I’ve been using Comcast for my primary email account for about eight years, but a month ago I finally decided to switch to Gmail. The last straw was when poetry written by dear friend was blocked. Of course that wasn’t the only reason. They’d been mounting

My reasons were:

1. Better spam filtering. Gmail puts what it guesses is junk in a folder you can easily review.
2. IMAP is an option. This is particularly helpful if you have an iPhone or similar device. A POP account that you look at on both your computer and your iPhone is a big pain, since you have to touch everything twice.
3. No need to backup. I suppose if you have super-important email you might want to back up even Gmail. It is fallible, but it’s nothing compared to the fallibility of email archives on an aging hard drive.
4. Great search engine. Combining Google search know-how and email is to die for.
5. Multiple email accounts. I still get my Comcast email. It’s just coming into Gmail. You can set Gmail up to fetch up to five POP email accounts. In fact you can set it so it replies from the same email address.

All in all, this is the easiest email migration I’ve ever done. And I’m getting my friend’s poetry again.

I’m finally over the worst cold I’ve had in years, and now lots of other people are succumbing. While recuperating, I had to relearn a few things, and thought I’d pass these tips on to other geeks during the cold and flu season.

• Lower expectations of yourself. You just can’t get as much done, so if you’re not expecting as much, it makes life easier.
  
• Drink juice and tea if you like them. No two people in my family who had this cold liked the same juice, but we all agreed it was about the only thing that tasted any good early on.
  
• Rest and take care of yourself (even if you are a swashbuckling young man).
• Play games and catch up on your reading (be it online or print).
• Wash your hands. It makes it less likely you’ll get something else as well.
  
• Perhaps most important, protect your computers from yourself. I tried to install Linux under Parallels. This was a bad idea, but fortunately not a disaster. So don’t do as I did. Please do as I say.

Last May, with remarkably little ballyhoo, Google substantially changed the way it delivered search results. It’s surprising that there wasn’t more of a ruckus, given that people care deeply about their Google rankings. My inner librarian weeps for how much search engines are used and how little understood.

In any event, one of the highlights of PodCamp was when John Ellis tackled this subject head on. And here’s a great take-away….

Search engine optimize (SEO) your images. With the new Universal Search, images often show up at the top of a generic Google search. There are three easy ways to do this:

1. Give them great filenames. For example, to SEO an image of myself, I could name the image happy-web-diva.jpg or anna-belle-leiserson.jpg, instead of my usual abl.jpg.
2. Use the alt attribute. Hopefully you are all doing this anyways, as this is a well-documented requirement for making web pages accessible.
3. Add an image caption. Actually it’s been a concern of mine that it’s not easy to caption photos in WordPress. I’ll plan on trying the Image Caption plug-in next time I use a photo.

Thanks, John, for a most helpful presentation.

The big surprise from yesterday’s PodCamp was the presentation by Dave Delaney. He sold me on Twitter and, believe me, I was a hard sell. I’ve been watching Twitter on the sidelines since it launched in 2006.

Why I Resisted Twitter

1. It seemed narcissistic. Do you really need to know what I’m doing most of the time? Of course not.
2. It sounded intrusive. If you don’t like IM (and I don’t, nor am I crazy about the telephone), why would you like a web version of IM?
3. It’s one too many things.

What changed my mind?

1. Dave’s enthusiasm — which wasn’t spin or a sales pitch. While I don’t know Dave, he finds Twittering worth his time and he’s clearly a very busy guy. He focused on how to do it more than why, but listening to him I figured out some good reasons to try it…..
2. It’s not only easy to start, it’s easy to stop. If you don’t like it, it’s as simple as clicking on the “Delete my account” link.
3. Brevity is an art form — and one I can use practice at. I relish this 140 character limit.
4. It integrates seamlessly with blogging. It feels a bit like pull-quotes or side-bars or even blowing kisses. Needless to say, it’s not called blowing kisses at your blog. But there is an apt description: “micro-blogging.”

I haven’t totally relinquished my reservations, but Dave tipped the pro / con balance sheet way in its favor. For now I’m planning on ignoring the narcissism on Twitter. If it’s just too rampant, I can always blow my account to smithereens.

Today was PodCamp. As I pulled into Cannery Row at 9:00 AM, out of my element but intrigued, I had no idea what to expect. Talks that went over my head? Things only young men are interested in? Boredom? The one thing I wasn’t expecting was for it to be as totally worthwhile as it was. I even liked the talk about beer podcasting — and I loathe beer.

The whole day was jam-packed with inspiring speakers — covering a surprisingly wide range of topics. It wasn’t just technical how-to, though that was covered, and covered well. There were also great talks on Search Engine Optimization, marketing, presentations and even Twitter.

My only criticism is that there were no women presenting. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t many women podcasters yet in this part of the world. Hopefully there will be more — very soon. And if PodCamp is coming to your part of the world, I’ve got one word for you: go.

Thank you so much to all the great presenters, organizers and supporters, including Emma and Griffin. You wore this web diva out, but boy did you make me happy.

My very favorite time of day is early in the morning: the quiet, the angle of the light, the sense of new beginning. Even better are the mornings when I remember these words of the Dalai Lama.

“Everyday, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

“In the past few years it has dawned on me that an important part of a long-term relationship with a congregation is coming to terms with the grief that comes with loss. Every year, when we gather at the Columbarium during our Water Communion service, the list of those departed whom I have known and loved grows longer and longer. It has been through this growing understanding of my own grief that I have come to embrace the gratitude I feel for having shared part of this brief life with this amazing group of people. In the end it’s not about having a great music program or about being a renowned composer, or preaching eloquent and inspiring sermons, or even helping to conquer any of the great social ills of our time. It’s about truly being with one another, about knowing each other. It is in those privileged moments, when I have simply been with people in the struggles and celebrations of their lives, that I have found a place for ministry, for service, and I am grateful for the opportunity to fulfill this calling in my life.”
- The Rev. Jason Shelton

Sometimes I question my sanity for going to church. Church life, if you enter into it past a certain point (a point I passed ages ago), is messy. Of course I’m busy too, and would love to just put my feet up on Sundays instead of going to church. More than that, I look around and many wonderful people don’t go to church. So why?

Then there are the other moments. One just happened to me, working on a recent web page I posted for the church. I read the passage from Jason Shelton quoted above, and time stopped. Of course I go to church. In fact, I’m very lucky to be part of such a wonderful community.

Jason is our highly articulate and extraordinarily talented music director, who is trail-blazing his way into music ministry. We are the envy of many other UU congregations to have him on our staff.

But he wants to stay with us, and I can see why. We have soaring ceilings, but our roots go much deeper — through the Columbarium, through the larger community, and into many hearts, including mine.

Late last night, in the time between running down to our nasty basement to avoid tornadoes and some big storm action, I got to coding. I couldn’t sleep and it was a pleasant distraction — not to mention my laptop wasn’t plugged in, so I didn’t have to worry about electricity. My Drupal-enthusiast friends and I have been trying to do a multi-site install for a few weeks, and to my amazement, with a howling wind, hail, etc., the last piece finally fell into place. One of my pals had said the issue was symbolic links. Bingo. That was it.

To back up, a multi-site install means you set up the core of Drupal just once, and then you can easily create lots of other sites using that one installation. The other sites don’t even have to have the same domain. It’s very cool. For example, at work I hope to set up one master Drupal site, and then create instances for each of the labs. After that, the labs can maintain their own sites.

For now all I’ve done is to set it up on my Macbook using localhost. I made it as modest as possible — just using one database and subdirectories. But having worked through this, it will be much easier to get it working in production.

Here are the gory details.

1. Go to the “sites/” directory and set up your new directory. At first, I named it “sites/site2/”, but that turned out to be a mistake. Given that the URL I was going for was http://localhost:8888/drupal/site2/, the correct name was “sites/8888.localhost.drupal.site2/”. It still looks weird to me, but that’s how you do it. The pattern is:
   [Port #.]domain[.directory][.subdirectory]/
   So if the URL were to be http://happywebdiva.com/drupal/site2, then the new directory would have to be happywebdiva.com.drupal.site2/
2. Copy the “settings.php” file found in “sites/default/” into the new directory.
3. Edit the new “settings.php” file. Leave the $db_url the same, but on the next line, give $db_prefix a value. I cleverly edited mine to read:
   $db_prefix = ’site2_’;
   This way you won’t have to set up a new database. Once you install the second site (step 6 below), the database size will double — from 40 tables to 80 tables.
4. Further down in the “settings.php” file, look for a line that’s something like:
   # $base_url = ‘http://www.example.com’;
   Uncomment this and change it to your desired URL. In my case this was:
   $base_url = ‘http://localhost:8888/drupal/site2′;
5. Next it’s time to create the dreaded symbolic link. Open Terminal (on a Mac) and use the ln -s command followed by first the full path of your base install and then the full path of the second sites’ directory (leaving off the characters before the periods in the final directory, e.g. changing “8888.localhost.drupal.site2″ to just “site2″). In my example, it was:
   ln -s /home/username/public_html/drupal/ /home/username/public_html/drupal/site2
   One caution: be sure there’s not a file or directory in the first directory that’s the same name as your new install. You don’t want the symbolic link overwriting something critical.
6. The last step…. In your browser, go to the new site’s URL followed by install.php, e.g. http://localhost:8888/drupal/site2/install.php

That’s it. You should now have a second site (and soon a third and fourth) to play with.

Addendum: In the myriad of multi-site documentation that’s on the web, these three pages helped me the most:

• Drupal Cookbook (best if you are using Windows)
• Multisite with drupal for dummies
• Geek Glue

Sixteen years ago today (on a not-so-Super Tuesday, 1992) the weather here in Nashville was abysmal. It was a cold downpour. As I exited the polling station, to my amazement there was a neighbor standing under a big umbrella, campaigning for Clinton (Bill, that is). I chatted with him for a minute — bowled over by his commitment. He was a good neighbor, whose opinion I respected. I hadn’t voted for Clinton that primary, but this made a big impression on me. The next time I voted it was for Clinton — and I was thinking of my neighbor.

Today as I exited the polling station, there was one lone person standing outside. This time it was a good friend from church, campaigning for Clinton (Hillary, that is). She wondered out loud why no one else was there. Was it because the polls are showing Tennessee will go for Clinton? I don’t know, but I do know her commitment, like my neighbor’s 16 years ago, made an impression on me. I expect if Clinton wins the primary, I’ll vote for her — and be thinking of my friend.

Usually I don’t like to discuss whom I’m voting for — much less blog about it — but there’s something different about tomorrow. It could be the sense of hope and possibility. Or perhaps I’ve changed. But what strikes me most is the sense that it’s a vote for Obama. I won’t be voting in a spirit that’s against Clinton — or anyone else, for that matter. It’s about Obama. And that makes me want to speak up.

Why? On the whole it’s for the same reasons you hear from others. I particularly echoed to Caroline Kennedy’s endorsement. However, I have a couple of reasons I don’t see talked about quite as much, so I’ll mention them.

First, he has the greatest understanding of technology. Since I’m grounded in technology, it helps me to measure the man.

Second, I believe his upbringing gives him a more global perspective. There are actually some things about his childhood that remind me of mine. My brother and I spent good chunks of our early years abroad. It gave both of us a better sense of where the U.S. fits in the world — how we look in others’ eyes. Reading Dreams From My Father, it’s clear to me that Obama was affected in similar ways, and it’s bound to have a salutary effect on foreign policy if he becomes our next president.

My hope is strong.