The NY Times has a report in today's paper about the Occupy Wall Street campaign and its spread to other cities around the country.

The second paragraph begins: "With little organization and a reliance on Facebook, Twitter and Google groups to share methods, the Occupy Wall Street campaign, as the prototype in New York is called..."

They put their finger on exactly what is troubling, from my perspective, about using corporate online media to organize political efforts to upset a supposedlly different corporate world. The assumption is that there are no connections between Wall Street and the ownership of the tech companies. This of course is not true. They are very interlocked. When Wall Street is threatened the response could easily come from one of the online networks.

Better to develop completely independent communication channels in case the Google, Facebook or Twitter ones are interrupted. Or as independent as you can possibly make it. Depending on university-hosted communication systems, for example, while certainly not foolproof, is a better bet than using the corporate systems.

Having multiple redundant channels is the best way of all. (In other words, based on the design of the Internet itself.)

Right now I don't want to be more specific because I don't want to jinx the great energy behind this movement. If I see specific signs that they are over-relying on corporate online media, I'll say more.

PS: I couldn't disagree more with this piece in the Atlantic. Just the act of occupying space in the middle of NYC is causing people to talk about things in a way they weren't before. It's the change they're creating in the rest of us that matters right now, not the ignorance of Wall St. They will be the last to hear it.

 10/3/2011; 9:02:16 PM.   .

One of my mottos is Only Steal from the Best.

It was with that in mind that I stole the design of my new story template from Readability. I figured they had invested so much in figuring out what readable meant in web writing, why not just lift the design and use it on my site?

I sent a pointer to Rich Ziade, the CEO of Arc90, the company that makes Readability, with my compliments. He said in response, "It doesn't need Readability. A good sign!" Now that's a software developer I admire. A man on a mission -- to make the web more readable.

And we're doing our small part here at Scripting News.

 10/3/2011; 8:51:10 PM.   .

Yet another new look for scripting.com.

It uses the Bootstrap toolkit for some things, but I didn't use their grid layout or the fluid two-column layout. Couldn't make the grid work, and the two-column layout had the columns arranged backwards.

This is a test to see how subtext looks in the new setup.

Using Google Web Fonts for the title of the home page, and for the text on the home page. The title is Fondiner Swanky (which people think of as the Rocky and Bullwinkle font) and the text on the home page is the very nice Ubuntu font. On the story pages I use Georgia.

I really like the blue text for links. That's a Bootstrap thing.

Not sure what to do with the linkblog contents. It's kind of disruptive, not in a good way, but I want to give people access to the links I publish. Still thinking about that.

As has been pointed out in the comments, it's broken in Chrome. Probably elsewhere. Oy. (I need a nap.)

 10/3/2011; 8:53:57 AM.   .