Flooded Lizard Kingdom

I do apologize. I've been a bit distractified.

You see, I'm writing elsewhere too. Yes, I know, you are the most important readers. However, unless you're going to start sending me checks, I feel I must see other people as well. After six months of all-baby-all-the-time, it's time for some Real Work around here.

(All of you who have children are now laughing, yes?)

In case you are behind on what I've been up to, I am blogging about environmental issues in crafting at Crafting A Green World, part of the Green Options network which is totally for great justice. They have a food blog and a fashion and style blog as well, and then a good number of other blogs that are much more serious and also quite good.

Hey look, a commercial on my blog!

Seriously, though, y'all know I'm all about shaming you for using plastic bags saving the world, and I feel good about working with these folks. So stop by and check us out. Or if you just want to see what I've been doing, visit my own personal corner of the GO empire.

1. Back up my database.
2. If doing a separate install to test it out and play around before committing, set up a new database.
3. Wait until NaBloPoMo is over.

1. Diabolical plot by our neighbors to get revenge for how bad our lawn looked during much of 2007.
2. XBox and PS3, now linked, have created an artificial intelligence bent on destroying us all.
3. History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man - GODZILLA!

Oh My Stinkin' Heck is a personal blog I would enjoy reading whether or not I'd met Heather at BlogHer. But I did, and she's gracious and lovely and fun, and I'm so glad she blogs.

Anti-Racist Parent is a group blog by a wide variety of parents. Invaluable for thinking about how we're going to raise our kid.

Dollymix is perhaps my favorite feminist blog. Fun, irreverent, linky, but not shallow.

Twinkle Little Star is a what? Mommyblog, disability blog, personal blog, all of the above. If I can be half the mama (and blogger) this woman is, I will be doing a great job.

What does the mother of a seven week old baby need? More to do! So I am committing to NaBloPoMo. For the uninformed (read: those with lives), that stands for National Blog Posting Month. Participants in NaBloPoMo commit to posting every day for the month of November, no cheating. Unfortunately for me, I think no cheating means no writing multiple posts in a day and scheduling them out for other days, so this is going to get interesting.

My goal is to get back into the swing of blogging, not cause myself stress, so I will be using the list format for my posts. I'm good at making lists, I like them, and it's easier for me than, say, interpretive dance videos. I may do a few non-list posts, but every day in November there will be a list. Virgos rejoice!

p.s. I wish the signup process for NaBloPoMo didn't exclude people by using a visual CAPTCHA. There are plenty of people with visual and learning disabilities who blog and who might be interested in participating, but due to the CAPTCHA they may not be able sign up as a member on the site without assistance. I'm just sayin'.

Two of my favorite bloggers recently blogged about blogging, and now I'm going to blog about what they blogged about blogging, and also about my blog.

Now that we have cleared the room...

Red Stapler: Getting all meta on you and Oh My Stinkin Heck: Kitten angst and comment query both ask readers to talk about their experience with blogs and comments. Among the questions raised:

• Do you read blogs that don't allow comments?
• What do you do if you leave comment after comment on a blog and they never respond or reciprocate in any way?
• When you comment, how do you like the blog's author to respond?

It had never occurred to me to evaluate whether to read blogs based on whether they allow comments. I think of "blog" as a publishing format, unlike one of the commenters on Red Stapler who says that not allowing comments on a blog makes it a website and not a blog. I also think that I read blogs more for what the author has to say than for a community, so the presence or absence of comments doesn't really affect me. With over 200 blogs in my aggregator, I would be hard pressed to read all the comments anyway.

My commenting practices, both as a commenter and a blogger, are wildly incoherent:

• I feel snubbed when people don't comment on my posts (more on Heroine Content than here), but I don't routinely comment on other people's blogs even when I've read them devotedly for years and love them. Often I have nothing more to say than "loved this post!" and that feels like a waste of space.
• I especially avoid commenting on posts where there are already 15 or more comments, assuming that the blogger has gotten plenty of feedback at that point, and yet I read and appreciate every single (civilized) comment that I get on one of my posts - and if I got more than 15 comments on a post, I would read them all and the next 15 or 20 as well.
• I'm sometimes jealous or amazed when I see comment threads on other blogs with 30 or 40 comments, but I don't find my desire to blog diminished at all when I don't get comments.
• If I comment on someone's post and they never follow up, my feelings are hurt even though I completely believe they have read my comment. However, I'm only 50/50 on responding to other people's comments on my blogs.

This is completely in line with my usual self-centered nature, but it's embarrassing. Having made this list, I'm quite motivated to improve my behavior.

During my horrible first trimester, I did start commenting more on blogs, because it was the only level of social interaction I could manage. I especially tried to comment on BlogHer, since it's built to be a community and I wondered how the Contributing Editors felt when they worked hard on a post and then got no response. I even managed to finally find a way of keeping track of where I commented and going back to check on the conversation - by bookmarking the post in del.icio.us and then looking at it again a few days later.

But here's the question that is nagging at me. Bloggers don't generally know who is reading their blogs unless those people comment. However, thanks to the magic of Feedburner, I know how many of you have subscribed to the feed: about 60 at any given time. Number of people who have commented on my blog in 2007: not more than 15.

Who the heck are the rest of you people? You don't have to tell me, because I find it quite amusing to make up stories. I don't even think I know 60 people, and quite a few of the people I know aren't reading this blog, so what's the deal with the rest of you? Such a mystery.

My favorite possible explanation so far is that there are WAY more abandoned aggregator accounts out there than anyone knows, and most of the subscriber numbers are phantoms. It's a conspiracy between the aggregator companies and the big bloggers who monetize based on their subscriber numbers...

They have one for lease...

I just know that the letters on this building sign say B L D G, but my brain can't stop seeing B L O G.

I am once again speaking about accessibility at BlogHer. Last year was practically a sneak attack on a room full of people who wanted to learn about making their blogs shiny. This year the BlogHeristas have switched things around and I'll be talking to a techie crowd. That will be a change, since my usual accessibility talk is "Don't worry, you don't have to be a techie to do this!" It also means I need a new presentation, perhaps one that doesn't include a photo of my dirty laundry?

In any event, I'm looking forward to it. I have some work to do on my own blogs if I'm going to be walking the walk, as you can see if you read the latest tip on All Access Blogging and then look carefully at this blog. Eeep! Time to get down with some CSS.

Hey kids, I'm launching another blog: All Access Blogging.

If you are a blogger and you'd like to make your blog more accessible to people with disabilities, or if you want to know why you should, check it out.

And let me know if that background color is just WAY too bright. It's pretty, but it kind of hurts my eyes.

(And while you're at it, you know about Heroine Content, right?)

Who is interviewed today on BlogHer? Me! Check out Ten Money Questions for Skye Kilaen, part of a series by BlogHer Contributing Editor Nina Smith. Nina blogs at QueerCents, a personal finance blog for the LGBT community. I enjoyed meeting her at last year's BlogHer conference, and I was delighted to participate in the Ten Money Questions series on BlogHer. Thanks, Nina!

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke (one of the people Ms. Sierra named in her post as a contributor to the sites where she ended up receiving death threats) have released a joint statement after talking through the incident. It's clear they still have some points of disagreement, but they have discussed the situation like adults and come to a resolution.

If only more people, myself included, could work through their differences with each other in such a fashion. I'm really impressed.

For those who missed the bad drama in the blogosphere in the last week, there's a good short summary on apophenia. The essentials are as follows:

The brief story is that three prominent bloggers got annoyed at another female blogger for not permitting mean-spirited comments in her blog. They created a site called meankids.org as well as a spin-off. These blogs encouraged people to say terrible things about others and it spun out of control.

And in the end, some statements and images that are easily read as death threats were posted about Kathy Sierra, a prominent tech blogger. She got scared, canceled a presentation, and blogged about it.

Ms. Sierra's post wasn't as clear as it could have been, and as a result two issues have been conflated. First, what we should think about people who make vile personal attacks against others online, or who take a step beyond that and start not one, but two websites devoted to bashing on other people. Second, what we should think about people who posts death threats against others online. Luckily, we all seem to agree on the second.

On the first, though, we are divided. Example A: The Matter of Kathy Sierra on BlogHer. Example B: Hating Hate Speech on BlogHer.

Some folks say that the best response is to ignore it. They condemn Ms. Sierra for overreacting, often pointing out that they too have experienced such incidents and didn't freak out. I don't see how this is relevant. Ms. Sierra is as upset as Ms. Sierra is, and how someone else felt in a different situation is not really relevant. And while I guess it would be an easier world if everyone could weather sexualized insults, threats of violence, and vicious mockery without being hurt or scared, I don't think it is anyone's responsibility to rewire their personality until it functions that way.

Some folks invoke the First Amendment as if that means what these folks did is beyond criticism unless it crossed into illegality. It's not. They have a right to say it, but I have a right to think their behavior sucks and to explain why I feel that way. I don't think it "chills disagreement" to condemn a post like this (really awful, be warned) no matter who it's written about.

(Along with that, I have the responsibility to update my opinion as more information becomes available. In the Kathy Sierra incident, one of the site's creators took down the site, took responsibility, and apologized for how ugly everything had gotten. Ms. Sierra accepted this in an update to her blog post.)

I strongly object to having concerns about the climate created by such speech dismissed unless the speech crosses the line into illegality. I agree with this, also from the post on apophenia:

There's nothing illegal about what the prominent bloggers did, but i think it is unethical at every level. This is not an issue of censorship, but an issue of social responsibility. What does it mean when the most prominent bloggers are encouraging speech that divides, particularly that which divides along the lines of race and gender?

I care about what kind of world we live in, and I care how people's actions (including speech) contribute to that world. Mean, sexist, racist garbage online makes the world worse. Period.

Elisa Camahort, in her post A Day to Think About Your Blogging House Rules, makes these comments:

I do believe that each blogger and site owner should set policies and practices in place that refuse to accommodate or tolerate cyberabuse. I believe each blog or site owner is entitled to draw their own lines and enforce them.

If we've been laissez-faire until now (and we all probably have been at times), then now's the time to take it more seriously and stop the blogosphere from devolving into a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, just-plain-hateful space.

Coincidentally, I started thinking about these issues just the day before the Kathy Sierra post came to my attention. On Heroine Content, we have received so far three comments that have struck me as taking away from the conversation rather than adding to it.

The first (on my review of Tank Girl) said we should stop writing "feminist drivel" and go "save the spotted goat" or something worthwhile. Since I could not find any information online indicating that the spotted goat was imperiled and it was obvious that the commenter was not seriously trying to engage in dialogue, I deleted it.

The second comment disagreed strongly with Grace's assessment of Alien, in an extremely sarcastic fashion. Grace chose to publish it and respond.

The third comment said Grace must not have been paying attention to 300 (link to her review), that she had it all wrong, and that she would end up "stereotyped as a stupid feminist who sees everything as a personal attack because of your sex" if she didn't get with it. I don't mind disagreement, but if someone had spoken to a guest that way at a party at my house, I would have asked them to leave.

While I didn't want to step on Grace's toes and delete the comment, I saw it as exactly the kind of aggression that leads me to avoid reading the comments on feminist blogs, political blogs, current events blogs, and the local newspaper's website. This commenter had raised a substantive issue in her comment (how do you define rape?), but one that could have been raised in umpteen different ways without insulting Grace. I didn't want to have a project that we created as a positive, fun, constructive space to turn hostile. I don't want to put energy into a project that enables people to attack me and each other.

So I told Grace I didn't like the comment, but she should do with it as she saw fit. I still felt bad about it. The next day, I saw the Kathy Sierra post. The comment was still not published, so I asked Grace to hold it while I thought some more and drafted a comment policy for Heroine Content. This is what we agreed on, adapted from several sources:

Heroine Content is a feminist and anti-racist space. Comments, including constructive criticism, are welcome as long as they are respectful. You do not have to agree with all of our ideas in order to comment, but we expect civility. We are not interested in creating yet another space on the internet for people to abuse each other. Please stick to debating and criticizing ideas rather than personal attacks.

All comments are reviewed by the blog's authors before being published, and may be rejected if we don't feel they follow these guidelines. Our blog, our discretion.

And under that policy, the third comment will not be published. I don't feel like it's unfair to apply it retroactively, since grace has responded to the issue raised in another post. The commenter is welcome to respond to under the new guidelines. Unlike the group of bloggers who created two sites to harsh on other bloggers, I'm not likely to start a site with the express purpose of trashing others - but I'm also not willing to accept, condone, or encourage such behavior by allowing it to be published on a site that I administer. I'm not willing to let them use me to publish that kind of content. The comments we've received on Heroine Content have been far from the level of the posts and comments directed at Kathy Sierra, Maryam Scoble, etc. on the "satire" sites that ran so amok. But I'd rather start with and keep a clean slate.

stopcyberbullying

I am a Six Apart groupie.

By "groupie" I don't mean I make myself available for sex to the employees of the company. That would be weird. I also do not follow them around the country and attend all of their speaking appearances. That would be expensive.

But I love Movable Type. Love it. I love Six Apart (6A) because they made it and support it. I don't even remember how I found out about MT, but when I saw it, I knew I wanted that. I gave the nice 6A people $40 to install it for me, and I have spent the last few happy years making it do what I want. Usually. And when it doesn't, I believe it has a good reason.

Now I'm having a baby. We heard the heartbeat Wednesday morning. It was a respectable 160 bpm techno beat and we're quite pleased with that. Since my family and friends all over the country, I can't imagine not blogging about this kid. Some people make scrapbooks or write diaries. I blog.

However, I don't really want my mom wandering over to this blog on a regular basis. I make it a policy never to blog anything that I would be ashamed for her to see, but I don't always have the same conversations with her that I do with my friends. And she dislikes profanity, so I don't feel like she should be subjected to it, but I'm not willing to refrain in my own space.

I could just set up another MT blog. Easy enough. But despite much experimenting with existing options and then actual development work on C-Man's part, I have yet to find a satisfactory solution for managing photo albums in MT. If I'm going to post 1 or 2 photos at a time, it's fine. But what if I have 10 birthday photos, or 12 from a grandparent visit? I should probably cull and only post the good ones, but I want options.

Enter Vox. My beloved 6A launched Vox last year, as a "don't be afraid of blogging" platform that feels (to me) a lot like Blogger and LiveJournal. Compared to those services, though, it makes managing photos and video easier. Since my digital camera takes movies, I imagine we'll be taking some. Vox also has a lot of cute, easy templates. I have a Vox account so I can comment on other blogs there, so it would be easy to just...be...sucked...in...

Except.

What if Vox doesn't last? What if they change it and I don't like it anymore? What if if I need to move my content, but I can't extract all the data that I've spent so much time entering, editing, and organizing?

This fear is not without basis in reality. Take my experience with Blogger.

I started on Blogger. I grew out of Blogger. I exported to MT, and it was fairly easy, since it was back in the olden days and I had no comments, photos, or categories. When Grace wanted to move from Blogger to MT, I told her it would be easy. I thought it would take about 12 minutes. It took about two weeks, and Cody had to use a bunch of his ninj4 skillz, and I didn't tell Grace how many hours I spent on it or how many nights I stayed up until midnight until it finally came over correctly. She was terribly patient given the difference between my initial estimate and the time it actually took.

During one stage of trying to export her photos, we changed her from blogspot publishing to FTP publishing. It didn't help us get the photos - and it also locked her out of updating her blog. Permanently. Despite repeated pleas to tech support. Despite Blogger's own documentation that stated if you switched, your blogspot domain would eventually be unlocked and you could reclaim it. Eventually, she managed to get them to delete her old blog. So instead of going to the old blog and finding its new home, visitors get a 404.

Blogger (on blogspot) is free, so perhaps you get what you pay for.

Vox is free.

Flickr, the photo sharing site, is free for a basic account, but I think you can also pay them for an upgraded account. As far as I can tell, Flickr kicks ass. It has all the features I could ever want in a photo sharing site, and then some, and they keep adding more. It would take all the thought out of managing photos and albums, and I could easily post to MT. But if Flickr changed, and I didn't like it anymore, could I get my data out? People can comment on photos, could I get those comments out in a usable format?

Another complicating factor: Flickr is owned by Yahoo, a company which in my opinion has historically had the worst online help and the most atrocious customer service of almost any business I've ever encountered. - even when I was paying them money for their services. If I needed help from Flickr, would I be able to get it? I can't believe it given my history with Yahoo.

I almost want someone to argue me out of my paranoia. It would be so EASY to use Vox and/or Flickr. For a baby blog, I don't even think I need that level of control that I want with my other blogs. A pre-made template and an easy interface is probably just fine. I have enough work to do on other web projects.

But it gives me chills to think about going through what Grace and I went through with Blogger, when the content in question is a record of memories of my child's life.

What to do?

FYI, that "links for 2006-08-31" post from last night was produced automatically from del.icio.us. I'm not sure why it posted at 9:36 specifically, and I'm really not sure why it says it's links for 8-31 rather than 8-30. I'll work on that, but I do like the functionality.

Also, I've been told that we may have some commenting issues. Like, you can't. So I'll check on that. Apologies for any inconvenience to the hordes of people whose evenings were ruined when they could not comment.

Yes, this is the giant BlogHer wrapup post you've all been waiting for. You haven't been able to do a thing because you're so busy thinking "Princess, you told us all about the advertising, but what was BlogHer really like this year?"

Well, from my perspective, it was quite lovely.

Some folks didn't enjoy it as much as I did. We need to do things differently next year. However, I wish more people would give the organizers some credit for not being evil. They thought about issues of inclusion ahead of time and asked for input from a variety of people. But the vibe of the criticism has a tone of "obviously they don't give a damn / never thought about it / didn't try."

Part of it was about the highly visible presence of the MommyBloggers. I appreciate the gentle way A Mama's Rant provided her feedback:

I don't understand the hate, but I agree that BlogHer was mom-centric. If the founders of BlogHer are as smart as I think they are, BlogHer will evolve, and highlight other female voices in the future.

I want the mamas to enjoy getting to see each other and celebrate without making new folks feel like BlogHer is a giant mom clique. I am so used to not being interested in what everyone else is doing that I just looked at them, thought "they're having a great time, good for them," then went about my business. It didn't occur to me that some people looked at them and didn't see anything else. I talked to so many interesting women who may or may not have been moms while I was there, and I wish the people who only saw moms had gotten to do that as well. But I don't think that's because the organizers did anything wrong on purpose.

As for the issues around race and sexual orientation, I am struggling to shut up and really hear some of the criticism.

I do agree that we shouldn't demand that people from marginalized communities produce 12-point, clearly articulated and logical statements of what went wrong before we take them seriously. I don't believe that we can dismiss their concerns on the basis that they didn't do something about it themselves - especially since not everyone is an extrovert activist, thankyouverymuch. I have to take into account my extremely high power of ignore, which makes things like cocktail parties and free wine and a free wine bottle opener not such a big deal even though HELLO there are adults in this world who don't fucking drink and my god it gets tiresome to have everything be about drinking. I just sigh and move on. Not everyone can do that.

But my not drinking is not at all like being a lesbian, because no one will ever try to kill me or burn down my house just because I don't drink. And though Lynne D. Johnson said at SXSW that it would be nice for once to be on a panel that wasn't about being African-American, that doesn't mean that people of color should just hush up if they felt ignored because there wasn't a BlogHer panel specifically on race. We probably need to do both formal recognition and integrated inclusion instead of relying on one strategy or the other to make people feel welcome.

While I think about all that, I am waiting for the panel podcasts to be released. Some of the sessions I attended were so enjoyable that I'd like to listen to them again and share them with people who didn't go to the conference. My favorite panel was called "Is the Next Martha Stewart A Blogger?" It featured Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim (food blog), Gayla Trail of YouGrowGirl (gardening), Marnie MacLean (knitting and crochet) , Andrea Scher of Superhero Designs (jewelry), and Maggie Mason of Mighty Girl and Mighty Goods (shopping blog) as moderator. If I start talking about how much I loved it, I may never stop. I arrived in the room tired, cranky, and annoyed that I had made a bunch of random, bizarre sleep-deprivation-inspired comments while introducing myself in the feminism small group. I left recharged and happy, even though I have no interest in doing a craft business online. The energy on the panel was so positive, and the panelists had such thoughtful perspectives and fun stories, it couldn't help but improve my mood.

When the podcasts surface, I'll let you know!

I also saw a bunch of great folks whom I'd met or at least seen last year and/or at SXSW:

• The organizers Elisa, Jory, and Lisa
• ae of Arse Poetica, and hurray that db came with her again!
• Melinda of Sour Duck, whom I suspected would dislike the conference, but I'm glad she was there.
• Samantha, who must start blogging somewhere new.
• Liz Henry, of Badgermama and Feminist SF. I had not previously had enough time around Liz to know how much I like her. Thank goodness that's fixed!

New folks:

• Brittany of HollaBackBoston, who let me know that there is a HollaBackTexas. How did I not know this? Brittany also let me use her sunscreen, so I am forever in her debt.
• Debra of A Stitch in Time was very kind to me after my presentation, and then it turned out she's a quilter. Yay!
• Sheri (and I think Amy as well) of Mamazine, a feminist publication for mamas. Another reassurance that I can have kids without becoming a suburban zombie. Also, you must mouse over (if you use a mouse) the nav tabs at the top of their site. I almost swooned.
• J. Craig Williams of May It Please The Court. Good guy, very interested in accessibility and pretty far ahead of most bloggers in making his blog accessible to people with disabilities. I hope I didn't offend him when I answered his email about skip nav.
• Lauren of Oodleday and Metroblogging Austin. Shout out to the Austin girls!
• Bill of History of the Button. You heard me. Don't be all "History of the what?" because I know as soon as you saw it you were dying to click on it.
• Kathryn of Daring Young Mom, who I met in the van on the way back to the airport. Poor Kathryn had never missed a flight in her life, but overslept this one!
• Adrianna, Media Relations Specialist for the American Foundation for the Blind. I must practice the name of her organization so I get it right. I've already had to correct four blog posts due to my inattention to detail.
• Suzanne of CUSS and other rants, to whom I have promised a review of Long Kiss Goodnight on Heroine Content.
• Candace of muse and fury (femilicious.com) and 16punches. Canadians rock.
• Last but far from least, the inimitable Suebob of Red Stapler and Linkateria. Her Red Stapler Portraits series is my favorite chronicle of the conference.

I also found a bookmark, appropriately, for Jen Robinson's Book Page. Its tagline is "Promoting the love of books by children, and the continued reading of children's books by adults." Love it.

My suggestions for next year, which will be in Chicago:

More stickers. There was a sad lack of stickers at this conference. Barking Dog Studios, a web design shop focused on accessibility and usability, left stickers lying around. Somehow a bunch of Six Apart and Vox stickers ended up on a table, but it looked like they had been forgotten there. So I took some.

Swag recycling, as suggested by (at least) Jory Des Jardins and a mamablogger whose name I've forgotten after reading so many posts. I felt like I was stealing when I rescued tiny potted plant kits (courtesy of the lovely folks of ThisNext) off the tables while the hotel staff were cleaning up after lunch, but I thought they would get thrown away. I would have been glad to take them somewhere to make them available for everyone throughout the rest of the conference. And I brought some of the swag back to the big room and left it on a table for people to take, but did that work? Especially with extra bags and branded stuff, I doubt the sponsors would mind at all if we took home extras for friends and family. Free marketing for them. I would have brought G. an extra set of the good swag since she couldn't attend.

I also can't remember who suggested space for attendees to exchange information with each other, such as cards (and oh, I don't know, perhaps stickers?). My card collection was quite lovely, but I would have loved to collect more. So many interesting people in the world.

Make sure speakers and panelists are reminded strongly that their audience will most likely be a mix of newbies and techies OR make the session descriptions explicit about the level they're targeting. It's really, really hard to please everyone, but if you don't consider your audience when preparing you will miss everyone.

A panel of bloggers who review film, music, books, video games, comics, etc. How do they decide what to write about? How do they keep up with what others are saying? Why do they do it? What have they learned about how to write a good review? I think a lot of bloggers write reviews even if their blog isn't dedicated to that on a full-time basis, so perhaps there would be sufficient interest for a panel.

Perhaps in addition to the Birds of a Feather groups, we might try something like (brainstorming here) a system of "new people welcomers" who have been to BlogHer before. They could set up at tables for breakfast each day and new folks could congregate if they so choose? I'm trying to think of ways to break that ice for people who are nervous about attending the conference when everyone seems to know everyone already.

How far in advance do they sell plane tickets?

Tags: BlogHer | BlogHer06

This year, I told myself that I was not going to spend a bajillion hours reading every blog post I could find that discussed BlogHer.

Oh well.

I have to admit that before I read so many of those posts, I would probably have written a post with more complaints. But god, the blogosphere has been there and done that. So my bajillion hours were not wasted, for I am now writing a more thoughtful, less snarky post than I would have otherwise.

(Full disclosure: I spoke on Day 1 of this year's conference, for which I have been told I will be paid back my conference registration fee. Whatever.)

The sponsorship and marketing of BlogHer2006 is being widely criticized. First, the MSNSpaces train wreck so eloquently described by SueBob. I have to say, though, that the VP of Whatever who introduced the Janes was just as offensive. Her presentation was completely tone deaf. Hello, you may be the biggest blogging service in the world but you're taking to a room full of people who use other tools. Hello, when you mention all the women in other countries whom we could inspire by telling our stories, maybe you want to include a country in Europe or Japan or something so you don't sound like SUCH A FUCKING COLONIALIST. And just for kicks, maybe mention that those women might also have a thing or two to tell us. I'm just sayin'.

Second, the Trojan Elexa people. Basically, they included a size Medium t-shirt in all the gift bags. I saw someone, don't remember who, saying "well, it's hard to order t-shirts for a group when you don't know the size, I think they did the best they could." Um, how about don't do t-shirts? I'm sure you can find something else to brand. Less widely discussed is their presence at the Feminism Birds of a Feather small group meeting in which one of the women made some shockingly racist remarks and then clumsily tried to take over the discussion.

There are also folks who are dissatisfied with having a condom included in the gift bag, as if it assumes that they are sleeping with a man. However, one of the lessons I gave as an HIV educator was that a cut-up condom makes a perfectly serviceable dental dam, so I'm not convinced.

Then in general, there is a lot of commentary about how the sponsor and advertising presence was overwhelming and that BlogHer felt like it has sold out.

At this point, you may be thinking "Princess, that's all well and good. But you told me you weren't going to write a big post full of complaints. Also, I read the title of this post and I'm not seeing how this relates to the International Quilt Festival."

Good points. Let me explain.

The International Quilt Festival (IQF), for those of you who don't know, takes place every year in Houston and Chicago. The company that does it - yes, company - also does a show in Europe. I can't speak for Chicago and Europe, but the one in Houston is huge. The entire Houston convention center huge. Part of it is a quilt show, part of it is hundreds of classes that people pay to take, and part of it is a giant store with hundreds of exhibitors' booths. Sections of the quilt show and some of the other events during that week are sponsored by manufacturers of quilting products, such as Bernina and Husqvarna Viking, both of which make sewing machines.

You see, quilting is a hobby that usually requires the purchasing of materials. Fabric, batting, tools, etc. Yes, it's possible to get a hand-me-down sewing machine, find fabric at thrift shops, and use an old blanket as batting, but many or most people who quilt as a hobby rather than to keep their families warm are buying stuff. And the businesses know there is money to be made, so they are all over the place.

But quilting is also a medium for self-expression, for creativity, or just for the pleasure of making something with your hands or giving a special gift to a family member or a friend. It can be a business opportunity, for those who make quilts to sell, teach, or write books, or open a quilt shop. But most of the people who do it will never make any money off of it, they just do it because they like it.

Blogging has much in common with quilting in that way. It shares one additional key characteristic: most bloggers depend on businesses to provide them with the raw materials. It has one key difference: many bloggers get those raw materials for free. Think about it. Anyone who is using Blogger, Flickr, most Movable Type plugins, sidebar widgets, etc. is being given raw materials for free, and the company that gives it away is still trying to make enough money to keep the lights on and pay its employees enough so they can eat and have a place to live, clothes, etc.

So why are people so pissed off about the sponsors at BlogHer? I've never heard anyone complain about all the shopping at IQF, or even the sponsoring.

I think part of it is that a good number of the sponsors of BlogHer this year were tone deaf. MSNSpaces was the worst example. At IQF, we know and like many of the companies who are there because we use their products - but also because the people who work for them and come to the event are just as excited about quilting as we are. Many of them are quilters themselves. They understand the "market" not from the outside, but from the inside and they're excited to share.

I enjoyed interacting with the folks from FilmLoop, ThisNext, BlogBurst, and Brandimensions because I could tell they were really into blogs and blogging and they wanted to talk about it with us. I'm sure they'd done market research, just as I'm sure the vendors at IQF do market research, but it doesn't show. They participated in the community rather than targeting the community.

BlogTalk Radio also sent a rep, though they were not a sponsor. She told us what the company did, then settled down to participate in the conversation as a regular person. She offered helpful tips from the audience at one of the Day 2 panel discussions based on her experience as a blogger, even though they had nothing to do with her company. She added value to the community (and gave us post-it notes) and I am intrigued to see more of what her company does.

For the sponsors who didn't add value, does that reflect on the BlogHer organizers and advisory board? Hell no. If MSNSpaces or Trojan wants to write a big check to the event and then show up and embarrass themselves, so what? It's on them to do their homework, and it's on them to send representatives who are good ambassadors for their companies. They didn't. Hopefully they'll learn from the experience of an entire audience ignoring them and do better next time.

Even if they don't embarrass themselves and it's just a slightly boring commercial, nothing says you have to pay attention. Trust me, there are quilt people who are inappropriate or boring as hell too, and you just have to laugh the 15th time they say "and I made this with my Flying Geese Tool (tm) too!"

Nothing was stopping anyone from leaving the room during any of the BlogHer sponsor pitches, and the majority of the conference attendees had laptops with them and could often get internet access. Plus, other bloggers were sitting all around you, and some of them were bound to be interesting. So entertain yourselves otherwise for 10 minutes and then they'll get back to the regular programming. Like any other speaker, they need to earn my attention by saying something interesting or useful. If they don't, too bad for them.

(As for the idea that we should be in a space free of advertising or marketing unless we choose to seek it out, I think that's a little hypocritical given all of the free tools that many of us take advantage of in our blogging. The Intarweb giveth all for free, but heaven forbid that the folks who make the stuff should get 10 minutes of our time in return. Especially when we are drinking their booze, eating their food, and enjoying the parties and wireless they paid for.)

Tags: BlogHer | BlogHer06

BlogHer is all about the business cards. I've been conferencing and mingling and every time I leave a conversation I have a handful of other peoples' cards. Last year, three people had cards and everyone else was SO jealous. This year, cards everywhere! I will blog the best one I got when I get home, it requires a camera and I left mine in Austin.

I gave my accessibility presentation this morning. About 85% of the audience was paying attention - and this in a room full of people with laptops and (mostly on) internet connections, so I think it went well. I probably said most of the stuff in my notes. I can't remember, and I'm not looking at them again because I don't want to know.

Half a dozen people have come up to me to say I did a really good job. Since one of them wrote the blogging articles at the American Foundation for the Blind and one of them used to test applications with screen reader software while wearing a blindfold, I think my information was probably pretty accurate.

I also got video-blogged in a short interview afterwards, and when I get the link I will post it here IF I think I look halfway decent. Otherwise you'll have to find it yourself.

There are so many amazing women here. Elise Bauer's presentation on increasing blog readership was well-organized and clear, and she has an informal presentation style that's still professional. I always love seeing ae from Arse Poetica. I want to ask her to wear my friendship bracelet or sign my yearbook or something. Everyone should have a chance to listen to Lynne D. Johnson speak, because she has an amazing voice and great insight to go with it.

Tomorrow or Sunday I need to do a vendor and swag review, because damn, girl, there is some fun stuff here. I'll also hopefully post a review of a test drive I'm planning to do tomorrow. Hybrid SUV, this is The Princess. The Princess, this is Hybrid SUV that's such a pretty color of blue... Technically, though, that's just another opportunity to get swag. They have a gift bag, and I must know what's in it!

p.s. To Safari people, I apologize that my new site design in busted on your browser. I didn't know! I will make it right...but not until I get home.

Tags: BlogHer | BlogHer06

How do you make your blog more accessible? This post contains some advice and specific instructions, related to a presentation that I am giving at BlogHer 2006.

The following information is culled from multiple sources. Big hat tips to Knowbility, an organization promoting barrier-free IT; to Mark Pilgrim for Dive into Accessibility; to the American Foundation for the Blind for their articles on blogging; and to Crabby Old Lady for her post Blogging for Older Readers on Time Goes By.

If you have any corrections, questions, or other feedback, leave a comment or send email to princess@lizardkingdom.org.

Break Up Your Post into Paragraphs

This one is easy. Just break long blog posts into paragraphs, and make sure white space shows up between paragraphs. It helps people with low vision, concentration difficulties, and many older people (whose eyes may tire out more easily) read all the way through what you have to say.

If you don't listen to me, you should listen to your elders. Crabby Old Lady says:

Crabby is sure you know that screens flicker and eyes, even young ones, tire faster reading on a screen than on a paper page. It is impossible to read paragraphs that go on and on without breaks.

Crabby first realized this when she was managing editor at cbsnews.com in 1996 and early on, she made a New Rule: no paragraphs longer than six or seven lines for ease of reading. She would be a less crabby blog reader if she could as easily enforce this rule for the entire blogosphere.

Make Your Link Text More Explanatory

Good example: I love this blog about vegan cooking.

Bad example: I've seen several articles about this.

Many people with disabilities who use screen reader software or text-only browsers either extract a list of links from a web page or tab through the links to get a sense of what's on the page. "Click here" is just not that informative. When the words you use as links are really small, it can be hard for users with mobility impairments (or anyone else) to click on the links. Blogs already have a lot of repetitive link text - comments and permalink, for example - so why add to the clutter?

In general, it takes a little more work for users with some disabilities to open a new link or back out of an unwanted page. It helps them to know if it's really something they're interested in before they go to that effort.

Sometimes it's fun to do a link like How Beautiful! or What a Jackass! and create a little mystery for your readers. Just don't overdo it.

Don't Open New Windows Without Warning People

The Back button is your friend. The Back button is always there, it doesn't move around, and it always does the same thing. It's big, which makes it easy to click on. So don't "break" it by opening new windows without warning people! A new window doesn't let you go backwards, which can be confusing. People with mobility impairments have to work to close an unwanted new window. Low-vision folks may have the screen zoomed to another area and not even know a new window has opened. For people who are blind, only the most recent versions of screen reader software gives any indication that a new window has been opened.

So warn them! And while you're at it, warn them if the link goes to any content that isn't just another web page, such as a Quicktime movie, PDF, or a YouTube video of your hamster in its little plastic hamster ball.

Further Reading: Give Back the Back Button and Dive Into Accessibility Day 16: Not Opening New Windows

Change the Style of Visited Links

A link should look different after you've followed it and come back to the original page. Users with short-term memory problems may have trouble remembering what they've clicked without a visual representation. Think about big collections of links like Blog Carnivals - if your boss walked by and you had to close your browser, would you really want to rely solely on your memory to pick up where you left off?

You can bold it, not bold it, underline it, highlight it, not highlight it, whatever. Just make sure people can tell them apart. But if you're thinking "Hey, I know, I'll just change the color!" then check out the next section.

Further Reading: Links That Don't Change Color When Visited

Use More Than Color Cues for Links

If your links are only designated by using a different color than your text, people who have trouble distinguishing colors may not be able to tell what's a link. Most common is red-green color blindness, which means the person sees green and red as greyish and can't tell them apart. Elders may also have difficulty distinguishing colors.

Further Reading: Dive Into Accessibility Day 12: Using Color Safely

Fun Tool: Colorblind Web Page Filter lets you plug in your website and see what it would look like to someone who is color blind.

Use Color and Value Contrast

We've all seen the sites that must have been designed by 21 year olds who eat a lot of carrots. Grey text on a black background just isn't legible to the rest of us. Use colors that are easily distinguishable from each other for the background and text of your site.

P.S. I hate to tell you this, but dark background with light text is just not as easy to read as the reverse. It's true. Yes, it's a bummer, and it doesn't mean you can't do it, but consider your audience before you decide on a color scheme.

Fun Tool: Juicy Studio Colour Contrast Analyzer lets you plug in the text and background colors for your blog and get an idea of how much they contrast.

Label Your Images

If you're using an image to tell a story or replace text, you need to add an "alt attribute" to label the image. Then users with screen readers or who browse with the images turned off can see the label you've created and they know what's going on.

The alt attribute is a part of the HTML code for your image. Depending on your blogging tool (see below), you will need to add it in or change the default. The text typed into the alt attribute inside a set of quotes is called "alt text."

Your alt text should be brief, but informative. If an image is being used to replace text, put all of the words in the alt text. Check your spelling, since screen readers will misread a word that is misspelled. Some people also use the title attribute to convey verbal information about an image, but not all screen readers provide the title to the user.

If an image is being used for purely decorative purposes, you can not enter any words. If it's a photo gallery or an artistic image, it's your call on whether to use words or not. But include the alt attibute itself anyway, because if it's missing, screen reader software will read the filename of the image, and that's not pretty. Just put in the quotes with nothing in between them and your image will become "silent."

To learn how to add or change alt attributes:

• Describe Your Image
• Dive Into Accessibility Day 23: Providing text equivalents for images
• Dive Into Accessibility Day 21: Ignoring Spacer Images

Blog Tool Specific Instructions:

• If you're using Movable Type, there isn't a field in File Upload for alt text. Edit your image tag once it's placed in your post.
• If you're using TypePad, upload your image into your post and then switch into the HTML tab. The alt attribute will be filled in with the photo's filename, so find that and replace it with your alt text.
• If you're using Blogger, upload your image into your post, then switch to the Edit HTML tab. The alt attribute will be there but blank, so if you don't need a label you can leave it alone. Or fill in your label in between the quotes.
• If you're using WordPress, "when you upload an image through the WordPress interface, there is a field to add a description - this comes through into the code as the alt text." (Thanks for explaining this, Candace!)

Resist Visual CAPTCHAS

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Visual CAPTCHAs are those little boxes with the squiggly text you can barely read, and they are impossible to solve for people with vision impairment or those using text-only web browsers, and may be frustrating or impossible for people with dyslexia. Use all the other comment spam control tools your blogging tool offers before resorting to visual CAPTCHAs.

Put Your Sidebar/Navigation on the Right

If you don't care whether your sidebar goes on the right or left, put it on the right! Otherwise, people using screen readers may have to listen to everything in your sidebar (recent posts, blogroll) before they get to your main content.

OR, Add a Skip Navigation Link

Or, you can add a "skip navigation" link attached to a small transparent image which screen reader users and Braille output users can select to jump to your latest post. This requires editing your template a little, but it's not too hard.

For instructions, see #7 - Provide Skip Links and Using Skip Nav Links.

Use Relative Font Sizes

When you select View > Text Size in Internet Explorer 6, it does not let you make the text larger if the stylesheet has the text set in pixels (px). Users of other browsers are fine, but this is a very popular browser. Set your font sizes using percentages, ems, or keywords instead.

Blogger folks are fine, yours are already like that. For everyone else, this probably requires getting down and dirty with your templates. MT/TypePad/LJ users can adapt or borrow from the Miniml style from The Style Contest, which is in percentages.

For a little help on this tip, check out Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design for a method using keyword and percentages.

Tags: BlogHer | BlogHer06

Of Republican rule? No.

Of blogging for me? Let's hope so, because I quite like it.

I actually started blogging over four years ago, but I let several posts go when I moved from Blogger to Movable Type. So the first entry on this blog was on April 14, 2002. I complained about my newly purchased toothbrush. Nothing like setting a positive tone...

My topic is blogs and accessibility, as some of my faithful six readers may have guessed. If you're reading this, please let me know if you have any thoughts on the following:

• Any things you've heard you are or aren't supposed to do to make your blog/site accessible or just plain easier for people to read, and whether you understand why you're supposed to be doing those things.
• Any experience you've had trying to make a blog/site more accessible or compliant with accessibility standards, and how that went for you.
• Any of your friends or family who aren't currently using technology because the technology they can access doesn't meet their needs, or any friends and family who are using adaptive technology (including even simple things like larger fonts, lower screen resolution).

I'll not only get a chance to speak, but to post materials to the BlogHer site and prepare handouts for conference attendees, so I'd like to do this well.

Those of you in Austin may be forced to sit through me practicing my remarks.

Let me tell you a story. It will wrap back around to BlogHer at the end.

Once upon a time, I started building websites. I used Netscape Navigator. I had no idea what I was doing. The only people who were building websites at that time were geeks. I got bored with it and quit.

Then I went to graduate school in public policy. I took a class focused on community technology centers. I was dating a guy who built websites, so he told me a few things. I picked up Macromedia Dreamweaver and learned how to use templates. I built a website for the class. We also organized a conference.

At that conference, I met Sharron Rush of Knowbility, John Slatin of the Accessibility Institute of the University of Texas at Austin, and Jim Allan of the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. After their presentation, they volunteered to open up my website source code and tell me what I could improve as far as accessibility and usability for people with disabilities. I expected a huge list of highly technical changes. What I got back was so easy:

• Dark text, light background.
• Use a style sheet for your fonts and colors.
• Add alt attributes to your image tags.
• When you create a link, use text that shows what the link is: "This story about the Volga" rather than "click here."
• Don't launch new windows or new document types (PDFs, etc) without warning your reader in the link text.

Do just this much, and you knock it out of the park.

I was lucky that I had only been building websites on an amateur basis for six months when I was told these things. I get the impression that people who have been building websites professionally for longer than that are not always open to these things. And now that using tables for layout has been deprecated, it's a little more of a challenge for old dogs to learn new tricks.

Since then, I have moved from building websites primarily with Dreamweaver to building them primarily with Movable Type. I've gotten lazy. I use dark text on light backgrounds, meaningful link text, and always use alt attributes on my images. But my design sense and skills are so poor in this medium that I'm relying primarily on style sheets made by others, which do not usually include relative sizing on text and other elements as is also recommended by usability folks. My current blogs use fixed-width layouts and fixed font sizes, and since I've always been a little fuzzy on why that's a problem when one is using a style sheet (or if I've just misunderstood the issue), I've just ignored it. I don't know if my current drop-down menus for archive navigation are accessible. I am a new dog who is lapsing into old tricks.

I've evangelized plenty of web designers on the topic of accessibility in the past few years, and I do get into the mix on certain issues that really punch buttons for me. For example, CAPTCHAs. Elisa Camahort talked about them, and I had to get involved. But when Koan Bremner blogged about a variety of accessibility topics, I let it go even though I could have contributed to the conversation. Crabby Old Lady laid out some great points about usability for readers who aren't 18 and have 20/20 vision, but I didn't link to it.

I think it's time to get back on the train.

As I was writing the post about comment spam linked above, I was actually thinking about BlogHer. Many of the bloggers there were non-technical. They don't have a clue in the world what I mean when I say "alt attribute." They don't have to. That's the beauty of it. They don't need a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver and a live-in consultant in order to make a website and share their thoughts, photos, and more with the rest of the world. I am now in the middle of the geekiness scale for people who make websites, because a whole group of people now has access to a technology that lets them make websites without being geeky. But they may need to learn a few more things so their thoughts and photos can be enjoyed by all their readers.

I've gotten lazy, and I need to re-teach myself, and I need to figure out how some of the generic rules apply to blogs (see for example in parenthese below). But if I do that, I'm in a good position to help my blogging peeps.

(For example, the rule about meaningful link text is meant to allow people using screen readers to pull up a menu that just has a list of the links included in the page. This can speed up navigation on a text-heavy page when they are looking for a particular link. This makes sense to me for a corporate or information site, where someone may be looking for the link "about" or "contact" or "weather" or what have you. I'm not sure it's necessary in blog posts, where readers aren't necessarily showing up just to extract information or find a particular destination. And sometimes the author may be hiding the destination as a surprise, in which case non-descriptive link text gives the same experience to sighted folks and those using screen readers.)

I'd like to revisit some of the classic guides, such as Dive Into Accessibility, make sure I'm up to standards, and figure out an easy and quick way to share that information with BlogHers and other bloggers. I'd also like to do the series that the American Foundation for the Blind should have done: evaluate the popular blog creation software and see how well it does out of the box.

'Cause if I lose all or part of my sight someday and I can't read my favorite blogs anymore, I'm gonna be mad!

Several months before I went to BlogHer, I had become increasingly uneasy about how the list of blogs I read was basically white. It looked pretty much like my life, in which I interact with very few people of color or people with disabilities.

My new job puts me in a workplace with many more people of color and people with disabilities than I socialize with, but rarely do I interact with many people at work on a personal level. So I see a lot more folks who don't look just like me, which I think is good for me as a daily visual reminder that I am not the only kind of person in the world. However, I don't spend much more time talking in any depth with folks who haven't grown up white and well-off.

Realizing the lack of diversity, I had made a few adjustments to my trusty blog aggregator before the conference, re-adding blogs I read in the past but had wandered away from, checking their blogrolls for additional links. It wasn't a deliberate and well-crafted strategy, but I was trying to pay more attention.

Then I went to BlogHer.

Jory, Lisa, and Elisa recently announced that BlogHer 2006 will be held in the SF Bay Area on July 28th and 29th of 2006. I already requested the appropriate days off at work.

Then they announced there will be a set of BlogHer panels at SXSW. This is actually bad news for me. I really don't want to spend $225 to go to the conference, but I will feel left out if I don't go since it's in my own town.

I have thought about BlogHer almost daily since I attended the first one at the end of July. I thought about it so much that I locked up and couldn't express how much I enjoyed it and why. Now that they've announced BlogHer 2006, I'm trying to organize my thoughts about what I took away from BlogHer 2005.

This post, though, is just a starter for my own reference. One of the major benefits I get from blogging is the ability to look back and remember what I was doing, and yet I posted very little about BlogHer. Yes, Google and Flickr can help me find things that will help me remember. However, they don't (yet) store events from my point of view.

So first, two choice memories:

• Early in one of the big group sessions, some of the audience members weren't speaking directly into the microphone when it was passed to them, so we couldn't hear their comments. Lisa Stone interrupted (politely) one speaker to ask "Would you mind Tina Turnering the mic a little bit?" For the rest of the day, whenever the problem recurred, she would yell (politely) "More Tina!"
• During the panel "Flame, Blame, and Shame" when people were discussing their fears about their kids being harmed due to their blogging, Matthew Holt of The Health Care Blog said (somewhat) quietly "I wonder if Kevin Drum worries about his cats being stalked?" (For those of you who don't follow blogs, Kevin Drum pioneered the practice of Friday Cat Blogging.)

Next, some lists. (Surprise!)

I thought about putting these lists after the jump, so those don't care wouldn't have such a long post taking up front page real estate. But quite a few of these folks are blogging for business reasons, and page rank translates into business opportunities. Technorati only counts links from the front pages of blogs in their page ranks. So whatever smidgen of help I can give those people by linking from the front page, I am going to do it.

People I met and conversed with:

• schoolsmelt
• Sour Duck
• ae of Arse Poetica
• Ping
• Kitt of nags of a similar ilk
• Matthew Homann of LexThink, who blogs at the [non]billable hour
• Susannah Gardner of Hop Studios and Buzz Marketing with Blogs
• Jory Des Jardins, one of the conference organizers, who blogs at Pause
• Lisa Stone, another one of the organizers

Other blogs that came across my radar screen because the authors attended BlogHer 05:

• apophenia by danah boyd, who wears great hats
• Elisa Camahort, the third organizer, has a personal blog and also writes Healthy Concerns, among others
• Sepia Mutiny (One of the authors tracked me down after a group session where I made a few comments and personally invited me to read the blog and ask questions if they ever used any terms I didn't understand, which I thought was lovely of her. It's also a highly entertaining blog, so I'm glad she pointed it out.)
• Culture Kitchen, which has excellent business cards
• Marian's Blog
• Writing is Fighting by Laina Dawes

Blogs I found through via mentions at the conference or on the BlogHer blogroll:

• Woman of Size
• Femme La Guerre
• Fussy (I know, I'm the last person on Earth...)
• Conversations with Dina
• Reznet Blog, part of Reznet News: Native American Student Journalism
• afronetizen

Two even less interesting lists after the jump.

[Updated 10/23/05: Elisa has updated her post to make a few additional points, so I've updated the URL to her post here.]

Elisa Camahort and Sour Duck have both recently had trouble with comment spam, but responded in very different ways. First, Elisa in "Bloggers getting more and more restrictive with comments...And it's definitely not good for blogging business":

I recently implemented the word verification tool on this blog after a weekend spam attack (over 400 comment spams within 24 hours.) When I encounter such a tool I consider it to be a minor inconvenience, but a small price to pay for posts free of comment spam. [...] It seems like most spam-fighting tactics focus on creating barriers that impact spammers and non-spammers alike.

Commenter Angel followed up:

On the word verification, I don't mind it as much. However, a recent study by the American Foundation for the Blind found that obstacles like word verification create a hindrance to people who are visually impaired since tools like JAWS cannot cope with the squiggly words. It was something I had not even thought about when I turned on my word verification after the spam was getting unbearable. However, I am not planning on turning the word verification off.

Elisa replied:

I did think about that. I've noticed that when you buy tickets online, for example, there's always a link to click in case you can't "read" the verification word. I'm sure we're not meeting the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act by not providing an alternate. (But since were not government contractors I don't think it matters.)

Sour Duck reacted differently to her comment spam:

I'm turning off the comments facility until I figure out a way to filter spam comments. (I don't like to use the word verification option that Blogger offers, because blind people and others with vision difficulties can't join in.)

However, she has now turned comments back on and is using the word verification option.

This "word verification" option they are discussing is what's called a CAPTCHA. Six Apart describes CAPTCHAs like this:

Perhaps the most famous Turing-style test in use as an anti-spam technique is the CAPTCHA (a cutesy acronym that stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"). CAPTCHAs frequently come in the form of images of fuzzy or distorted letters and numbers, which humans can read and parrot into a text field, but which automated optical character recognition software has trouble identifying.

[...] an image-based CAPTCHA is impossible to solve for people with impaired vision, those with reading difficulties (e.g. dyslexia), or those using text-only web browsers. If the only way to comment on your site is by solving an image-based CAPTCHA, you have a serious accessibility problem.

Anyone who knows me well would expect me to start yelling when I read Elisa's comment that she doesn't think it matters whether users with disabilities can comment on her site, or when Angel and Sour Duck recognized the problem but decided to use the CAPTCHA. But since I'm trying to grow as a person, I'm more interested in this question:

WHY CAN'T THE GENIUSES WHO MAKE THIS SOFTWARE FIGURE OUT A BETTER SOLUTION?

After spending a chunk of Sunday screwing with the Kubrick theme for WordPress (note to the guy who made it: gaaaaauuuughhhh!), I would like to reiterate my love for Movable Type.

If you're not yet convinced that Six Apart are some of the coolest kids on the block, check out their Viewmaster show entitled "If Bloggers Had Been Around Throughout History."

UPDATE: I didn't write that very well. You can see the Viewmaster itself here.

BTW, you may have noticed a halfway done site style change hanging around. I'll fix it next week. This weekend, it's all sewing all the time. Oh yes, the $3200 Bernina Aurora and I are going to bond.

p.s. I can never spell remodeling.

I just reserved airplane tickets and a hotel room for BlogHerCon in Santa Clara, CA on July 29-30th.

BlogHer is a network for women bloggers to draw on for exposure, education, and community. By holding a day-long conference on July 30, 2005, and establishing an online hub, BlogHer is initiating an opportunity for greater visibility, learning and success for individual women bloggers and for the community of bloggers as a whole.

This flagship event is open to all bloggers—including men and beginners—interested in enhancing their online exposure, learning the latest best practices in blogging, networking with other bloggers, and specifically cultivating the female blogging community.

I have to keep myself busy from 8-3 on Friday and from when I wake up to 5:30 on Sunday, but that's just fine. San Francisco, anyone?

I don't think I've ever taken a trip before where I wasn't going to see someone I knew. Unless you count France. But I was with people I knew. So this is, well, new.

Notmyself.com recently made a good point about Movable Type:

Dear Six Apart.

I think we're all ready for you to spend some time on your Movable Type default styles. You've created quite the system for TypePad users, and yet the default styles for Movable Type are still really, really ugly.

We all know by now that I love a good complaint. ;) But what I love even more is at the end of the comments thread:

Actually, I think we're all with you about the templates. We do need some new ones and have some cool plans to provide those.

However, as you mentioned, customizing the templates is not only possible but pretty damn easy. You've seen CSS Zen Garden, right? You don't even need to modify the templates, but instead only the CSS to come up with pretty great designs.

So since customizing the templates is easy for customers but adding new functionality (e.g. dynamic publishing, commenter authentication, a ridiculously powerful API to name a few from the past) is not, we've been focusing our efforts on those other things.

I think you'll like what you see in the future. :-)

-Jay Allen

I agree with him that modifying "only the CSS" makes customizing the MT templates "pretty damn easy." However, most of my template modifications end up making more ugly templates. Who needs that? And even the MT templates I find for sale are not nice, just like the default "several colors on the same template" styles for MT. Just give me a few good launching pads to choose from, and I'll mix and match the colors myself.

So I'm glad to even hear rumors about template-related good things in the future. It would be a relief for the lizards, who are forgiving but slightly embarrassed about the appearance of the website that represents them in the world.

Movable Type released MT 3.17 today, which included the following fix:

Fixed a bug in mt-db2sql.cgi which caused it to fail in certain situations when subcategories are in use before conversion.

Now the bragging: my baby figured out that it was broken and why! And he told them! C-Man is The Man! There's a reason his domain name is benign-ninja.com!

The 6A folks were awesome during the whole encounter, btw. C-Man sent them his theory, and within 48 hours they sent us a new script that worked all fine and dandy. Huzzah for Six Apart!

OK, so I-ROCK tells me that I am so far away from deserving my wardrobe. Not yet syndicating full posts. Bleh.

I paid the nice folks at Six Apart to install Movable Type for me because I am not skilled or knowledgeable enough to do it myself.

But I have now used the support forums to research and implement a change to my RSS feed (I hope) and also to stop the comments feature from creating a mailto link when people enter their email address but no website (the mailto link was allegedly spam-proofed, but still!). And a few other things.

The morals of this story are that (A) the support forums at movabletype.org are damn fine resources and (B) what I lack in technical knowledge and skills I make up for with willingness to do research and edit my site's code. And that's the half of the battle that G.I. Joe didn't mention.

The Flooded Lizard Kingdom extends its heartfelt gratitude to Movable Type for providing The Princess with a wonderful transition from her old blog to this new space. A national day of appreciation h