Brian Alvey

After not thinking about LOGO for years and years, it appeared to me twice this week.

The first time was when we were taking a tour of a school my older son might go to next year. They had computer generated drawings in the hallway and someone pointed out that they were teaching LOGO in the computer lab.

The second was in a Wired article this week called Forward 40: What Became of the LOGO Programming Language? The article covered the history of the LOGO programming language and talked about the only thing I remember from using LOGO in fourth grade.

In LOGO you’d type in commands and then a little turtle would carry them out. The turtle was just a triangle and as it moved it would draw out lines with its tail. If you told it this:

FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
REPEAT 4

then the turtle would draw a square. Of course my favorite was:

RIGHT 1
FORWARD 99999999999

or whatever the highest number was that it would accept. I think you could only tell it to move something like 9999 and then you’d have to follow that with a REPEAT 9999 command. that would cause the turtle to turn slightly and then speed up the screen drawing these overlapping lines across the screen to the right — sort of like messing with the horizontal hold on an old black and white television. It was a trip.

The Wired article invited people to share their own LOGO stories, but I figured I’d put mine here since I hadn’t heard of LOGO since fourth grade and now I’ve heard it come up twice in a week. Wild.

TechCrunch reported that Propeller.com has been doing better than Netscape.com since AOL took the Netscape domain away from the social news team and turned it back into a portal.

The conclusions they found included:

• the audience must have been really loyal to the social news site
• that Jason and the entire Netscape social news team were vindicated for their efforts
• AOL’s latest move destroyed the Netscape brand by another 50%

I think they’re missing the story here. The real conclusion a savvy reporter should draw is that the Propeller team needs to be careful to stay under the radar or a middle manager at AOL is going to take their new domain name away. Just look at all the built-in traffic it has!

I’m betting that the social news site will live at either Compuserve.com or Switched.com by Christmas and Propeller.com will be an instant messenger client.

Joey Manley, who knows a lot about publishing web comics, wrote a great article covering the ComicMix Phase Two launch and focused on the quality of our online comic book reader.

Overall he was really kind to us. Being that he’s a guy who has obsessed over the problem of reading comic books online, his positive review means a lot. He said that there was nothing wrong with the interface, but added that there were a few extra things he’d like to see — some missed opportunities.

First, Joey asked for permalinks to individual comic pages. His commenter Bill said “Comments per page are a must for webcomics.” Commenter Gerhard Bahnsen said “permalinks are a total must” and likes it when each page is commentable. Are you sensing a theme here?

Like Joey Manley, I have obsessed over how to read a tall multi-page comic book online for quite a while and I have some reasons for not having permalinks. There is a solution that lets people link straight to a specific page within an issue, but I’m still not sold on having comments for each page. That topic deserves its own blog post and will get one this week.

Second, he asked for full-content RSS feeds. I could see if I was an independent webcomic artist and my primary goal was to tap into the audience that already read webcomics via RSS feeds. I’d put my whole 60K three-panel strip into a feed for free at full size. I wouldn’t care what method people use to read my daily strip as long as they read it. But providing full-content feeds of multiple full-color 1MB comic book pages — not in our current online reader and not as part of our site — isn’t high on our list. We pay our creators competitive industry rates, you know.

We will definitely have RSS feeds to alert people when our new issues get published and feeds for just about everything else on our site soon. Those feeds will include preview images, probably thumbnails, but not our giant 1024×1574 images.

Joey said that there were probably more ways the site could be “bloggified.” I agree! I’ve built blogging platforms before and, although this is not running on a purely blog publishing platform, I will not be leaving many standard blog features out. The only reason they’re not in there now is that this new platform was built from scratch in the last two months. I left my old platform behind at AOL along with a pretty stellar development team. Hey, that’s the subject of another upcoming post.

His commenters pushed for even more:

Gerhard suggested adding a way to save what place you were at in a story that’s longer than a five-page installment. Fantastic! We were working towards something like that, but it was more along the lines of remembering what issues our members had read. We will add that to our list. I already told Christoph he needed to add that “remembers your place” feature for his inline podcast player months ago. Why do I not think to add these things to my own products? 😉

He asked for a few other features that we have coming up in Phase Three, but rule number one of Phase Three is “No one talks about Phase Three.”

Gerhard didn’t like having to search all over the site to find our issues. Great observation. With just one comic to show the world on Tuesday — and only a couple in the first week — we hadn’t yet had some of the listing pages working. You pretty much had to click the promo links at the top of the home page or on the covers on the home page. Navigation options will increase as we add more content and as we, um, add more navigation.

As of Friday morning we have a primitive comic issues listing page that you can get to from the “Comics” tab at the top of every page. It’s not exactly how we’ll be listing our issues in the future, but for now it works like a blog’s home page — listing content with the most recent stuff on top.

I’m loving these discussions about how best to read tall multi-page comic books online. If you’ve got any suggestions, let me know.

You all know that stars like Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Peter Rojas and Harvey Levin use my old blogging platform, but are there any other famous people using Blogsmith?

Sure there are!

Niki had the food channel on yesterday and I asked her if we were watching Bobby Flay. She said it was Tyler Florence. Ah, I remember that name because I saw him in Blogsmith. He blogs at the clever domain AOLFoodBlog.com. I should have known it wasn’t Bobby Flay because the guy didn’t look stoned. I’m sure Bobby Flay is drug-free, but to me he always seems high. Maybe it’s because he’s a guy who’s always cooking and I’m just reading into it.

Today I clicked on an AOL news story and saw a sidebar listing some featured blogs. Weblogs, Inc. ones? Of course not, but I did see a few names I had heard of before. One was Mo Rocca from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. He can be found on AOL’s evocatively named group blog News Bloggers. If you just want to go to Mo, you can find a listing of Mo-only work.

More you say? Sure thing.

Here’s Regina Lewis’ blog. She’s on the DIY Network and all over TV.

And Blogging Stocks recently added Jim Cramer from TheStreet.com and CNBC’s Mad Money.

It’s always wild to see someone on TV who also uses Blogsmith for their blog.

I enjoyed Ryan Block’s response to Nick Denton’s assertion that Gizmodo’s traffic has passed Engadget’s.

The most interesting section was the one where Ryan addressed Denton’s claim that “Engadget had… in AOL, a corporate parent which funneled through new visitors.”

“Oh Nick, how I wish. According to our internal traffic systems, yesterday, our second biggest day for traffic ever, AOL referrers accounted for 0.2% – yes, less than one half percent – of our total page views. On our biggest day ever, the day the iPhone was announced, our AOL referrers accounted for a record 2.1%; in all of August, they represented less than 0.5% of all traffic. The vast majority, I believe, are just coming from AOL search (which uses Google, where we’re routinely higher ranked than our competition), too – not from promo.”

It’s bad corporate strategy for the past of online publishing (portals) to have its hands on the steering wheel while the present of online publishing (blogs) sits in the back seat repeatedly asking, “Are we there yet?”

A better strategy would be to find the future of online publishing.

My wife guessed my Twitter address and followed me. One of my favorite web designers found me from her blog and followed me.

So I came out of the Twitter closet and followed a bunch of people I like.

Does this mean I don’t think Twitter is for teenage girls anymore? No. It is still a great service for teenage girls, but as Jeffrey said it’s also a good “bon mot generator.” It’s also a logged semi-public chat room and the variety of ways to get content in are impressive: IM; text messages from my phone; through their web page; by fax; pigeon; telepathy and more.

Plus I can do “My Favorite Tweets” recaps like Matt does:

• taught Jack how to throw and catch a frisbee, came inside for a drink and to count his teeth, so far so good Aug 26
• do people who spell owned as pwned call that TV show about superhero kids Herpes? Aug 28
• why is it that “I guess heaven needed a power forward” turns my stomach when “I guess heaven needed a shortstop” makes me sorrowful? Aug 29
• when LOLcats makes the cover of BusinessWeek, it is officially a dead language: IM ON UR COVR, PUTTIN NALZ IN UR KOFFIN Aug 29
• @gavin Candlelight 10oz burgers with Craig, it’s like a mini CodeJam — jealous? Aug 30
• “right now she’s saying ‘I’m drunk’ and he’s thinking that he’s gonna get lucky” — now that’s a status message Aug 30
• Staples is a day late with my 2 UPSes. That wasn’t easy®. Aug 31
• I love how they’re portraying Tony Stark in the new Iron Man movie — he’s like a modern day Steve Jobs Sept 07
• I just figured out why my Obama Nation t-shirts aren’t selling Sept 07
• I’m rocking the suburbs, just like Jon Bon Jovi did Sept 10

Update: No that status message above where the girl is drunk is not about me cheating on my pregnant wife. It’s a line from that big Carrie Underwood song. It just fit my theme that day — wondering why Twitter asks “What are you doing?” when people are going to use it like an instant messaging service. Good grief.

I am a sucker for anything about Frankenstein or mad scientists.

Especially a good comic strip.

Especially a Rhymes With Orange one.

Last night I took my sons to a Yankee game without Niki. The people in front of me thought I was brave.

Our seats were only a few rows away from right field, but the view was blocked by the foul pole and its net. Besides the great game and the win, the highlight for Tor was the Yankee squirrel. He’s a squirrel that showed up a few games ago and got a ton of television time. He sits on the top of that foul pole and every now and then climbs down it and then back up. People cheer. They take pictures and video of him. They yell at people who scare the squirrel back up the pole.

We watched him climb down over and over. One time he turned around to head back up and started shaking and then squirting streams of pee. Tor screamed “Pee! Pee!” It was hilarious.

The squirrel emptied himself one more time a few innings later and that started to freak Tor out. He was sure we were all going to get peed on even though it all rained straight down and we were way out of his range. Even telling Tor what position the squirrel would play for the Yankees didn’t calm him down or cheer him up.

The squirrel would of course be a middle reliever.

We saw Alice in Chains open for Velvet Revolver last Saturday at Jones Beach. It was a great show, but it reinforced the drawback of having an established opening act.

Let me explain by example. We saw Stone Temple Pilots open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers at Jones Beach a bunch of years ago and STP blew us away. They played only eight songs, but each one was amazing and had a ton of radio play. Vasoline. Interstate Love Song. Some of my favorite songs ever. Add in the fact that I never thought I’d see them in concert before Scott Weiland overdosed and it was a powerful experience. Scott mooned the audience as they unfurled a giant American flag at the end of their set and I sat there in awe.

Then the Chili Peppers came out and bored me. I knew at least half of the songs they played and I even loved their new Californication album at the time, but every time I tell people about that night I’m telling a story about a brilliant STP show.

Now Scott Weiland and most of Guns N’ Roses are the band called Velvet Revolver. You’d think that some of that STP concert magic would have rubbed off of Velvet Revolver, but no such luck.

Alice in Chains came out and I knew every word to all of the songs they did: Grind, Again, We Die Young, Down In A Hole, Man In The Box, Would?, Them Bones, Dam That River, Rain When I Die, Angry Chair and Rooster.

Amazing.

Then Velvet Revolver came out and bored me. Sure I loved their take on the GNR songs It’s So Easy, Patience and Mr. Brownstone. They even played Vasoline and Interstate Love Song.

The funny thing is that if the bands were switched, Velvet Revolver would have done a tighter set with only their best ten songs and the long Alice in Chains set would have had some boring moments.

It’s a no-win situation.

I was pretty sure when I saw this in the newspaper yesterday that Hilary was hoping this one would go viral — getting blogged by hundreds of A-list bloggers and increasing her audience ten-fold. At the very least it will get clipped by the moms of all the kids who live in their parents’ basements while they create the next big blog network.

Over on her site, Hilary explains how you can get Rhymes with Orange in your local paper:

The very best way for this to happen is to contact your local paper and tell the editor what you like and don’t like on the comics page. I think Rhymes With Orange appeals to a small niche of witty, intelligent and incredibly good-looking people. (As you know, not everyone falls into this category, so not everyone is going to get, or like, the strip.) To newspaper editors, I write one of those “edgy” strips. Letting the editor know you like the strip will be a buffer every time someone calls up saying, “I just don’t get that Rhymes With Orange strip. Can’t you just print Garfield twice on the page?”

Remember, you can’t spell hilarity without Hilary.