Archive for the 'Meta' Category

• e  18 Hiring complete

  I’ve picked my Director of Digital Things.

• e  33 Hiring a new person

  I’ll be hiring a new full-time employee, a position I’m calling Director of Digital Things.

• e  30 Blogs and baked goods

  Most people shouldn’t run their own blogging software.

• e  31 Looking back on #amazonfail

  Two good write-ups on an incident in which many smart people became swept up in moral outrage based on flimsy evidence.

• e  18 Answer Finder

  Answer Finder is a new way to navigate through the hundreds of answered questions on this site.

• e  36 The Visitor

  On Wednesday morning, we came into the kitchen to find an orange slice on the stove and a tomato that seemed to have exploded. This was obviously troubling.

  My initial thought was that one of us had sleepwalked, and acted out some rage issue against fruit. I realize this is a strange explanation to [...]

• e  37 Charlie Brown, advertising, and whatever comes after postmodernism

  What a mash-up indicates about genres and modern storytelling.

• e  5 New server, some issues

  Hope to be 100% in a few hours.

  Surprisingly, it all seems to be working okay. Even the wiki, which I was certain would break.

  If you notice anything broken, leave a comment, or email ask (you know the symbol) johnaugust (dot) com.

• e  6 Stupid MySQL server. Be less crash-y.

  And suddenly, we’re up. Honestly, we could have probably been up earlier if I hadn’t mucked around with some things. If the site goes down again over the weekend, don’t despair. Why not see WALL-E?

• e  3 Off-topic tweaks

  I’ve made some tweaks to Off-Topic, including adding comments. For those who never click over there, Off-Topic is largely a list of things I find amusing and/or interesting, including a lot of videos.

  The section is experimental, with the explicit goal of trying new things that are prone to failure. It’s not even hosted [...]

• e  18 Gravatars

  For the last week, you may have noticed little pictures in the comments section. They are called avatars, and they’re hosted by a service called Gravatar.

  If you’d like one, you can register and upload an image.1 It’s free and painless. Conveniently, the same picture will show up any blog that uses the Gravatar system, which [...]

• e  18 Press Day

  Today was press day for The Nines, which meant six solid hours of talking about the movie. And it was fine. I conducted all of my interviews sitting next to Melissa McCarthy, so it was a good excuse to exercise our pact of mutual appreciation.1

  The event was held at The Four Seasons. [...]

• e  Comments Off Guest-blogging on EW.com

  Because I’m just not busy enough, I’ve started guest-blogging on EW.com’s PopWatch blog, detailing some of the madness related to launching The Nines. You can read the first of these entries today.

  One observation so far: I’m snarkier on other people’s blogs than my own.

• e  6 An air duct speaks back

  From the comment thread on the Air vents are for air post:

  I am an Air Conditioning Duct and I find this entire conversation incredibly ignorant and offensive.

  On the rare occasions that I do see my Community represented on screen, it is invariably unrealistic and below industry standard. All the Air Conditioning Ducts of my acquaintance [...]

• e  10 Interview up at cecil vortex

  Link to an interview on creativity.

• e  3 Housekeeping

  A few things around the site to mention and discuss:

  Chinese in the feeds

  This was my bad. I misconfigured a plug-in, and it started to grab some random Chinese Twitter feed. I’m going to be traveling a lot in July, well outside of traditional internet access, so I’ll be needing to use an alternative method [...]

• e  11 Life is now worth living

  In a bold choice that shocked, well, me, The Morning News gave this very site one of its 2007 Editors’ Awards for Online Excellence, which is pretty cool considering it’s a damn screenwriting blog.

  The other award-winners are more deserving quite interesting, and worth a click-through. I’m particularly enamored by Mindy Kaling’s awesome Things I’ve [...]

• e  21 Five things

  I got tagged with the Five Things Meme, in which I’m supposed to share five pieces of information most readers probably don’t know about me. Fair enough.

  I’m an Eagle scout. I can tie all my knots, splint a broken bone, and build a fire without matches. Growing up in Colorado, I also [...]

• e  5 Feeds and subscriptions

  In a bit of misguided tweaking, I completely screwed up the RSS feeds for the site. It was a few weeks before I realized the damage I’d done. (I was redirecting through FeedBurner, but only certain formats, leaving other feeds lying dormant. Bad.)

  I think everything is fixed now. I’m back to the [...]

• e  1 About the live updates

  If you’re reading this site via the RSS feeds, you may not be aware that the “real” site features a continuously updated list of what I’m doing at Sundance. Call it microblogging. It’s powered by Twitter, and doesn’t show up in the main feed.

  However, you can subscribe to the just the Twitters at this link.

• e  3 Staring into mirrors

  Your article, “Farrah Fawcett on Parade” states that the first hit in Google for the search “poitier singing porgy” gives the answer to whether or not Sidney did his own singing. But the first hit in Google is a weblog at “johnaugust.com” containing an article entitled “Farrah Fawcett on Parade” that…

  Well, at that point, the [...]

• e  7 Forums are fun!*

  *Unless you have to moderate them.

  Over at Look For The Nines, the official-for-now site for The Nines, I set up a forum to handle discussion about the movie. I had deep ambivalence about doing this.

  Forums pre-date blogs, instant messaging, and even email as we understand it. Stretching back to their BBS roots, forums [...]

• e  13 On why the site looks a little different

  One of my self-assigned projects for the holiday break was to rebuild the site — not so much how it looked, but the coding underneath. Inspired by the SimpleBits re-do, and armed with my copy of Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS, I envisioned sparkling new CSS, built on a clear semantic framework. No longer would [...]

• e  11 More in the Store

  I’ve had the Store sitting in the sidebar for a few months now, with Amazon links for DVDs of movies I’ve written. To my surprise, people do actually buy some of these — I made a whopping $16.43 in referrals last quarter. That almost covers, oh, half of the hosting fees for this [...]

• e  8 Follow-up, please

  I’ve had this site up and running for about four years,1 and in that time have answered approximately 300 questions from readers who wrote in, either to johnaugust.com or my column on imdb.

  What I haven’t done is followed up with any of those questioners to see what they actually did with the information I offered.

  In [...]

• e  79 The collected works of 17.255.XXX.2

  One of the great qualities of the internet is that it allows unfettered discussion and disagreement. Unlike traditional media, which is largely one-way, a blog like this one benefits from constant reader feedback. That’s why I’ve chosen to leave comments open for the majority of my posts, putting up with the inevitable comment [...]

• e  52 MyAmbivalence

  I’ve had a MySpace profile for a long time, but never really did anything with it.

  At the time I registered, I remember thinking that MySpace felt like a lame Friendster knock-off. But as we all know, MySpace is now the Google of social networking, a billion dollar eye-magnet. The difference is, I like [...]

• e  35 10 things I hate about me

  Kevin Arbouet tagged me to answer 10 questions about mistakes and bad practices.

  Taken the wrong way, the whole exercise could be kind of negative and bleak. But one (hopefully) learns from one’s errors, so it’s in that spirit that I further the meme.

  1) WHAT’S THE WORST THING YOU’VE EVER WRITTEN?

  With hindsight being 20/20, probably [...]

• e  21 Footnotes on the footer

  In my previous post about the redesign, I glossed over what was actually was a fair amount of thought and logic behind what I did (and re-did). Based on the comments, some of that thinking might not be clear.

  Why not just stick them on their own page? If you want archives, click on archives, [...]

• e  23 Redesign, part one

  Readers who visit the web site, as opposed to getting it through the feeds, will notice a few changes, both cosmetic and architectural.

  We’ll start with the obvious stuff. The blue header is a little bluer, the footer is fatter, and there are fewer entries per page.

  There’s now an archive listing on every page of [...]

• e  9 I’m setting the TiVo for Bubble

  Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, Bubble, opens in theaters today. I’ve hardly read anything about the movie itself, because all the publicity is about the unique (some say troubling) distribution strategy: reducing the traditionally months-long window between the theatrical release and the DVD release to mere days.

  Of course, DVDs have always come out a few [...]

• e  19 Good Night, and Good Luck. And Good Job.

  Over the weekend, I went to see Good Night, and Good Luck at The Arclight. I liked it a lot, not only for its strong performances, but also its complete disregard for anything approaching traditional narrative structure.

  The screenplay, by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, is full of good dialogue — much of it apparently [...]

• e  26 Metablogging

  Now that there are several screenwriter-oriented blogs, I thought I’d take a moment to examine the six-degrees of separation quality among them.

  Or perhaps I just want to revel in the fact that I’m the Kevin Bacon of screenbloggers.

  ★ I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing

  This is how I met Josh Friedman: When I bought [...]