Author: Jason Grigsby

links for 2008-12-07

Let’s Play Sheriff and Tully. I’ll Be Sheriff.

Tully & SheriffAs many of you know, we lost our beloved dog Tully this summer. We didn’t plan on getting another dog, but Sheriff started showing signs of separation anxiety (he and Tully were litter mates), and we finally relented.

So in September we got a puppy from our friends. The puppy was their favorite of the litter. Our friends gave him the name Primo in honor of his first born status.

Primo & Sheriff 2

As you can see from the photos above, there is a slight resemblance between Primo and Tully. Yet while friends commented on the similarities, I didn’t see it.

Or more accurately, I didn’t want to acknowledge it. We didn’t pick Primo because of the resemblance. And no dog was ever going to replace Tully.

After last weekend, I’m ready to admit it. Jeez, Primo reminds me of Tully!

We took him out to the beach for the first time last weekend. He quickly fell into the same pattern as Tully did. Sheriff fetches the ball and Primo attacks Sheriff. Tully used to get into a crouch, wait for Sheriff to get close enough and then pounce.

It made me wonder if Sheriff’s personality was so strong that any new dog would by necessity end up playing the role Tully had played.

Dana’s Uncle Jim had a funny take on it. He imagined a conversation between the two dogs that might go something like this:

Sheriff: Hey Primo, I’ve got an idea. Let’s play “Sheriff and Tully.” I’ll be Sheriff.

Primo: Oh man, I wanted to be Sheriff this time.

Sheriff: Sorry. You can be Sheriff tomorrow.

Primo (under his breathe): Man, you always say that.

It was a blast. It was great to see Sheriff enjoying himself and to know that his new buddy was helping all of us both move on and remember Tully at the same time.

More adorable puppy photos on Flickr.

Need Google Adwords Assistance

A few months ago I moved our beach house web site from a server in my house running Zope to WordPress at Media Temple. In the process, I screwed up my Adwords account.

In particular, I forgot that I had a special landing page that tracked the referring url and then redirected to the home page. After the move, the url for that landing page was returning a page not found error.

Now my ads won’t run no matter what I do. I’ve pointed the ads at the home page, the about page, the features page, etc. I’ve tried domain aliases. No matter what I do, Google Adwords never seems to budge from its opinion that the landing page is of poor quality and not relevant.

I don’t believe my changes to the landing page are having any effect. I’ve been battling this for a couple of weeks now. I’ve sought from the Adwords help forum and from Google’s support (which thus far has only sent me back borderline insulting template emails).

Has anyone encountered anything like this? Any ideas on how to fix it?

Finally, any SEO/SEM experts interested in trading some assistance for some free time at the beach?

Details on the problem are in this Adwords Help Forum Thread.

links for 2008-12-04

Portland Tech Community

Lately I’ve found myself in a lot of conversations about the Portland Tech Community.

It started with a conversation with people at Software Association of Oregon (SAO) about their interest in creating a Mobile SIG and wondering how that would relate to Mobile Portland.

Then there was Thrive PDX which attempted to bring together the growing tech community that orbits around Legion of Tech activities and the different community that attends SAO events.

Finally tonight, Rick Turoczy led an interesting retrospective at the PDX Web Innovators on where the tech community has been in the last year and where it might go in 2009.

To varying degrees, all of these discussions have had some tension between those who want to bridge the different communities in Portland and those that desire a more organic approach. At ThrivePDX, someone suggested that we needed one group to coordinate all of these subgroups.

I dislike approaches like that. They are massive undertakings that never quite succeed. I prefer distinct problem statements that you can solve.

Which is why I became interested when someone tonight said that they had problem connecting to the Portland Tech Community when moving here from out of the area.

Over the last year, I’ve written several emails to people moving here describing different events to attend and at those events introduced people new to the area to others in the Portland Tech Community.

Despite the fact that I had found myself doing that multiple times, I never really thought about it as a need. I just considered it some ways part of being a good host for the town I grew up in.

As Selena pointed out tonight, our community is actually pretty good at pointing people in the right direction once you connect with someone in the community. She described it as latching onto a spoke and getting pulled in.

But there is a clear need. If someone doesn’t know to ask or whom to ask, they may never find their connection.

So it is with that in mind that I purchased PortlandTechCommunity.org tonight. I don’t want to solve bridging gaps between communities. I don’t want to replace existing organizations either formal like Legion of Tech and SAO or informal like http://pdxtech.org. I don’t have a desire to recreate other efforts like creating central calendar of events for the community.

Instead, I envision a site that solely exists to introduce people from out of town to the Portland Tech Community and connect them to one of the spokes. A short simple problem statement that we should be able to solve. It will benefit those moving here, and it will benefit Portland by highlighting how vibrant the community is and how to get involved.

Portland’s Tech Community has given a lot to me. This is one way of giving back. If you’re interested in helping out or have specific ideas on the best ways to accomplish the mission of the site, please leave a comment or contact me via Twitter.

links for 2008-12-03

HTML 5 Proposes Integrating Forms with HTTP Auth

One of my earliest blog posts delved into the challenges of http authentication and forms.

The good news this week that there is a new “radical proposal for integrating HTTP authentication with HTML forms.”

The bad news is that “this idea has been kicked around for more than a decade” and that “no browsers currently support this proposal.”

The optimist in me wants to believe this will happen. The realist is happy to no longer be forced to work exclusively with http authentication.

links for 2008-12-02