It feels great to be in Texas again, so much about this state is so beautiful. My sister is picking me up in a few minutes, I’ll see the rest of you tonight.

A day in Tahoe, everything from snow on the beach to blue steel to flying dirt and gorgeous rocks and water. Oh, and of course a little shameless self-promotion.

Structured Blogging is a way to structure blog posts for reviews and such so that they can be aggregated in interesting ways. Here’s a demo of their plugin.

Bloggers of America, chill. Great advice! Declan’s story seemed like a bit of a blogger troll.

I can’t believe I’m going to be out of town for this concert, Branford Marsalis and Ravi Coltrane celebrating the 40th anniversary of Love Supreme. (Listen to Branford’s recording of Pursuance.)

The art of project management by Scott Berkun is coming out next month. My quote on it is about halfway down the page.

Eric has a new version of Gatekeeper, the very effective spam plugin that lets you quiz people before they leave a comment. Compare installing Gatekeeper under 1.2 and 1.5 to see how far the plugin API has come.

Don’t bother with all the ultra-fancy javascript email encoders, plain entity encoding works just fine.

It looks like LinkRanks have been owned, dominated by something call “deai.com.”

Another great extension for Thunderbird, inline spellchecking checks words as you type.

How many days, months, and years have you put into your site? Do yourself a favor and take a few hours to back up everything, right now. You’ll feel a lot better afterward. Anyone have any favorite backup tips they’d like to share? Right now I have my servers backing up to a remote fileserver over FTP nightly, and my home stuff is mostly flying without a net.

Announcing the Ping-O-Matic Global Network, a global and redundant array of servers providing Ping-O-Matic service and APIs.

I’m at the web spam summit and it’s going pretty well. I think some excellent things will come out of this. I wouldn’t want to be a spammer these days.

It’s like one of those train wrecks you can’t look away from, but Om has the scoop that Paris Hilton’s voicemail was cracked as well.

Another great review:
“It’s beautiful, light-weight, easy to manage, and by goodness it’s got so many features I feel like a spoiled rich kid with 20 Ferraris, 10 Lambos, 5 Lotus Elises, and a spit-shined Bentley. This thing is powerful, yet compact. Don’t even get me started on their plugins systems.” And that marks the 300th ping on the announcement entry.

coldforged Image Headline Plugin gives you really nice shadows, I’ll have to check out how he did that.

The Web Spam Squashing Summit announcement has quite a bit of spam on it. Unfortunate, but an excellent illustration of the problem.