Web self-reliance
What it is: the ability to set up and run a web site without assistance, permission, or support¹.
Why you want it: Because begging sucks; because you’ll try far fewer experiments even if you can get a friend to help you for free, because doing so costs social capital, and that capital isn’t infinite; because if you don’t, you’ll be more dependent on an employer for a job and your livelihood, and who knows? You, yes YOU, might save journalism. And even if you don’t, you will have grand adventures on the Web and be able to Make Things, which is only the best thing ever.

Reading: “Self Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (Hi, Chris!)

View Source
What it is: View Source tells your web browser to show you the underlying code of the web page you’re looking at. In most Windows browsers, you can do this by pressing Ctrl+U, and on many Mac browsers by hitting Apple -U.
Why you want to do this Just think about it. You can view the source code for pretty much any page on the Internet. And doing so teaches you a lot about that site. You can often figure out what programs are being used to create the website, find and look at the page’s stylesheet, and much more. If you’ve never done it before, it may feel like trying to glean some meaning from someone who’s speaking in a language that you don’t speak, or don’t speak well. But you CAN get useful information even if you don’t understand all of it. Be patient. Read from the top, slowly. If you make a habit of it, you’ll learn a lot about web sites and about the Web. (What IS under the hood at NYTimes.com anyway? How do they do that?)

DNS (Domain Name Service)
What it is: Every computer on the internet, including the one you’re using to read these words, has what’s called an IP address. Click here to see your IP address. An IP address looks like a string of numbers, something like this: 173.114.213.38. But when you want to look at a website, you don’t need to know the IP address of the machine that it is on — you type in a URL. DNS is the service that matches that URL to the IP address. An analogy: the URL is a person’s name, their phone number is the IP address, and DNS is the phone book.
Why you want to know about it: When you set up a new site one of the first things you want to do is point your URL at the machine where your website is living. You use DNS to do that.

Reading: A Basic Guide to DNS, Google

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
What it is: Cascading Style Sheets tell your web browser about the look and feel of your site — the colors you use, what font you use, etc. Click here to see the stylesheet that this site uses. You’ll see that stylesheets themselves are pretty much plain-text documents, but the text you see there are instructions to your web browser that tell it how to lay out this page, what the colors are, fonts are, and much more.
Why you want to know about it: Sure, you can use prepackaged “themes” for your site, but there will always be little irritations. You don’t like this font, or that all hyperlinks are red. If you know a little CSS, you can change these things by editing your stylesheet.

Reading: “Mastering CSS Coding: Getting Started,”, Soh Tanaka

CMS (Content Management System)
What it is: a content management system is a computer program that is installed on a server that allows nontechnical people to create, publish, and manage a website’s content. Some examples: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla.
Why you want to know about it: A CMS is often the backbone of most “dynamic” sites — that is, ones where content changes frequently. Popular CMSes have droves of themes (CSS stylesheets that let you change the look of your site) and plugins (which let you add features to your site. Example: adding your Twitter feed to your sidebar). Many of the most popular and best content managment systems are also free — they’re open source software that many programmers contribute to.

Reading: Once you decide which CMS you are going to use to build your website, I recommend buying a book on that CMS and reading it from beginning to end. For Drupal, I recommend David Mercer’s book on Drupal.

Manage content on a CMS
What it is: the ability to post, edit, and delete content on a site that uses a CMS (like Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla). At a minimum, you should feel comfortable posting and editing text, adding links, uploading photos, and embedding video.
Why you want to do this: You’ll be able to change the content of your site, and you’ll be able to present a visitor with something more than chunks of text with no links.

Install a CMS
What it is: Installing a content management system on a web server so you can set up a new site.
Why you want to be able to do this: You can get surprisingly far using hosted services like Blogger, TypePad, and Wordpress.com. But these sites place serious limits on what you can do with your site — many won’t let you install plugins that aren’t on a preapproved list, a limited selection of themes and no ability to customize them, and some place ads on your site that you don’t control, and may not let you put your own ads on.

Backup/Restore
What it is: the ability to back up your website and restore it if it crashes.
Why you want to do this: Because Murphy’s Law is always in effect.

A scripting language
What it is: Many CMSes, and custom-built websites, are written using programming languages called scripting languages. Examples include PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and many, many others. If you’re running a site, it might be good to learn a little about the scripting language that the site is built on uses. (Ex: Drupal and Wordpress are both written in PHP).
Why you want to know this: What happens when you want a feature on your site and nobody has written a plugin for it yet, or you found a plugin but you want to change something about how it works? If you can read the programming language it is written in, you can do that. Learning to read code, even if you don’t write much of it, is a form of becoming literate in your chosen medium. If you get a job working for a new employer, and they put you in charge of building a website and you can’t read any code at all, you really don’t know what you’re paying for. It’s also NOT AS HARD AS YOU THINK. You can learn quite a bit in a six-week online course, for example.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
What it is: This lets you move files onto your web server.
Why you want to know about it: Eventually you may want to add an application to your web server that your hosting provider does not have a one-click installer for. For example, maybe the site you launched is doing well, and people are asking you if they can buy ads on it. In order to do that, you have to install an ad server. How do you get the software onto your webserver? You use FTP. FTP is also great for helping you rescue your site if something goes wrong. Example: you install a plugin and it breaks your site — you can’t see it or log in. When you can’t see your site in a web browser, you can still see it via FTP (although what you see is a list of folders and files that live on your web server). Via FTP, you can look at all the files on your site, find the file for that plugin, and delete it. Doing so often puts your site back to normal.

Reading: How To Upload Files to Your Web Server Using FTP, Christopher Heng (uses the free, cross-platform FileZilla FTP program as the example)

MX (Mail eXchange)
What it is: MX records tell other machines on the Internet how email for your domain name should be routed. It’s part of the DNS record.
Why you want to know about it: It lets you set up mail accounts for yourself and others who may be working with you on your project. At some point, you may also want to set up email accounts that aren’t associated with a person — for example, an address that lets people subscribe to your content via email, or pings them when someone has commented on a post they made.

1. Can a journalism student really do this? “I’m not good at math. What if not everybody can become a computer programmer? I’m not technical, maybe I can’t learn it.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guess what? You’re wrong. You CAN do it. (Yes, YOU. I am looking at you — I see you back there!) A journalism student CAN become proficient in all of these things in less than one year (Read: Before you graduate and hit the job market!). Most of the things on this list would not take more than an afternoon to learn how to do for the first time, and the most complex (CSS and learning a scripting language) can be learned in a few weeks. No journalism student should be intimidated by the process of setting up and managing a website — it is well within your ability, and it can all be learned and practiced before you graduate.

[Endnote: I run a news startup and I love talking to journalism classes about entrepreneurial and web skills. Doing so is a fun way to energize and recharge, as well as a source of new ideas for me. - Lisa ]

We’re gonna go in with 8 or 10 people and try to come out with 8 or 10 websites.

Heh. Let’s see what happens. How far can we get?

I like round numbers. Doesn’t everybody?
And I like contests too.

My husband Evan and I have decided to see if each of us could do 100 workouts in 100 days, starting tomorrow, Friday, October 16.

If I drop out, I have to take him to Italy.
If he drops out, he has to take me to Montreal.

If we both complete the challenge, yanno what?

We’re going to Disneyland!

Every once in awhile I get into an epigrammatic mood and decide to take this out on the poor people who happen to follow me on Twitter, where I’m @lisawilliams.

This morning I got a tweet from @susanmernit that inspired the following seven tweets:

Lisaism #1: Never start a company when you can start a revolution.

Lisaism #2: Just because something ends doesn’t mean it failed. All movies end. All musical pieces end.

Lisaism #3: Never do something for free that you wouldn’t do for free indefinitely.

Lisaism #4: The world is full of the rich & popular; they will be broke & forgotten tomorrow. Be brilliant today, even if broke & obscure.

Lisaism #5: revolutions are better than companies because they will survive us & transcend us.

Lisaism #6:revolutions are better than companies because they’re efficient. They don’t need office furniture, investors, or even offices.

Lisaism #7: Revolutions aren’t about us. They’re about everyone who believes in them. (This means you can take a nap and they will still be there when you get up).

Admit it: you didn’t even know the Kentucky Derby was today, did you? Neither did I until I picked up her mother, a singularly well-informed individual, for our monthly planning-of-world-domination board meeting.

(After awhile you accept the fact that your mother really DOES know everything.)

This put me in mind of the only thing I’d ever read on the subject of the Derby — Hunter S. Thompson’s The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, which begins with Thompson putting on an unsuspecting taxicab driver with a tall tale about the Black Panther’s (nonexistent) plans to stage a riot at the Derby.

“Oh yeah?” He eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. “Is that what you got there–cameras? Who you work for?”

“Playboy,” I said.

He laughed. “Well, goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of–nekkid horses? Haw! I guess you’ll be workin’ pretty hard when they run the Kentucky Oaks. That’s a race just for fillies.” He was laughing wildly. “Hell yes! And they’ll all be nekkid too!”

I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. “There’s going to be trouble,” I said. “My assignment is to take pictures of the riot.”

“What riot?”

I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. “At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers.” I stared at him again. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

The grin on his face had collapsed. “What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

“Well…maybe I shouldn’t be telling you…” I shrugged. “But hell, everybody else seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They’ve warned us–all the press and photographers–to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting…”

You can read the whole thing here.

Evan and I are considering having one of our monthly-ish brunches on Saturday, May 9.

What should we serve? I’m thinking…

• Orange blossom pancakes
• bacon
• champagne

I know I had you at bacon, but…why not add some dim sum buns, fruit, a frittata, marmalade, maple syrup, and coffee?

We used to have these in a dinner format on weekday evenings, but our house is so obscure that half our guests gave up on ever finding our house in the dark. Brunches also mean guests can stay to play and talk.

This plan is sounding better all the time…

Young Jean Lee, playwright and author of The Shipment, gave an interview to The Nation. Talking about how to persevere in your work even through difficult times, she related a conversation with Tim Etchells, who is the longtime director of a theater company in the UK:

I don’t want to stop doing theater–there is definitely something in the live-performance experience that could never be replaced by film. I was talking to Tim Etchells, from a company called Forced Entertainment in England, who’s been doing this since the ’80s. I asked him, “How do you become you?” He said, “You just survive. You keep making shows no matter what happens.”

Over the last year or so I have had the opportunity to take a look at projects by a wide variety of people. Often I’m reading their application for a grant program, or an educational opportunity that they believe will let them keep doing their work.

I sometimes worry about people who apply to such things. If they aren’t accepted, will they turn away from their work? What I tell everyone who’s applying for anything is this: Whether or not someone gives you a grant, or invests in your project, or gives you a job or a scholarship HAS ABSOLUTELY NO RELATIONSHIP TO WHETHER YOUR WORK IS WORTH DOING OR NOT.

There are almost always more people who want to “get in” than there are places to put them. And programs aren’t always necessary to keep doing work you believe in, and they’re not necessary at all if you believe in your work enough to do whatever part of it you can do with your own resources, for however long it takes you to complete with those resources. If you have humility to do your work in the slowest, stupidest, most modest possible way…then who can stop you? (If you’re reading this you have an internet connection and an impressive level of literacy. You can’t do anything with those? Sure you can — as long as you’re not worried about looking stupid).

(I’m so radical that I think that work that is worth doing is worth doing even if it takes longer than your own lifetime).

So, if you’re reading this and you think, “I’ve always wanted to do X, and if I ever got into graduate school/won the lottery/got VC money/wrote a grant application that worked/got a job at XYZ place/got tenure…” Just stop. Stop!

And then start. Now. Right now. (Don’t even read the rest of this.)

Because if you really believe in your idea, you should do it even if there are tanks in the streets.

Just wear a helmet and proceed carefully.

And don’t ever stop.


(By all means, pause if you need to sleep, eat, attend to children, seek medical attention, or if you’re taking heavy fire — after all, being able to Not Stop is a function of Not Getting Stopped By Death & Devastation. But don’t confuse your pauses to reconnoiter or resupply with The End. Hell, take a vacation, a sabbatical, a decade off: just don’t stop).

My dad, pictured at left, used to ask me what I was reading, and when I told him, he’d get a stern look on his face and say that I really needed to be more careful with what I took into my psychological environment.

But I was a much more serious reader then, and read more, and I just didn’t get it. How could anybody object to Invisible Man, 1984, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings? How could you miss the great interrogation scenes in Crime and Punishment?

Yeah. See, the thing I didn’t get is that I wasn’t just reading Great Books, I was basically on a steady diet of The Great Bummers of Western Literature.

But I was in my 20s, and I think I had a psychological version of the same sense of immortality everybody has about their physical self when they’re young. When you can pull an all nighter two nights in a row, sleep six hours, and feel totally fine, why wouldn’t you feel immortal? Back then I could suck down industrial quantities of pharmaceutical grade literary despair, and be just fine after watching an hour of Streets of San Francisco.

What can I say. I’m getting old. I can see 40 without my glasses on from here, and I can’t pull all-nighters like I used to.

Along with age comes the experience that gives me a much more palpable, less abstract sense of life’s real consequences; people we love really do die, you can lose everything. So my tolerance for bummers — regardless of their literary, historic, or cinematic worthiness — has tanked like the stock market.

In fact, when I read now, I’m reading trash.

And even that sometimes gets me in trouble! I mean, I’m reading some totally forgettable bestseller pitched as a “beach book” and 200 pages in the narrator contracts a terminal disease and is abandoned by her family.

Um. WTF? Couldn’t they have put that on the cover blurb? I tossed it.

So when my husband suggested we go to the bookstore together, I was pleased (when do we ever get to do things together?) and apprehensive (everything in there is dangerous, dammit).

I figured I could always buy some Captain Underpants books for my seven year old.

I’m glad to report that I picked up Nick Hornby’s Shakespeare Wrote for Money, and…

…it is delightful and utterly restorative. It. Is. Funny. It does not make me want to pitch either the book or myself off of a bridge.

It’s a collection of monthly columns written by Hornby about what books he’d bought, and read, the previous month. Each one starts with a list of bought books, and one of read books, and the running gag is that these lists are almost always totally different. And one month, this column of book reviews showed….no books read. He says this:

You have probably noticed that we don’t think much of scientists here at Believer Towers. The Polysyllabic Spree, the eighty-seven white robed and intimidatingly effete young men and women who edit this magazine, are convinced that the real work done in our society is done by poets, novelists, animators, experimental filmmakers, drone-metal engineers, and the rest of the riffraff who populate these pages.

…Cynics don’t read The Believer, which is fortunate, because a cynic might say that the introduction of a Scientist of the Month award is a desperate attempt to draw attention from the stark, sad entry under Books Read at the top of this page. And a clever cynic might wonder whether the absence of read books, and therefore the appearance of the award, had anything to do with the arrival of the World Cup, a football tournament that every four years consumes the inhabitants of every country in the world bar the U.S..

He’s funny even when he DOESN’T review books in his book review column. I love the reference to the Polyphonic Spree, a band I adore which features a very large number of musicians performing in white robes [video]. And writing about the World Cup reminds me of the first Hornby book I ever read — Fever Pitch — which is about being a hopeless, degenerate fan of a perenially losing English football (read: soccer) team. Fans of the Boston Red Sox during their 83 year losing streak only wish they had someone to write as comically as Hornby does about his crazed love for a doomed team.

Finally, something I am remotely well enough to read.

In truth, I really don’t have a writers’ notebook anymore. I did, once. I had a golden year in 2003 — I seemed to be bursting with ideas for a novel, essays, unusual websites, blog posts; and all of them went into a Moleskine notebook like the ones pictured at the right.

I do have a fancy pen, though. A fountain pen in red anodized aluminum, which I use with ink cartridges the box swears are made in France. They have the temerity to call my preferred color ink Florida Blue. Shrug. Whaddya gonna do?

Just because I don’t have a notebook doesn’t mean I’ve given up paper for a digital world or that I don’t write on paper. I mean, if you saw this pen (a Waterman Expert) you’d have to do something with it, too.

So I steal blank pieces of paper out of my printer and write on them.

Here’s one:

Montaigne lived in France in the 1500’s but I picked a Penguin Classics edition of his essays out of a recycling bin on my way to work in 1994.

I read him on the train and wondered if those peculiar stains on the cover meant I should wash, and then rip the covers off if I wanted to keep reading it. Then Montaigne says, “Kings and philosophers defecate, and so do ladies.” Which reminded me, guy lived in 15th century France, a lot dirtier era than mine. Somehow this allowed me to relax and take in what I was reading. He was crass, wrote about sex and farting and royalty and was utterly self-absorbed back when self-absorption was a new and radical thing called Humanism and could get you burned at the stake if you lived in Spain. Now everybody does it and we call it blogging.

It was actually this one that made me laugh…but it was too wide to fit in the center column, and…I’m just not going to figure out where the license key for SnagIt is now either.

Yeah, I have a new computer. I love it! I hate figuring out where all my license keys went to.

But I haven’t installed iTunes yet and that? Is bliss! (Yes, I know it’s temporary).

Evan and I have a monthly dinner called “Family Dinner,” where we invite up to three dozen of our friends, neighbors, computer programmers, journalists, and fabulous Strangers from the Internets.

I can tell you with total confidence that this is much less trouble than our family (with a small f) dinner — that is, the one we serve to ourselves and our two boys, ages 5 and 7.

One of our children will eat anything but cannot pass five minutes without making me think he is going to crack his head open through a combination of leaning back in his chair, inadvisable moves with serving implements, and other parental torment kung-fu moves.

The other one only eats four foods and three of them are fluorescent orange (read: Macaroni and Cheese. FROM THE BOX).

What Evan does on the nights he cooks is his business, but *I* do not want to cook two meals, and I want to be able to sit and eat my entire meal without having to get up and duct tape one of my children to the ceiling.

Thus I have discovered the wisdom of The Childrens’ Table.

One of our sons had a kid-size table in his room, which mostly collected crap.

It is now in the livingroom, and spotless. It has two chairs that are too low to the ground for injury in case of tipping incidents, and it is spotless. It is also at least ten feet from The Grownups Table, which makes all the difference in the world.

And today I served one and only one foodstuff: Orange Blossom Pancakes.

You can make these with any pancake batter, but I reproduce my recipe here:

Orange Blossom Pancakes
2C Heart Healthy Bisquick (same as regular Bisquick, but with reduced sodium. You won’t miss it).
1 1/4C skim milk
1 egg
Zest of one blood orange (any orange will do, actually)
Juice of one half orange (optional)

I use an electric nonstick griddle that sits on my counter. This is a marvelous invention because you don’t need butter, oil, or nonstick cooking spray; your pancakes just won’t stick to this thing. It also gets hot enough that the outsides of the pancakes caramelize a bit — but without burning. If you don’t have one and you can spare the space in a cabinet, you may find that it is something worth having if you can find one on sale. It cuts down on cleanup — because all you have to do afterward, really, is wipe it.

Oh, also, one of my projects got a mention in the New York Times today. My friend Elisa Camahort read the article and commented on it, which made me very happy. Elisa — along with Lisa Stone and Jory DesJardins, founded BlogHer. BlogHer, its founders, and its community have had a huge influence on me.

I’m not taking any new work until September. But I am *thrilled* with what I’m doing now:

I’m on the board of The New England Center for Investigative Reporting. I’m really excited about the potential for independent investigative reporting in nontraditional contexts — anything from Talking Points Memo to ProPublica. As traditional newsrooms shrink, having places for reporters to do serious work is more important than ever. I want to help with what I know about blogs, Twitter and social media to make that part of both the newsgathering process and the distribution process for important stories.

I’m a Knight Challenge Fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. This semester I’m attending weekly research meetings at the Center and trying to be helpful to fellows and graduate students doing web/media/citizen journalism projects. Mainly, I sit and type in awe at the amazing presentations I see. It’s simultaneously humbling and thrilling.

I am at the most fun point with Placeblogger, the site I started that won the Knight 21st Century News Challenge. The number of local, independent grassroots community sites and blogs we find grows every day. Like NECIR, I can’t take my eyes away from how these local sites will (or won’t) fill in the gaps left by shrinking newsrooms.

I spent last summer away from my children and family having a fabulous adventure and a huge learning experience at Techstars. That experience informs a lot of what I’ve done since with Placeblogger.

That said, I am so, so, grateful to be home, to be home EVERY NIGHT and to see my family EVERY DAY.

Our home, though small, is a great refuge and source of joy to me. I love being here. I love my office, our room, the changes and improvisations we’ve made to the space over the years, the blankets we’ve bought for the beds, our dog, our yard with the dwarf fruit trees and kitchen garden.

I do my best work here, at Fort Williams.

And now, I have just enough time to pick up the things I had to put down during the early startup phases of these projects. Like blogging! Yes, I started all this by blogging but while I was doing all this I barely wrote a word. I’ve been blogging more here, at my personal blog I started in 2000, and at H2otown, the local community site I started in 2003. These aren’t “work” exactly, but I think of them as both a wellspring for my work and a laboratory for experiments; it’s how I learn things and test them out (usually by breaking them).

I have more energy now that I’m home, so I go to the gym, which I love. And since I don’t fall into bed exhausted each night, I have books on my nightstand and I am ACTUALLY READING THEM.

I am rereading Jay Rosen’s “What are Journalists For,” and a book my mother lent me, Paul Theroux’s “Dark Star Africa,” a chronicle of his overland journey from Cairo to Cape Town.

H2otown has been getting regular hints from The Universe that it is time to start blogging over here once more.

There have been many such hints, and I do not mean the many, many plaintive emails from people I adore asking me if I am, in fact, dead. (I did feel guilty when I read them!) Most hints were small, and came during moments sitting on planes or in fancy conference rooms and once on stage while giving a presentation to several hundred people, moments in which I’d think:

Yanno, I miss blogging at H2otown. Was it, or was it not the funnest thing I ever did? It sure seems like it was.

You know where the back button is, right? Good. ‘Cause I’m about to complain in a way that I’m sure reveals the revolting depths of my bourgeois privilege.

Still with me? Okay, I warned you.

My husband Evan and I live in a small space with our two children and our Boston Terrier, Mercer.

When we had children, I think THEY (You know, THEM) expected us to move further out to the suburbs, get ourselves in hock up to our eyeballs on a larger house, and, well, you know…

Except we didn’t. Given the state of the economy, we now know that that was probably a very, very good decision. We live in one unit of a two-family house we own, and our costs are low. If one or both of us couldn’t work for awhile, we wouldn’t be out on the street retroactively, yanno?

I do not believe we need more space.

Except for this one thing: we need more space for our sound waves.

Our living space is so small, that if you make any noise above a whisper, it will be heard by every other sentient creature in our place.

During the day, this means that our house is VERY LOUD, as children are in fact quite loud. Not only are they loud, but about 3% of the noises they make either make me think they have been severely injured or are fighting with each other. These are noises that instantly activate the Mommy Alert Center that was installed in my brain sometime before I delivered the first of these two children.

At night, it means that I must watch the television with the sound off and the close captions on — because if I can hear it, so can my five year old son, who really doesn’t like to go to bed in the firstplace and will jump on any chance to render bedtime obsolete.

I have to say, the noise level during the day is pretty stressful to me. I generally work in my home office wearing an enormous pair of headphones that cover my entire ear. At night, I feel a bit oppressed by the requirement to, oh, I don’t know — type more softly because others within three yards of my position may be woken up by my rapid, percussive touch-typing (yes, it has happened, mostly when my kids were babies. I blogged so loud I woke them up).

Our dog also snores like only dogs with pushed-in faces can snore.

Ah, I feel much better after writing this. If you have made it this far it is my sincere hope that you have not felt unduly oppressed by reading it.

Also, if you have any suggestions for me…well, I’m all ears.

In the last week, my husband saw a nutritionist, and today I helped him buy some running sneakers and gear at a sporting goods store.

It can’t last, right? It’s like snow in July, right?

I’m thrilled beyond measure that he’s doing this kind of stuff — because I want him to grow old with me.

But pretty much every grownup I ever loved just didn’t bother to take care of themselves consistently enough to stick around and not die.

So I have a hard time believing it. It’s a miracle! (Is it the real thing?)

Do I dare to hope?