Isn’t it ironic that the Oregonian, whose Web site is the crappiest of all local news outlets, has suddenly discovered (thanks to the folks at Nielsen) that blogging is kind of a big thing in Portland. The front page of today’s living section features a story — yet to be published on the Web, evidently — about how Portland is the #2 bloggingest metro area in the US.

With a cutesy blog style article, complete with comments from Real! Live! Portland Bloggers!, the big O barely scratches the surface. In typical lazy Oregonian style, Steve Woodward did a cursory browse of ORBlogs and didn’t quite mention this blog.

He quotes the blurb on my ORBlogs page (“This may well be he only anti-war hockey blog… in the universe”) without mentioning the title or URL, and lumps me in with sports blogs.

Lordy, I’ve tried to be a sports blogger, but I just don’t have what it takes. All my hockey fan readers have left in droves since I’ve become more about politics than pucks. So it’s obvious that Woodward has no clue that this is one of a small handful of sites where Portland Public Schools policy and politics are discussed with any depth and regularity. The Tribune has pegged me and this blog as “the leading voice for equity issues” at PPS (I don’t think I’m worthy of that, but at least they’ve got the general drift). To the Oregonian I’m a sports blogger.

Most glaringly, there was no mention of Wacky Mommy, the internationally adored blogger I share a bed with.

Naturally, there’s no mention of the Portland Mercury’s very popular, pop culture-saturated Blogtown, or the less popular, more newsy Willamette Week WWire.

The fact that the Oregonian is trying to get current, with their generally irrelevant blogs and Oregon Reddit on oregonlive.com, doesn’t make up for the fact that they have the most outdated, least usable Web site of any local media source. The fact that I can’t even link to the story I’m writing about says it all. Even if it were published on the Web, the link would go dead after a couple weeks, since the O refuses to keep archives online.

The front page of the metro section of the Oregonian today features a large, full-color photo of Bud Clark reenacting his famous “flash”, this time with the help of Mayor Tom Potter and former-Mayor Vera Katz. I’ve put this into context on metblogs today.

(And yes, I still intend to blog here; I’m just getting my feet wet over there.)

Somebody foolishly decided it would be a good idea to give me another platform (besides this, my own sometimes-creaky printing press) to spout my insane communist rhetoric. I just wrote a post about the proposed Homer Williams/Mark Edling land grab involving Lincoln High School over at Metroblogging Portland.

I encourage you all to pop over there and join the conversation.

I’m a bit wonky about numbers… some of you might know this about me. So I have a couple different ways of tracking visitor stats for this blog. One of them is AWStats, which analyzes my Apache logs and gives me nice reports. The other is Site Meter, which uses an image and some JavaScript embedded on each page of the site. I like Site Meter because it gives me an instant look at who’s on my site at any given time, and organizes data by visit, which is cool. Today I just happened to take a look, and lo and behold, I got four visits from my friends at Portland Public Schools, all within about 45 minutes. Glad you guys are reading!

You may have noticed I’ve been slacking about this blogging thing. I’ve been distracted by a nice little thing called “summer”, which is the fairest month in Oregon. I also haven’t been skating at all, which has got me a little grumpy.

I’ve taken a little time away from reading and engaging about Portland Public Schools, and despite the fact that the Winter Hawks have a new coach, I haven’t found the time to read, comment or blog about that, either. I should be back in full force with the blogging and skating soon. Until then, enjoy your summer, and I’ll see you at the rink and the school board meetings soon.

TTFN

Well, it happened again, almost exactly a month after it happened before. Seven hundred-some Portland General Electric customers lost juice in North Portland, this time on the hottest day of the year. We didn’t have the multiple power surges like last time, and we managed to get all of our stuff unplugged just in case. The only casualty was the Wacky Enterprises blog farm, which does not function without all those electrons wiggling around in the copper, and was consequently off-line for five hours (from 4:30 PDT to 9:30 PDT).

So two lengthy outages in two months is making me think more and more of moving this whole enchilada to a hosting company. Anybody got good suggestions? Requirements: WordPress (and all its requirements, e.g. MySQL, PHP, etc.) , ssh/ftp access, reasonable rates, 24×7 rock-solid reliability, decent customer service. Local would be nice. Maybe I should just collocate, since I’m kind of anal about running my own servers.

The bonus of doing it here by myself is that it’s basically free. Maybe I’ll just keep it that way, and consider PGE’s monthly outages a cost of doing business.

Once in a while it’s fun to check the server logs and see the search terms that bring readers to a blog. On the one hand, it brings your not-so-humble blogger down a few pegs to see that his recipe for cholle or his review of Judy Park’s performance of Rach 3 with the Portland Youth Philharmonic is of much greater interest to the world than any of his views on hockey or politics.

That’s okay, because when it comes right down to it, I’m probably more passionate about food and music anyway (I just don’t have as much to say about them).

But when I noticed my piece about Vicki Phillips yesterday got at least one visit from someone at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I had to smile. (I extend a sincere welcome to the folks at Gates, and invite them to participate in the discussion if they care to refute anything written here.) They didn’t get here by way of Google, but I decided to check my Google juice on some key search terms, like “Vicki Phillips Gates”. Hey, not bad! I’m the fourth result, just after Gates, PPS and the Oregonian, well ahead of metblogs, the Portland Tribune and Willamette Week. Sweet!

But it’s even better when you search for “Vicki Phillips Gates Broad”: this blog is the first result.

It must drive the spin doctors absolutely bonkers that they can’t control their image any better than that.

They seem to be learning, though, at least on the local level. Witness comments here and on Terry Olson’s blog by the likes of PPS PR person Sarah Carlin Ames, PPS school board member David Wynde and Portland Schools Foundation executive director Connie Van Brunt. I personally welcome them to this exciting and new (to them) arena for democracy in action, and hope their friends at Gates will join in as well.

We were without power in my part of North Portland, and it turns out Web servers don’t work without electricity. And it turns out that when you run your own servers, you’re vulnerable to things like power outages (I don’t have UPS, not that that would have helped for the three-hour outage). The good news is that everything seems to have come back up. And that’s a wonder, because right after the power went out, there were two massive surges that blew a few light bulbs in our house and fried a couple GFCI outlets. I mean fried hard. Thanks for your patience, and hopefully that’ll be the last glitch for a while.

Edited 6/10/07: One more little power outage today, as I powered down to replace the GFCI outlets. I also took the opportunity to move the Web server out of our bedroom, which I’ve been meaning to do for some time. Dang, it’s got a noisy fan! Hopefully that’s it for moving things for a while. Blog on.

(Not counting Wacky Mommy, of course.) I recently stumbled across the Dingleberry Gazette, written by a “middle-aged guy with the heart of a twelve-year old” who works nights in a 24×7 convenience store in downtown Portland. This is some good, funny stuff. Quoth the author, “The running commentary in my head needs a place to rest, so I chose here.” Check it out.

Well what do you know, this blog turned one the other day, and it totally slipped past me.

I started this blog on February 1, 2006 as a successor to WackyMonkey.org, which was a non-bloggy blog I used to post on occasionally. It’s still out there, just as I left it a year ago.

This remains a relatively low-traffic blog, since I do very little (i.e. nothing) to promote it. (Wacky Mommy, on the other hand, has been around for two years, and her traffic has gone up dramatically in the last few months.)

Even though y’all rarely (if ever) comment, I know you’re out there through the magic of logging. I even know who you are and where you’ve come from. BWAHAHAHAHAHA! So thanks to both of you, and here’s to another year of hockey, politics, and life.