Pie Palace

Blogawa.ca now has three new contributors: our geeky pals at Zone 12, the highly fashionable Dare to Unravel, and the contentariffic Hello Ottawa. ((blogawa++)++)++

For some of us, making it big is getting cross posted to the Make blog. By that measure, the folks on Ottawa’s Zone 12 Project blog have made it with Nigel Vezeau’s fantastic child-size recumbent trike. (And yes, I’ve asked them if they’d be willing to have Z12 added to Blogawa)

ScraperWiki just got a little more awesome. Dave0 put together a scraper that crawls the City of Ottawa website and makes the development applications machine readable.

A couple of years back I floated the idea of portable website scrapers that would be able to programmatically pull information off of websites regardless of language and platform. The folks at ScraperWiki have gone so far as to actually do it. Their version scrapes publicly available information (meaning that my use case of scraping my bank statements is out of scope) and stores the result in a publicly accessible manner. Props!

David Chernushenko was elected as Councillor for my ward last night. Not only did he win, he rocked the ballot box with 41% of the vote.

My voting career has spanned almost two decades now. I think this vote was the first winning vote I’ve ever cast.¹ It’s good to know that I’m in the majority largest single voting block for once.

I was only at the victory party briefly, but there seemed to be a degree of shell shock. Lots of the folks in the room had supported David’s previous campaigns, and we didn’t quite know what to do when our candidate actually won. I’m glad that we got to see it.

Congratulations to David, his campaign team, and his volunteers. You all did a great job.

1. I believe that I may have voted for a winner in a decorate-your-office-door-for-christmas contest in 2001, but I don’t think that’s on quite the same scale as electing a representative. (back)

One of the few things I miss about my Citizen subscription is being able to read Dan Gardner’s op-ed pieces. They’re everything the main stream media should be: well thought out, well researched, and slightly contrarian. Add his blog to your feed reader. You won’t regret it.

I accidentally let my New Scientist subscription lapse. They helpfully spammed saying that they’re having a subscription sale until October 10. The price for a year’s subscription? $75. Last time I checked it was over $300. I guess they’re feeling by the intertubes.

I’d like to welcome a bunch of new bloggers to Blogawa! In chronological order:

First among equals is GJ Hagenaars‘ now ex-campaign blog. He’s no longer in the Bay Ward municipal race for all the right reasons. It sounds like he intends to keep his blog updated with his thoughts on the future of our city.

Keeping in the electoral vein is Municipalities Out Of Control – sort of a Girls Gone Wild for city politics, but with finances instead of sex and city councillors instead of drunk/stoned/payed teenagers. (Mr. O’Malley, I apologize if you don’t like the simile, but the name of the blog was too good to pass up)¹

Blogawa also welcomes its first online magazine, in the form of UnFolding. The whole thing looks pretty snazzy, particularly the previews section.

iKEN is an excellent photoblog by a Korean exchange student visiting Ottawa. The photos of Korea are particularly cool.

We also get to welcome ThumbShift a cycling blog. Fellow cyclists are always welcome, especially those who post pictures of street art.

1. Mr. Francis, you really don’t deserve this simile. Best of luck on your legal battles. I encourage you to consider joining a religion. Like Scientology. (back)

If you think Dr. Who was bad, stop and consider World War II.

The Web 2.0 dream is to be able to give something away while still making a living on it. That may work for Cory Doctorow, but for most of us, it’s untenable. The only mechanism I’ve seen for paying open source peeps for consumer-grade projects is donations. Paypal and Amazon both provide an ability to donate to a project, as does Pledgie, but I haven’t seen anything that makes donating easy.

Then I found Flattr. It allows donors to give micropayment-style donations to anyone with a web page (and a Flattr account). It makes life easier for donors because they choose how much they will give a month, and that amount is divided amongst their donees.

It isn’t perfect. The Flattr community is pretty sparse, and there’s no way to set a recurring Flattr, but they’re 90% of the way there. It’d be great if Canonical, vim, Parcellite, Google Chrome, kdenlive, and Guake accepted Flattrs.

If you’re looking for an invitation, hit me up with the contact form and I’ll hook you up.

(h/t Raphaël Hertzog)