Author: Ruby Sinreich

I didn’t want to do this

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One of the web sites* that I have been relying on for wedding planning is theknot.com. After spending a couple of months using the site and getting our guests to enter their personal information and RSVPs, the feature allowing us to export this data has gone on indefinite vacation!

theknot.com
The above screenshot says “our site will be down for several hours today for required maintenance.” The above was taken around noon on Sunday, July 16th and has not changed since then. In other words, the site has been down for “important” – but apparently not scheduled – maintenance for three days now, whith no advance warning to users.

As you can imagine, I have sent many e-mails into the black hole known as feedback@theknot.com. It’s time to play hard ball. Should I contact their press rep and threaten a blog swarm, should I start contacting advertisers, or should I just threaten to sue unless they send me my goddamn guest list?

Oh, and did I mention the wedding is in 4 days? This is not a good time to fuck with me. 😉

* I wanted to use CiviCRM for all of our online wedding needs, but I was unable to upgrade CivicSpace (which I installed in 2005) to a current version. My offers to pay someone to do this simple upgrade went unanswered. So we resorted to theknot.com and evite.com and our wedding web site still looks like crap.

Am I old yet?

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I don’t understand people who keep trying to tell me that I am not “old.” In addition to the fact that I am now legally mature to run for President, my body is degrading at a pretty good pace now.

Last week I saw a podiatrist who says I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot and capsulitis in my right foot. The former was probably caused/aggravated by the fact that I use walking as my primary form of transportation, the latter by my attempt to lose weight by jogging. That’s what I get for trying to be healthy! Now I can do neither of those activities for 6-8 weeks (just in time for my honeymoon) and I do a lot of shopping at sites like this.

There’s no need to fight it, I always wanted to be, and now I finally am… OLD. 😉

Mad’s new gig

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I have a bit of a backlog of things I want to blog about. This one’s just a quick bit of good news. Online fundraising guru and all-around fabulous creative person Madeline Stanionis has left her job as President of Donor Digital to become a freelance consultant.

I guess this means her book “The Mercifully Brief, Real World Guide to Raising Thousands (If Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars with E-mail” is doing well.

I met Madeline because she stuck out like a beacon of interestingness at a big boring reception when I was working at Planned Parenthood. I went over to talk to her and was amused to find out that she was working (as a consultant) for our ally/nemesis NARAL. We talked about how silly the rivalry was and agreed that we would be friends, even if we had to keep it a secret from the competitive sister organizations.

She’s the kind of person I always wish I could spend more time with. Hopefully soon I will make it to her super-cool conference Web of Change where I can stop wishing and start hanging.

Best of luck in your new consulting effort, Madeline!

‘No Knock’ on my sister’s head

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In honor of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow police to use evidence obtained in illegal ‘no knock’ searches, I give you Gil Scott Herron‘s 1972 song “No Knock” (1.7 MB MP3).

The 5 to 4 decision broke with the court’s modern tradition of enforcing constitutional limitations on police investigations by keeping improperly obtained evidence out of court. The “exclusionary rule” has been imposed to protect a series of rights, such as the right to remain silent in police custody and the right against warrantless searches.
– Washington Post: Court Eases ‘No Knock’ Search Ban, 6/16/06

President as trickster

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Oh look the President is at Camp David showing us he is thinking hard about Iraq. No wait! He’s making a surprise trip to Bagdad to show us the power of a Rove-ian Photo-Op ™. Do you feel better yet about the hundreds of thousands dead from Bush’s oil policy? I’ll be surprsed if this moves the polls a single point – if at all.

Maybe it’s because I just read American Gods, but the President is starting to remind me of Loki the trickster god.

So you wanna start a local politics blog

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In my continuing series of turning advice e-mails into blog posts. I recently received this request:

I’m working on setting up a local-politics site for my area of the world. I was wondering if you had any words of wisdom on launching a local-politics site. What challenges have you encountered? What good/bad decisions have you made along the way? What kind of time/money is involved in running the site? Is this at least a break-even venture for you, money-wise? Any other suggestions or insights you may be able to offer would be great. Thanks in advance.

My reply:
Continue reading “So you wanna start a local politics blog” →

Big news for Katrin Verclas and N-TEN!

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In a sign of N-TEN‘s ongoing lack of web savvy, this announcement was all over e-mail yesterday but not online anywhere… until now:

From Lynn Labieniec, Chair of the N-TEN Board:

On behalf of the N-TEN Board, I am very pleased to announce that Katrin Verclas will be our new Executive Director. Katrin will start on June 1st for a smooth transition before Joe Baker, our current Executive Director, leaves at the end of June.

The letter continues after the jump: Continue reading “Big news for Katrin Verclas and N-TEN!” →

Categories icon Tech

A collective “nice to meet you”

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It seems like after every conference I come away with a handful of business cards and the intention to follow up with lots of new people and possibilities. However, my intention does not always translate into action. Although I still hope to contact these folks and/or blog about about all the cool things they are doing, for now I am going to do a brain dump to document (and lazily ping) everyone.

Continue reading “A collective “nice to meet you”” →

Thanks for making it happen with me

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I just got home after a very long day of inter-coastal travel. I will post a longer thing tommorrow about the rest of the awesome people I met at NetSquared.

So I was recruited to lead a Making it Happen: Tips & Tricks session at NetSquared. I called it: how to be more cause-based, aka network-centric advocacy, aka bottom-up, aka cluetrain advocacy, aka user-centered, aka movement building. Basically I gave a little intro to the above topic and discussed it with anyone who wanted to stop by. People asked a lot of good questions and together we came up with a lot of great ideas for how to empower the supporters of our issues and help them lead our movements for change.

Thanks to everyone for chatting with me:
Continue reading “Thanks for making it happen with me” →