BradSpangler.com

While I oppose electoral politics as, in my own opinion, a wrong-headed strategy for the libertarian movement to follow (preferring an alternative approach as ultimately more realistic in the long run), I don’t see that as a reason to leave money on the table — any more than you would expect an agorist hot dog vendor to not sell a hot dog to a cop (the ones that actually pay, that is). Thus, while I don’t even volunteer (let alone sell) campaign advocacy, almost any organization can purchase technical services from me — even political campaigns, if they can stomach having an anti-political anarchist technical consultant show up on their government-mandated campaign expenditure reports.

Thus, while Mr. Knapp, Prof. Long and others have already mentioned the Ruwart for President campaign, I thought I’d talk about what I’ve done so far to actually get them set up.

While I sell decent personal and small business web hosting accounts, early concerns in discussions with the Ruwart campaign involved having a large enough amount of bandwidth on tap, availability of sufficient system resources to enable a snappy response time even under a respectable traffic load and the desire for flexibility in software options that comes with having full administrative control over your own *nix host.

A true dedicated server — literally, your own box given “room and board” at some data center for a monthly fee — can potentially set you back a respectable amount of money. In the case of the Ruwart campaign, though, I recommended (and acted as purchasing agent for) a virtual dedicated server w/ 500GB monthly bandwidth in the paltry $29.99 a month range from GoDaddy.

For those not clear on the distinction between a dedicated server and a virtual dedicated server, a virtual dedicated server isn’t a physical server but an “imaginary” server, one of perhaps several created and run on a physical server at a data center somewhere. The VDS runs as a software simulation of a real server. The many imaginary servers a physical machine may be running each have their own dedicated slice of that machine’s resources, but otherwise act as independent machines. Think of it as the difference between an apartment building and a mansion. The many virtual servers being run on the physical machine each act as a sub-divisions of the larger machines capacity. What all of that boils down to is that the Ruwart campaign is only paying for approximately as much server capacity as they actually need — and that capacity is readily expandable on short notice.

Open source software and the virtualization technologies described above lead to a very cost effective approach.

• Fedora 7 Linux OS
• Apache web server
• MySQL database server
• PHP
• Drupal 6.1 content management system

The Barlow theme for Drupal was pretty much ready to go and gave the site a somewhat “Ron Paulian” look. As a result, no true design work was necessary — only setup, configuration and some minor customizations. The train image in the page header comes from the Marinelli theme, which was another one of the stock themes I showed the campaign. The train image wasn’t to my taste, actually. I was showing them the Marinelli theme just for layout purposes and talking about putting together a photo image for the header based on a well-cropped but high-res close-up of the eyes and crown of the Statue of Liberty. They saw the train, though, and specifically asked for it. The customer wants the train, they get the train. [shrug]

The real bulk of the work in setting up this site has been laising with content developers and providing initial user support.

Setting up campaign email was an easy choice. I wanted rock solid reliability and knew that I (or whoever) would be better off “out-sourcing” it and just not having to deal with it beyond stuff like user account setup. We went with Google Apps, of course. Along with all of the other advantages, the free suite of apps gives me a chance to evangelize on behalf of using online collaboration tools to move beyond email. Talking about stuff like file sharing in Google Docs and calendar sharing in Google Calendar makes for a great segue into talking about powerful project management tools — either open source ones that I can set up and manage for the campaign or great commercial tools like Basecamp from 37signals. Ultimately, this is a chance for me to help teach key libertarian activists a better, more effective way to work. I told Ruwart’s campaign manager that the following is required reading, and I meant it:

How the Barack Obama Campaign Uses Wikis to Organize Volunteers

Like a lot of bloggers, I enjoy finding out who’s linking to me and what kind of traffic I’m getting from them. AWStats is a great tool for this purpose. It’s very common, though, for the useful information in the statistics to be overwhelmed with fake results, such as HTTP referrer spam that makes it look like the spamming site is linking to you when what’s really going on is that it’s just bait to get YOU to visit THEM.

If you’re having that problem in AWStats, find this line:

Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) - Full list

Click on the link marked “Full list”.

Now, you might already be aware that this Full results page for the listing of referring links has options for filtering in an affirmative sense or filtering to exclude. How that helps is when you realize that most referrer spam is for URLs that contain spam keywords in the first place, because that’s part of the spammers blackhat SEO strategy. Using an exclude filter of “poker” in that AWStats page, for example, I can take out a lot of spam URLs that would otherwise show up and get in the way of figuring out who’s really linking to me.

Just using any one filter word doesn’t cut it when you’re getting incoming tsunamis of referrer spam, though. There is a solution, fortunately. You can use the pipe symbol, shown in between brackets here [ | ] to build compound filters. It’s treated as a logical “OR”. So, to filter most of the spam out of my referring web site listings in AWStats, I just went about adding one exclude filter term after another, seperating them with pipes and re-filtering the report until almost all of the spam was gone. The result of the compound filter “poker|pill” would be to remove anything with EITHER the word “poker” OR the word “pill” in the URL.

Below is my compound exclude filter for AWStats referrer listings. You may find it a useful headstart in your own anti-spam strategy.

pharm|gener|weigh|casino|pill|poker|diet|blackjack|roulette|doctor|ruleta|stud|texashold|omahah

Now pity those who can’t filter out “cialis” because they want to discuss “socialism” (hat tip to Chuck for pointing that last one out to me).

People continue to speculate about the phrase “Ismail Ax” that Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, had written on his arm. Several go through various contortions of logic, which would otherwise be comical if not for the subject matter, in their aching hope to find a connection to Islam to feed their hungry lust for more pro-war hysteria.

What all of these Dick Tracy wannabes forget is that psychotic people are usually quite “rational” within the bounds of the premises set by their delusions. The most likely meaning of the phrase is a very simple and mundane one, in my opinion.

Mentally roleplay this…

You’re all set to “make them all pay” and go out in what you yourself perceive as a blaze of glory.

You’ve sent your public manifesto to the media.

You’re mentally prepared to die, after having convinced yourself it is right and necessary.

But what about tying up all of the loose ends of your life? What about those you leave behind? What about helping them with the various details of the MUNDANE but private things you’ve left undone? You’re going to die — so how can your next of kin or whoever settle up on your dry-cleaning bill or whatever?

They need to get into your personal, off-campus email account, of course, to see your saved messages and sent replies. And since you’re paranoid, you don’t want to email the password to them. Instead, you hide the password in plain sight with no context, so that it’s just gibberish to everyone except the people who might have a use for it.

I predict that if it ever becomes public knowledge why Cho wrote “Ismail Ax” on his arm, we’ll find that it was just the password for his stupid Hotmail (or whatever) account — put there for the benefit of a relative or friend. And like all decent passwords, it means nothing.

I’ve added a captcha form for user registration on the freedomSLUT bookmarking site. Here’s hoping that will help with the spam issue.

New open source social networking project that fans of both Ruby on Rails and radical politics might be interested in working on — Project Crabgrass: Software for Direct Democracy and Social Organizing.

Personally, I mainly work with PHP and, to a far lesser extent, Perl. As I grow as a programmer, though, I’m anticipating using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) approach that reportedly makes Rails so great, but still in PHP using frameworks like Cake. Still, that’s just me. If you’re getting into or are already immersed in Rails, Crabgrass definitely sounds like it might be worth lending a hand with.

Excerpt:

GOALS

The social networking phenomenon holds much promise, but it is clear that the revolution will not be hosted by myspace. We are building a web application currently called Crabgrass with these main goals:

Democratic decision-making: Our primary focus is to facilitate directly democratic decision making for groups and networks. This means easy tools for polling, voting and achieving consensus. Since different situations call for different tools, we plan to support up-down-polls, rate-many-polls, vote-for-one, ranked-voting, formal-consensus, informal-consensus, and different forms of modified consensus.

Group relationships: In social networking, the focus is on the individual and their relationship to other individuals. In organizing networks, the questions are very different. The application will make it clear how groups are related to one another and what human roles and responsibilities people have within a group. Rather than social networking, you could call it social organizing.

Security and privacy: It still requires a high degree of tech savvy in order to communicate securely. By keeping communication enclosed on a single, high-security server and by making it clear who the authorized audience is for a particular message, we can achieve a very high degree of privacy and ease of use.

Messaging platform: Dialog is the lifeblood of democratic organizations, but it is very difficult with current tools to track particular discussion threads. By using a closed system and well-defined domain space, we are confident we can combine the better elements of email, chat/im, and bulletin boards. The goal is a single system that allows users to read just what they want, to communicate in real time, and to have many views into their message space

Ease of use: Even the coolest features in the world are totally useless if people don’t use them. The sites that people actually use tend to be clean, simple, and attractive. At each step, our first priority must usability.

Developers interested in helping out should email: crabgrass@riseup.net

Former libertarian blog syndication site LibertyFilter.com has instead been re-conceived as a means of circumventing web filtering restrictions.

Enter the URL of the web page you want to read plus your email address and LibertyFilter.com will e-mail it to you.

Hat tip to: Ghetto Puppet.

Just so you know — yes, it’s true. I’m one of the two diabolical bastards behind a new social bookmarking site for libertarians…

freedomSLUT: Sites, Links, URLs and Tags

The other one being, well, one of the usual suspects.

Here’s the news release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
06/01/06
POC Thomas L. Knapp
admin@freedomslut.com

NEW SITE IS FAST, EASY AND GETS (THE WORD) AROUND

The libertarian web community’s newest networking tool — a politically specific social bookmarking site — debuts today at www.freedomSLUT.com.

“Get your mind off of smut — it’s not slut, it’s capital ess ell ewe tee” says Thomas L. Knapp, one of two bloggers behind the effort. “For Sites, Links, URLs and Tags.” But, he admits, he intends to capitalize on the acronym in advertising and promotion.

Knapp, publisher of libertarian sites Rational Review and Kn@ppster, and Brad Spangler, who blogs at BradSpangler.Com and consults for several movement sites and organizations, developed freedomSLUT on the open source Scuttle platform and plan to promote it to the libertarian community as a resource for “finding or flogging” anti-state, pro-freedom bloggage, news and commentary.

“The net is in continuous transition,” says Spangler. “A tool pops up in a discrete community, spreads to the broader web, then gets specialized again. Social bookmarking started out as a tech/geek thing, then went pop, and now we’re bringing it back to a specific group whose members will find it extremely useful.”

freedomSLUT allows for private and public bookmarking, and offers browser and blog template tools to make sharing links easy and convenient.

-30-

Web sites mentioned in this release:

freedomSLUT — http://www.freedomslut.com
Rational Review — http://www.rationalreview.com
Kn@ppster — http://knappster.blogspot.com
BradSpangler.Com — http://www.bradspangler.com/blog

For more information on the software used, Scuttle, check out this Newsforge article.

Complaints can be directed to the circular file.

Worth checking out: Php Object Generator: A free php object relational database code generator

Php Object Generator, (POG) automatically generates tested Object Oriented code that you can use for your PHP4/PHP5 application. Over the years, we’ve come to realize that a large portion of a PHP programmer’s time is wasted on coding the Database Access Layer of an application simply because every application requires different types of objects.

By generating the Database Access Layer code for you, POG saves you time; Time you can spend on other areas of your project. The easiest way to understand how Php Object Generator works is to give it a try.

You may have encountered the latest tech term to get adopted and abused by marketing types — Web 2.0. For reference purposes, read and bookmark Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0 — and then never let Web 2.0 cross your own lips unless you simply must. Why? Because so many of the people uttering Web 2.0 are going to be full of shit. They will be using it to try to sell you something, even though they don’t properly understand the term themselves.

If you’re looking for Wordpress themes, then I should let you know that I’m releasing a slight modification of Liew Cheon Fong’s three-column version of the Kubrick theme as TigerKub.

Screenshot | Download

Installation: Unpack the zip archive, then upload the folder “TigerKub” and its contents to wp-content/themes on your site. Then, in Wordpress, just click “Presentation” and select the TigerKub theme.

I put this theme together for a new project. See TigerKub in action at The Longer Tail.

BTW, the domain name thelongertail.com is for sale right from Day One. Contact Thomas L. Knapp for details.