's even better if you also view it on other platforms and browsers. If your blog has a mobile web interface, be sure to set up the proper environment to check that too.

Here's what you can learn by putting yourself in your readers' shoes:

• Does your blog actually display? Don't laugh. I've looked at a lot of blogs lately, or tried to look at them. I was surprised by what I found.
  
  Your blog may be among the many that won't even come up at all.
  
  How do you know it's running if you haven't tested it recently? If you're serious about blogging, you won't want readers to find that your blog is down. If that happens too many times, readers will stop visiting because they think your blog is defunct. Worse yet, other bloggers and webmasters will stop linking to it.
  
  You can't just assume that your hosting provider and your blog publishing system are making your content available, unless you monitor your blog regularly.
  
  
  • Does the entire main page load up on the first try? Or does the loading process stop before the page is complete, leaving you with pictures or text that are cut off in the middle or missing entirely?
  • Does the initial page provide everything that the reader needs to begin navigating, including excerpts or full text from one or more recent blog posts?
  • When you click on the URL for an individual blog post, does the entire page become visible, including comments?
  • Are your outbound links working? Check your recent blog posts. Click on outbound links individually or run a utility. If a link is dead, either fill in the updated URL, or delete the link entirely.
  
  
  
• Is all of your text legible? If you want people to make a habit of reading your text, give them an unrestricted view, and don't give them eyestrain and headaches.
  
  
  • Is any of your text hidden behind misaligned widgets, add-ons, photos, or other text elements?
  • Is there too little contrast between the text and the background?
  • Is your background so loud or busy, or your layout so cluttered, that readers have a trouble focusing on your text?
  
  
  
• Does your blog take too long to load? Remember, people may be browsing from anywhere in the world, sometimes from mobile devices. They don't all have as much RAM as you do on your desktop. They don't all have broadband connections with unlimited access at no additional charge.
  
  So don't try to make them drink from a fire hose. Their connections will time out, their browsers will crash, they may incur extra charges. Many readers will give up and never come back.
  
  If you want those readers to stay, make it easier for them.
  
  
  • Limit the total size of blog posts, text, and graphics that appear on your home page, and on each subsequent page.
  • Break the data stream into chunks and let each reader decide what to see next.
  • Don't cram your last fifty blog posts onto one display. These endless vertical scrolls hog system memory and run at a snail's pace. All too often, the text at the end is cut off. Readers hate that. Instead, display full-text blog posts individually or in small groups.
  • Don't post high-resolution graphics directly on the page. Let your readers click on a thumbnail view when they're ready to display or download a large photo or chart.
  • Don't autoload music or videos. Readers are always complaining about websites or blogs that monopolize their bandwidth, make unexpected noises that disturb others, or launch some sort of multimedia extravaganza without asking. Let readers decide by clicking on a link when they are ready to see the next set of blog posts, watch a video, or play music.
  
  
  Does your blog offer an RSS or Atom feed? There are many advantages to offering a feed, so you certainly should set up that feature if you haven't already.
  
  
  • Subscribe to your own RSS or Atom feed. That way, you can be sure that it comes out promptly and is formatted correctly.
  • Use full feeds, not just headlines or excerpts. Don't frustrate users by making them wait for something else to load in order to finish reading your article. Also, some search engines use your feed to index your blog, so it's to your advantage to provide the complete text.
  
  
  
• Are readers leaving comments on your blog? If they do, be sure to pay attention. You may even find some good ideas in the comments for this blog post!

The bottom line: Review your blog regularly to make sure it's functional and user-friendly, and you'll be sure to attract and keep far more readers.

Stumble It!

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Two ways to access Twitter from the mobile web

See Introducing Twapper 2.0b: Mashing 30boxes and Twitter on the 30boxes blog. 30boxes is an "identity aggregation" service for Web 2.0.

They're offering another way to access Twitter from the mobile web that has some advantages over Twitter's own m.twitter.com interface. In a nutshell, Twapper lets you view expanded URLs, more photos, and other things that you can't view directly through Twitter Mobile. If you already are a 30boxes user, you can mesh Twapper in with the other features of 30boxes. It works on a PDA or on a conventional cell phone, subject to memory and other limitations of the device.

Click here to access Twapper. Access to the basic display features is free and no registration is required.

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Female genital mutilation as a modern European fad

According to this Breitbart article from AFP, more and more physically normal women are demanding plastic surgery to "improve" the appearance of their vulvas. This "designer vagina" surgery (or, rather, butchery) involves cutting away healthy sensitive tissue, with the end result being a vulva resembling that of a prepubescent girl.

1389 declines to speculate on the depth of the mental, emotional, and spiritual sickness that could motivate supposedly modern, civilized people to begin toying with the savage custom of female genital mutilation.

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Off-topic tech note for fellow mobile web enthusiasts: 1389's laptop was down, so this entire blog post was entered via a bare-bones Sanyo SCP-7000 cell phone. This is not the easiest way to go, but it will work. However, the memory limitations of the cellphone itself are a problem, in that this limits the size of the file that can be loaded back into the cellphone for editing with the Blogger editor.

Computerworld: Why cell phones are still grounded

We've all been told that we can't use a cellphone on an airliner because it would interfere with aviation electronics, or perhaps with cellular towers on the ground. To put it bluntly, both of those excuses are hogwash.

This Computerworld article points out that any technical issues associated with cellphones could be resolved easily enough, and explains why it has been more convenient and more profitable for the airlines, the cellular carriers, and the government to keep the ban in effect.

Too bad they can't be honest enough to admit that they might consider dropping the ban - just as soon as they can figure out a way to extract enough money from us to make it worth their while.

As an ironic, and only slightly off-topic, footnote, the TSA has lost 100,000 employee records. Oops...

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"Oops! That wasn't supposed to happen! © Google 2007"

Okay, I'll admit it: 1389, a/k/a the editor of this blog, is the worst Internet junkie on the planet. Among other things, I have upwards of thirty feeds coming into my Google Reader account alone, and when I'm out somewhere, I pick them up on my cellphone with Google Reader Mobile, which is currently in beta test.

Normally, Google Reader Mobile works surprisingly well, even on a cellphone screen not much bigger than a postage stamp.

This past Friday, I clicked on a feed link and got the mysterious message shown in the header of this blog entry.

Obviously, this is not the most helpful error message - neither for the tech support staffer nor for the end user. If any of you happen to know anything about this message, please post a comment here!

More to the point: my attention was especially drawn to the fact that Google included a copyright notice in a message that is such a painfully ironic summation of the human condition.

After all, who among us has not said, or at least thought, the same thing?

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TV and radio ads compete with spam

Television and radio commercials - and not only those low-budget late-night ads - are looking more and more like those offers for fake Viagra, boiler-room get-rich-quick schemes, and worthless diet products that seem to clutter everyone's email.

Billionaire blogger Mark Cuban warns that showing these ads, which are nothing but ripoffs of the consumer, will hurt the reputation and the brand value of the radio or TV station.

In the article Ripoff Commercials = Stupid TV Stations and Networks, Cuban argues that, if a station hasn't sold an ad slot to a quality advertiser, it would be better off not running any ad at all instead of running this garbage. Can't argue with that!

Commenter Trey Tomeny says:

A great observation, Mark. It is especially appalling that so many of the commercials that air on talk radio are for highly questionable get rich quick schemes. Those shows are the product of individual hosts who seem to value their integrity, and then apparently sell it to the highest bidder during the breaks.

By the way, Mark Cuban's blog offers a mobile website - try it and see!

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Mobile computing on a budget

This moblog shows what can be done with minimal equipment.

Analyze wrote:

Very nice....you are obviously well connected using mobile devices. What are you using...Blackberry, Treo...? If you don't mind sharing, how much do you have to pay monthly for your internet / mobile phone plan? I'm thinking of getting one. Cheers...

1389 replied:

Actually, I have an ordinary bare-bones Sanyo SCP-7000 cell phone with a 12-key pad, no camera. Nor does it come with any music or video playing features. It's enough for me to type email, including this message!

I don't know offhand what the basic plan costs, but the add-on for unlimited web access, email, and IM is $15/month. The unlimited access through Sprint is what makes it all possible.

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Analyze (author)
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What's a moblog, anyway?

According to Wikipedia:

Moblog is a blend of the words mobile and weblog. A mobile weblog, or Moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile or portable device, such as a cellular phone or PDA. Moblogs generally involve technology which allows publishing from a mobile device.

Learn about Blogger Mobile here and here.

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What this blog was like when it began...

1389 is my nom de guerre, and I am the editor of this blog. I am an IT professional, living in the in the U.S., with thirty years' experience, mostly on IBM mainframes.

I am blogging my thoughts, impressions, and concerns, as well as tech tips and news, mostly from my mobile phone. The phone is a Sanyo SCP-7000, text-only at this time.

This blog will address some technical matters, along with anything else that seems interesting or useful.

There are frequent posts from other authors who have been invited to participate.

If you are wondering why this blog uses such a spare and simple design, it's because it allows this blog's website URL to be used from both a conventional browser and a mobile phone or PDA. That means you can navigate, read, and post comments on blog entries from your mobile device. It avoids the need to build a separate mobile interface. If the main blog page were to have graphics, scroll boxes, or other trimmings, it would require much more memory, and it might also require features that are not implemented on all mobile devices.

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About 1389 Blog
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More about 1389 on this blog.