I came home tonight to find three traffic cones protecting the telephone pole at the bottom of my driveway. Some sort of device is there, with a cable wrapped around the pole and connecting to the wires running overhead.
Nate thinks it’s a fiber optic repeater. That’s better than any theory I came up with. Leave a comment if you’ve got a better idea.
Click the tabblo to see the photos (including high resolution versions).
One of the most annoying things about running for office was (and is) the paperwork. The financial filings are the worst. I have spent many hours trying to figure out what needed to be on which form. Is that a gift-in-kind? Or is that an expense? Or is it a liability that will be expensed later? Does it need a line item, or is that uncategorized? Or is it a reimbursement of a past liability? Yech. If I was elected, I’d probably try to dismantle the Office of Campaign and Political Finance.
But, the data is there, and I like data. I review the filings of local candidates when they occur, like they did last week in their pre-primary filing. Unfortunately, the OCPF website doesn’t permit you to link into actual reports. They make you re-run the search every time you want to review the data, which I find inconvenient. You can check out the database yourself. For Arlington residents, I think Senator Havern’s recent report is the most interesting.
From the report you can determine that his campaign received $38,595 so far this year. If you click “Schedule A (Receipts)” you can see that $16,775 of that came from PACs, lobbyists, and unions, plus an additional $3100 from lawyers. You get to draw your own conclusions from that information.
There is also one real curiousity on that form. He lists a $100 contribution from the “Alcohol Beverage Control Commission” which, as far as I can tell, is actually a state agency. I should go for a bike ride and see what is at 90 Homer Street in Boston.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of TechCrunch did a writeup of Tabblo today. It was quite positive.
He was particularly focused on our new “variations” feature. With that feature, one author can permit other authors to make a copy and “riff” on the original. For instance, check out my tabblo of Spy Pond Sunsets. There are a ton of photos there, and it is really busy. Say you think a couple of the photos are great, but you think I’ve made something that is too busy and cluttered. You can click the “variations” link (be sure to be logged in, or you can’t see the link). You can then start with my tabblo, but make it your own. I encourage you to do this – it’s a great way to get a feel for what our website can do.
This really points out one of the challenges we’re facing with Tabblo. We’re getting excellent reviews and return visits from people who actually try to make a tabblo. The trick, we find, is getting them to give it that first try. When they just look at it (or hear about it), they don’t necessarily get it. But once we get them clicking at it a bit, they see the usefulness. You can see that in the comments on TechCrunch: off-the-cuff negativity followed by positive reviews from people who tried it.
So, what does this new press mean for Tabblo? It’s positive, to be sure, but it’s not going to change our world. Brad Feld’s analysis of the effects of a press hit is a great read. (I am amused to note that the “10,000 user” question had already become the 53,651 user question in May, and today TechCrunch boasts 113,000 subscribers).
TechCrunch is a good review, and I’m glad to have it. But we have to build our business a user at a time. We have to win over the moms, the dads, the friends, the co-workers, the event organizers, and the gift givers with one good experience after another. We’re not going to build our business because 113,000 geeks checked us out on a September afternoon.
Yesterday was Town Day in Arlington. (Out-of-towners: Mass Ave is closed for a few blocks, and organizations and business rent 10 feet of curb to set up a table. Think crowds, fried dough, and advocacy on a sunny Saturday afternoon. It’s great fun).
I ran around with my camera and a stack of flyers. So far I’m the biggest contributor to the Town Day tabblo, with a handful of people sending in 3-6 additional photos each. Check out the photos.
For the last three years, I’ve built this website by typing HTML by hand. No wizzy-wig editors, no composers, nothing – if I couldn’t figure out how to code it, I didn’t do it. I did it that way partly as a way to keep the website clean and simple, and partly as a learning exercise.
Lately, I’ve been writing less and less. I still have had the urge to write, but I haven’t put pen to paper, so to speak. I think that part of the the problem is that the overhead in putting up a new post has been too high. (Self-analysis of my own motivations are always a crapshoot, so we’ll see if this is a new burst of energy followed by months of silence. Only time will tell).
So, I installed WordPress. So far I’ve spent about 4 hours in configuration and settings and such, and only got frustrated twice. The old website is available through the links on the left, and someday I may import it into the regular archives.
As part of this new software, I’m doing something very new for me: I’m enabling comments! So, please make use of them. To start with, I welcome feedback on the new look and feel. Does it work for you? Is it missing something? Whatever you’ve got, I’m curious.
