Jason H. Davis

Sean Tevis is running for office in Kansas. He’s progressive, running against a staunch conservative in a red state. In American politics it takes money and name recognition to win. Sean had neither. He changed that with a simple website with an appeal to the masses.

All it took was a comic with a little humor and a little bit about what he believed in with a website that called the average person to a simple action. Sean asked for 3000 people to donate $8.34. Using this dead-simple tactic, Sean Tevis has already gotten over 4,600 people to donate.

This kind of campaign raises some interesting questions. For example, should a resident of Georgia be able to donate to a resident of Kansas? Even a year ago the answer to that would be most certainly, but I think this starts to push the scales in the other direction. A campaign financed on the success of a single comic strip due to the donations of non-constitutions doesn’t seem very democratic, does it?

Is it good for a constituency that someone good at internet marketing can, for lack of a better word,”;win” them? While the Internet is fueling a new age of innovation and economics, even after the dot com boom and bust, that certainly does not necessitate being a good public official. Further, his successful internet campaign will lead to loads of stories in more traditional, local media. If it’s true that people only vote on name recognition, then this is great news for Sean Tevis regardless of what the stories say about him.

These are interesting issues, but it all boils down to that money buys votes. If you have the money to buy the right ads, the right posters, the right website, you can win an election. With the internet, getting 3,000 people to give you less than 9 dollars is childs play. The question is, are we looking at a precedent in campaign finance or a sign that our election system has a flaw?

-Jason

It looks like my website was down for a while. I’m glad to see it’s back up again.

California has plans to spend $40 billion on a high speed rail system from Sacramento to San Diego. The train has multiple stops along the way including Los Angeles, Fresno, San Jose, and San Francisco.

According to the site, the 220 mph train will provide the same traffic throughput as $82 billion dollars in infrastructure. It will also provide a less expensive, more environmentally friendly travel option. Not to mention being 3x faster than driving a car.

This November Californians will vote on a ten billion dollar bond to begin the project. Such a move could begin the revitalizing of passenger train infrastructure and promote a more environmentally friendly America.

It seems the entire country is”;Going Green” or at least pretending to. From hotel rooms to Wal-Mart, from Barack Obama to John McCain, from California to Florida everyone is trying to be green.

As Bruce Banner will tell you, it’s not easy being green. It’s not about going out and buying a hybrid or installing solar panels on your house. Although, how cool would it be to power your electric car from your own solar panels?

There are beaucoups of tiny lifestyle changes that have an impact. Take, for example, the food you eat. We are accustomed to having bananas, oranges, and apples available to us all year. We don’t, however, think of the planes, trains, and automobiles those fruit had to travel on to get to the supermarket. Eating locally reduces the mile your food travels. Lowering the demand for gas, thereby lowing the cost of gas.

Such thinking has led Dickson Despomier to develop the idea of vertical farming. This would allow people in cities to start eating food grown locally. It would also provide the year-round luxury that our society has grown accustomed to.

While it might be a costly solution, it is gaining some traction. That’s not really the point, though. It’s the little things, multiplied hundreds of thousands of times that make the real impact. It’s eating local apples, not buying bottled water from the Fuji islands, not buying bottled water at all.

We’re becoming a globally aware society. The world is getting smaller and flatter, and it’s hard, but a cleaner, greener, more ecologically diverse planet is worth it.

The Loading Speed Issue has been fixed thanks to some helpful people. After my last post one of the Ryans from SimplePie left a comment on the blog pointing to a solution. After trying that and failing, I sent the code I was using to the Newsgroup. The next morning I had a solution from Michael Shipley. After about 30 minutes of rewriting, I had the problem all fixed!

So, if you’re ever looking for an easy excessively easy way to turn RSS feeds into HTML, I highly recommend SimplePie RSS. Easy to use and amazing support.

Speaking of SimplePie, I recently used it on the new Iridium Apparel front page. I set up a blog for them and changed the front page to display the recent posts.

You can see that more and more pages are making the transition to the new design. Once they’re all moved over I actually think I will be doing a little redesigning. This will serve two purposes.

One, I’m not entirely happy with the look of the site. There’s definitely room for improvement. For one thing, it’s too blocky.
Two, I want to get back into my habit of blogging with posts starting to gear more towards mainstream. I’m going to work on broadening the news that I read and in turn broadening the things I post about. Also, I think the musings on life and love have been lacking as well.

I appreciate everyone who’s continued to follow the blog through this dry spell, all one of you =).

Jason

I’m aware that the site takes a while to load, and I know what the problem is.

It would seem that all of the cool feeds that I added (Twitter, LastFM, Picasa, etc) are the culprit.

I’m using a free program called SimplePie which takes RSS feeds and parses them into HTML (website language). It does a great job, better than Magpie RSS, which I was using before. The problem, it would seem, is when the website loads SimplePie, the cache folder gets loaded with the data from the different feeds.

This is good! This speeds up loading time for everyone except the first person to load the page.

The problem, is I can’t seem to figure out how to get all of the pages to use the same cache! This means every page has to load all of the feed data once it is accessed. Not good.

With that said, I put some time into working on it, but to no avail. I’ve made the refresh time longer, so feeds will be more likely to be out of date, but you’ll also be more likely to load the page quickly.

I’m going to continue on with the updating of the layout. You’ll notice that Photos and about represent the new change. The Blog is halfway there. The front page is, of course, finished.

About, Photos, and the front page all have slightly different layouts. This is because the design is, in a way, modular. Designing on a grid has allowed me to plan for content areas of various sizes. As the update progresses, you’ll see most pages with slightly divergent layouts.

Also, my logo is TOO HUGE.

As for me, there hasn’t been much going on in my life. Getting ready to move back to Athens and working on the Iridium Apparel website. It might not have been mentioned here, but I’m updating (content) for their site and will hopefully be redesigning it soon. Exciting stuff.

More to come, as always!
Jason

Sorry it has been a few days. I was in New York for a little bit. There will be pictures posted soon. I need to go through the Italy photos as well to make sure they are all there. I only posted the best Italy pictures. There were a lot of ones that weren’t worth uploading.

As for the website, I think I have the code the way I want it. I hope, at least. This means that I’ll be updating the site to the new layout. Very exciting. Depending on how many snags I hit, though, it could mean that the site will be acting a little wonky for the next couple of days.

We’ll see how it goes.
Jason

I’ve been making steady progress on the redesign of the site. I’m really starting to feel like it’s a cohesive unit now. I have one problem that needs to be addressed, which is formalizing the code. Going through and making sure naming structures are consistent, optimizing somethings so it loads faster, and formatting so it’s easier to read. It will be a fair amount of work because I basically put the site together without a formal plan. It came together piece-by-piece, one part influencing the other. It probably would have been quicker if I had laid it out in Photoshop before hand, but I had tried a number of times and nothing really came of it.

The design does not seem to be lacking because of it, though.

One thing that I’m really happy about is the Footer. It shows my most recent blog posts, tweets, music I’ve listened to, and news I’ve been interested in. If you go to the testing page you’ll also see a search bar. This will be good to search through all of the content of the site. It functions, but it isn’t very pretty right now.

I’ve learned some important things while putting together this iteration of this webpage. Most importantly, though, is I’m pretty confident at using a grid system to design a page and can’t imagine going back to designing with out it. Part of the changes in naming structure will involve being able to interchange sections of content very easily from page to page.

In other news, it would probably be good for me to pick up some non-computer based habits.

-Jason

Mostly using a Mac, I don’t have access to Internet Explorer. I looked at the redesign of my website today on IE 7 and it looks terrible. There’s nothing there (hardly). It’s terrible that the most”;advanced” browser from one of the largest software companies in the world does not render code correctly. I shutter to think that the site looks on Internet Explorer 6.

What’s sad is only around 20% of web users use Firefox which scores a 71/100 on the Acid 3 test for Web Standards compliance. Internet Explorer gets a 12; it doesn’t even render the text correctly.

Firefox 3 will be released on the 16th and hopes to set the world record for most software downloads in one day. They’re calling the release Download Day (D-Day).

I’ve been using Firefox 3 for the past 4 months or so and absolutely love it. With each new Beta version that comes out I’ve seen better and more useful features being added. I’ll be downloading it on D-day along with over a million other people. It really is the best browser out there, even the Wall Street Journal thinks so.

Anyway, that’s enough software soap-boxing for today. I’m off to use hacks to make my website complaint with Internet Explorer.

-Jason

I spent some time today and put together a logo for myself. I’m pretty happy with it. I hope it will help pull the design together a little more (as in, I’m going to change the design to fit the logo).

-Jason

I’ve spent the last few days working on the redesign of the website. I’ve gotten the navigation menu finished.
Summer 2008 Design

The header and the body are just placeholders. I might be changing the colors as well, maybe making the navbar look less flat. But, the code and layout is what I want.

The pink and white stripes, you can see is the grid that I’m using to place elements. This is my first experiment with designing on a grid.

I’ve also come quite close to finishing the WUOG Podcasting page Full Hour Of Power This is just one page, however, implementing the other pages is more or less copy and paste. Along with uploading the episodes. The great thing about this project is that each show page can be redesigned independently of the main site. This means that there are 20 blank canvases for student web designers. It should be an exciting semester.

I think there’s another set of photos that still need to be uploaded. I keep updating with the progress of the redesign.

Jason

Hello hello! It’s been some time, but I’ve uploaded some more picture. They can be viewed in my picasa web gallery. I still don’t have any descriptions written. I’m hoping there will be some point where I’ll be able to sit down and write them. I had time to sit down and upload these today, didn’t I?

I have not, however, been blogging. This is something that I am quite sorry about. I’ve been in Texas for the past week visiting family for my cousin’s graduation. I’ve had a great time. We have one more day then we’ll be driving back.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures. I hope they are to your liking; there are some good ones in there.

Jason