I have about 1000 new things I want to do with the site my problem is now time and balancing the site development with my homework load and job.

(e:nparkproject),[inlink]nparkproject,3[/inlink] you should record some songs for the elmwood radio station. Also, if you have any upcomming events you could post them on the calendar.

I have been working on lots of new features recently and decided to release two today. One is an rss news feed module for when you are logged in. It allows you to slect a news source and get the last 10 articles from that source. Currently, we have sources including boing boing, Buffalo News, Buffalo Employment, The Buffalo Report, The Beast, estrip, jambase, wired gadgets, wired politics, and yahoo top stories. If anyone knows of any other local rss feeds, I would love to add them to the list. Also, if anyone knows of any good local sports rss feeds, I'd happily add them too.




The second upgrade is the ability to see how many guests are online. Guests are people who are visiting the site but are not users or are not logged in.



More to come soon . . .

In reference to [inlink]paul,1914[/inlink] There is finally some good news in regards to information being published about the site in a local newspaper.

I received a phone call from Tony Violanti at the Buffalo News for an interview about web pages. (e:holly) said that they had called Medaille about web design and she gave them my info. I was so excited to talk about the site but still a little nervous. I don't usually get calls on my cell phone, I try to keep my number secret, so when it rang I picked up figuring it was (e:terry) or (e:southernyankee) calling from work and then all of a sudden I was being interviewed.

He asked me a lot of questions about web design in general and what I thought about it. One question he posed is, "Should people start their own webpages?" another question was, "Should people learn to code web pages or use deisgn programs such as Dreamweaver?"

I responded that everyone who feels that they have something important to say should have a web page. I also said that I encourage people to learn HTML from the ground-up as HTML coding is not that difficult and quickly becomes routinea dn used the intro students at Canisius as an exmaple. While some of them find coding daunting at first, they easily pick it up and can transfer the code from making one site to the next.

I explained that I created this site for people who have something to say but are unable to web program or are simply interested in drawing from the larger audience offered by the site. I also mentiioned that our readershp statistics reflect peoples interest in reality programming on televsion and in gerneral. People simply love to learn about the lives of others and when it can be people within their community it makes it even more interesting because they can meet each other.

[size=m]What do you guys think about it? Why do you keep a journal here?[/size]

So we have over 125 members now and I would really like to see that number grow to about 300 over the next couple months. At that point we will have a really good base to define what was the elmwood experience during our time here. I would like to branch out in some more in terms of user background, hopefully picking up some more younger people and some more older adults. Right now our average age is around 24-29.

I am also working on developing some new stuff and a new look although that might have to wait till my other projects are done.

Today, I sent an article about our site to Alt Press . I hope they carry it. I have been meaning to talk to more news sources about it but was so discouraged after the Artvoice, buffalo.com, and west side times let down.

[size=m]Art Voice[/size]
When I wrote to artvoice telling them about the site, I thought they would be excited about the development of a free local site where people could have a "local" voice on the internet. I was kind of hoping for an article but instead was offered a classified ad for free or a $500 spread. I was not interested in spending $500 on them. I chose neither. I have worked so hard for this project to be free and I felt like they were trying to exploit me.

[size=m]Buffalo.com[/size]
Then I had a similar experience with Buffalo.com. No need to retell it here, you can read it on the entry from the time it happend [inlink]paul,1818[/inlink].

[size=m]West Side Times[/size]
Then we wrote to the west side times. Didn't even get a response!

I guess that is why we created this site in the first place - as a way to circumvent the old media barriers to publication.

So anyhow, I am being brave and writing to Alt Press this time. Wish us luck.

Here we have (e:matthew) trying to take an upclose picture of something in the sand. From far away it looks quite funny.

We ended up at Bennett Beach again. It is much nicer than Wendt Beach which is closer by but trashier.

We went to (e:trisha) 's bachelorette party last night. Many of the peeps were out. Congratulations trisha. It was also nice to see (e:springfaerie) this evening. I really like her, not to mention that she was supercute in her snow white wig.

[sizem]Paper Media[/size] At frizzy's, (e:southernyankee) took a pic with (e:flacidness) in the photobooth and I recaptured it on the 'kick. The photobooth is a strange media producing dinosaur. It's black and white and prints on paper. Paper! Yuck! I thought we were promised a paper free lifestyle 10 years ago. Thank you (e:terry) for never allowing me to buy a printer with ink.

[sizem]Translate It[/size] So now I have a picture of this picture and I'm sending it to the web and we have a situation with media based on other media, based on an event being sent to another medium. Is it changing during this process? What is the data? What is the media? Can we separate the form from the content in this case or are they intrisically interconnected. While my life revolves around this translation of digital media resources, I am still not exactly sure what the essence of the media is and if it can be separated from the content.

On the web, you can easily separate display information and style from content. But can you do that with other mediums. What about a photo. What is the content in this case? Is it chamile or TK? Is it the paper and ink? Does the history of the paper or the photo machine / sidekick and web somehow imprint some sort of mark into the content / media? Or is the media itself is unimportant? Does a photo of a photo somehow lose something in translation. What if they are using the same medium, what if they arn't (e.g. a picture of a painting)?

So can the original paper photo perhaps express something that the digital version of the image can't. Maybe it's just ascribing a sense of nostalgia. The photo machine and paper strip does have a certain aethetic appeal that is lacking in the digital reproduction. But what will happen in 20 years when the digital phone snapshots have a similar nostalgic feel to paper pictures. Is it possible that with time this aspect lost in translation can "develop."

We can't just look at these translations alone, we should also consider the reason for making the translation and see what that offers the media. If it offers enough value to the media, does it make up for what is lost in translation? In this case the digitization offers mass distribution to an otherwise static, temporary, and easily destroyable medium.

Okay enough of this.

It is so loud here. They have been doing so much construction to turn this once nice house into an apartment complex. I kind of wish we moved out. It is so loud now with construction and honestly, I bet it will be even more loud once we live in a complex with people above and below us. It is also very expensive for that.

We heard they will be installing a sprinkler system. I never intended to live in an apartment building. With my luck people will have cats and we will have to break the lease.

Here is recording of what we woke up to this morning. It's an all day process. Please turn your speakers down before playing it. It is mega loud.

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

Yesterday they started early in the morning and went until 7 at night. Most of the day throwing stuff around and yelling at each other about who is and isn't working. My landlord must have hired the cheepest, trashiest crew available. I should have recorded them yelling at each other.

Back in july I wrote this journal entry [inlink]paul,1405[/inlink] about prisoner abuse. This may be old news but because I don't have television I haven't really heard much about it anymore. Barely anyone believed me that the bottom picture was real because I had found it on an arab site at the time.



Well, it just resurfaced on the web again, this time on the Washington Post Site.

The person in charge --> "Specialist Armin J. Cruz of the502 nd Military Intelligence battalion was also demolished to the rank of private as another punitive measure after he confessed to forcing three naked inmates at the notorious Iraqi jail to crawl along a floor before making them simulate sex acts."

The Washington post has an entire gallery of the images here

I am working on a new design of the layout. In the mean time there is a problem with the section under the journal not extending all the way to the bottom of the page. Please be patient. I have a million other things to do right now. It will be fixed shortly.

So I was working on the site and a developers worst nightmare happend. No matter what I uploaded as soon as I accessed the file through the web browser it would go from 13k or whatever it was to 0k. It only happend if the file was FTP'ed, dynamically written files had no problem. What is up with that crap. I want my own server space so bad so that i don't have to deal with crap like this anymore. If the job with (e:zack) works out maybe I can finally afford it.

On another note, I finally got rid of that problem where it would delay loading between the search box and the chat box.