John Kenney

Online storage is an excellent cloud-based service that businesses of all sizes should take advantage of. We are pleased to publish a guest post by Shelly Towns, a writer and tech enthusiast, who writes for Maytech.net.

Description: Most online file storage providers have a list of features to sell about their services. But how will these features benefit your business?

Today’s cloud-based computing solutions include a number of online file storage options for businesses that need a place to put their big files. For some companies, however, their needs for online, off-site storage are eclipsed by their lack of in-house technical experience. This generally results in solutions to file storage and transfer that are unsustainable, inconvenient and usually expensive.

Security is important to most businesses and the concept of sending potentially sensitive materials across the Internet into and from their storage facility can be scary. One of the benefits of selecting a high quality online file storage provider is they tend to have all the latest encryption schemes to ensure ones business intelligence remains private and proprietary.

Being able to control access to the files in ones online storage account can make the difference between having something useful and simply a dumping point. Well constructed file storage infrastructure will provide the ability to set up and control access to individuals, teams of workers, or even the general public. Having real time insight into who is accessing what resource as well as the ability to instantly remove access can be just the type of feature a business needs to compete.

The benefit of proper branding is not lost on most businesses. Better online file storage services will provide their clients with the ability to install their company logo and color schemes which will readily identify the web-based online file storage with the rest of the company’s website. Additionally, it can sometimes be confusing when a user is taken to some completely foreign domain name in order to transfer large files to or from the company. Being able to integrate the file storage services right into the company domain is another branding hurdle overcome.

One of the main reasons businesses consider using a file storage service has to do with saving on bandwidth costs to serve extremely large files. Storage costs can run into big money as well. By using a service that has the ability to mirror files in their data centers across the globe, users will get access to their downloads faster and will have the ability to upload files to the company easier because the targeted destination is much closer to them geographically.

Sometimes business operations only need quick, easy access to or from the files. Using an online file storage solution that provides easy to install web page widgets can save the business, time, money, and the ill will often caused by attempting to institute technical solutions that wreak havoc for their end users.

Communications are key in most business transactions. Online file transfers can sometimes leave both the end user and the destination company scratching their heads as to what the current status of a transfer may be. With notifications, automated messages can be emailed to users when their files have been uploaded to the target successfully. Likewise, it may behoove operations for the company to receive a message when an upload has been initiated and subsequently completed.

Compatibility issues are a nuisance and can turn normally good business relations bad. With so many standards, platforms and various technologies, getting things to play together can be tough. Instead of trying to insert square pegs into round wholes with an online file storage solution, seek out a provider that solves compatibility issues. The hassle and headaches this prevents will be well worth the small hosting fees the business pays for those services.

A final benefit which cannot be overlooked is the concept of backing up ones data. How many times has word come down that some challenge–server crashes, hard drive failure, network not accessible–has caused irreversible data loss? Even one time can be too many times. An online file storage service which provides offsite file backups will surely save the day for a business if and when the worst happens in relation to data file loss.

Author’s Bio: Shelly Towns is a writer and tech enthusiast. She enjoys researching upcoming technologies, new programs, and file transfer service.

We are pleased to publish a guest post by Carol Brown that addresses the ever timely topic of what type of laptop a graphic designer should buy. Since we just bought ourselves a new laptop, we can confirm that these are the right issues to think about. Carol is a writer with WebGuru India.

There was a time when graphic design professionals relied on desktops for their work. Graphic design on a laptop was not a suitable option for the millions of designers across the world. This was because the laptops were slower, too delicate to use, and of course, far more expensive than their desktop counterparts.

However, things have changed drastically in the past few years. The advent of new technologies in both computer hardware and software have enabled laptop brands to make laptops with performance that exceeds the desktop PCs of just a year or two ago. They also cope with heat dissipation issues better and are more rugged.

As a result, graphic designers can now purchase a high performance laptop for their work instead of a desktop machine. Apple Macbooks are obviously very popular among designers because they are very capable for any kind of website design related work. The downside, however, is that not all designers can afford Apple products – they are much more expensive than their Windows counterparts.

Today, the nice thing for designers is that they can buy laptops from brands like Dell, Toshiba, Asus, and other for half the price of the Apple models. These types of Windows machines offer great bang for the buck.

Designers looking for a capable and powerful laptop for their graphic design work need to assess the models according to some parameters.

• Large screen: A laptop for design work should have a large screen. Designers should pick a model that has at least a 16 inch screen – bigger is definitely better. However, screen size in inches is not the only way to measure. Screen resolution in pixels also plays a decisive factor. Many laptops today sport a default resolution of 1366×768 pixels. However, graphic designers can opt for a laptop that offers a resolution of 1600×900 pixels. Design professionals should opt for large screen laptops because screen real estate is ideal for working with two or more apps at the same time. Here portability is not the priority.
• Fast processor: A laptop meant for multimedia and design work should have a fast processor and oodles of RAM. The Intel Core series CPUs are really fast and they help in smooth multitasking. There are some models running on AMD Phenom triple core CPUs but they are a tad slower than their Intel counterparts. It is hard to gauge the true capability of a CPU just from the tech specs though. The latest Intel Core series CPU based on the Sandy Bridge architecture are the fastest according to industry experts. They not only offer fast performance but also consume less battery. If you want to see how a specific processor stacks up, here is a great resource for checking processor speed.
• Lots of RAM: Designers should opt for a model that has 6 to 8 GB of RAM as anything less is not suitable for multitasking. To get maximum RAM memory, you should choose a laptop model that comes with 64 bit operating system installed (e.g., Windows 7). This is essential because only 64 bit Windows OSes support more than 4 GB of memory. Once you’ve worked on a machine with 6Gb or more of memory, you’ll never want to go back.
• Separate graphics card (GPU): If you can afford it, all web designers should opt for a machine with a separate graphics card. Many of the latest processors have on-board graphics cards that will work fine, but these types of graphics cards share the system RAM and processor power with other functions. For maximum performance when using powerful apps like Photoshop and CorelDraw, design professionals should get machines with discrete GPUs, such as cards from Nvidia. These cards should have memory of 512 MB or 1GB. Some laptops, such as high end models from Sony and HP, sport Nvidia Optimus technology. This technology enables users to switch from the integrated graphics to the discrete GPU in the laptop without requiring a reboot. Designers should also make sure that the GPU used in the laptop is capable of supporting dual monitor setups. This is often a prerequisite for hardcore graphic design work.
• Warranty: Since designers are not always computer jocks, a laptop for design tasks should come with longer warranty and excellent customer service. Designers should check out the support policy of a company before buying model. The multimedia laptops can be expensive and spare parts can also be costly to replace, so a good warranty can save you in the long run. The laptops also come with useful apps preinstalled. It is useful to buy the models that come with OS recovery DVD and driver CDS.

Hopefully these tips will help get you going in the right direction in your quest for a new graphic design laptop. In addition to the items above, designers may also also want to consider investing in some laptop accessories like cooling pads and cleaning kits etc. These accessories can be useful for proper maintenance and increasing the longevity of the device.

Author’s Bio: Carol Brown writes for WebGuru India, a pioneer in the field of website design and seo services since 2005. Carol and other WebGuru India writers have published many articles on web design, graphic design, web development and SEO and internet marketing.

We are pleased to publish a guest post by Ashvin Sawmynaden with a new take on SEO. Ashvin is a web marketing specialist currently working on the ACCESS Formation Surete Aeroportuaire website.

The search engine optimization world is one that can literally scare people out of their skin. With the number of unrepentant scammers running around, the speed at which things keep changing and the tons of things to learn, it is often frustrating to most people. Small businesses and blog owners are particularly at risk as they may not have the required knowledge for more advanced and effective SEO techniques and are often left chasing tips and hints that will eventually enable them to boost the visibility of their website.

However, the complex world of search engine optimization comes at a cost. There are techniques that are no longer very effective and can even downright hurt your website, but that are nevertheless being used by a lot of webmasters. Worse yet, even some shady agencies actually recommend these burnt out techniques, thereby ensuring that more people keep wasting their time implementing things that will never help their website visibility. This article lists the most popular three SEO techniques you can stop worrying about.

Tons of links in your footer

The idea of putting tons of links in your website’s footer is one that is done even by huge websites. However, having so many links in your footer only makes it look extremely spammy. Moreover, it increases the total number of links on your pages for no reason. Most of the time, this is made worse by the fact that all these links are actually already prominently displayed in the main navigation menu.

The bottom line is that your footer should only include a few of your most important links, along with those typical links you expect to see, such as your contact and privacy policy pages. You can also forget about having your entire sitemap in your footer. Keep in mind that search engines are now also taking a page’s load time into consideration, and you will understand that it’s a good idea to keep your number of internal links to a reasonable amount.

Two-way link exchanges

Two-way link exchanges were a very popular practice before Google caught on to it and began ignoring them, much to the dismay of many webmasters around the world. The practice involves putting a link on your website and in return obtaining a link from that same website you just linked to. However, this strategy, known as a two-way link exchange, is no longer effective and constitutes a big waste of time.

The truth is that Google can detect such obvious link exchanges and no longer considers them a factor in rankings. Such traditional link exchanges merely indicate that you are actively trying to obtain higher rankings, which, ironically, is frowned upon by Google.

The Keywords Meta tag

Google, along with the other search engines not many people care about, has clearly stated that it no longer takes the Keywords Mega tag into consideration. This should not be surprising when one considers how much they were abused by spammers back when Yahoo was still the leading search engine. While many people have acknowledged the fact that these keywords are not effective, they nevertheless keep using them as their belief is that it does not actually hurt to do so.

However, you do run the risk of your competitors scraping your Keywords Meta tag to know which keywords you are targeting. Obviously, once they’ve done so, they will very likely attempt to outrank you in search engines, thereby effectively taking your hard-earned traffic away.

Doing things rights

Instead of wasting your time on these techniques, you should focus on implementing things that may not look important but are nevertheless extremely effective in increasing your website’s visibility. These include ensuring that all your images are properly optimized with relevant names and ALT attributes, making sure your content is visually appealing (by using headers, images or even both), and having great Meta Descriptions that will make search engine users actually want to visit your website.

Author’s Bio: Ashvin Sawmynaden is a web marketing specialist currently working on the ACCESS Formation Surete Aeroportuaire website.

We are pleased to publish this guest post about text messaging by Howard Gibbs of Specialty Answering Service.

With the development of cell phones, smart phones and iPhones, people now have a miniature computer in their grasp for instant communication. The convenience of text messaging is having an impact on the way small businesses do business.

Communication in the business world has rapidly changed over the last few years from pagers, fax machines, and telephones to emails and online video chats. Small business owners must be willing to adapt and embrace new methods of communication or their company will quickly become outdated.

Text messages offer an alternate yet effective way for clients and business owners to keep in quick communication of each other. As a method of increasing customer service through rapid response, text messages can be relayed instantly and are usually responded to just as fast. Customers no longer have to call a company for information about a product or send an email via their home computers, cell phones, or the like.

When businesses offer a “text messaging” line for customers to initiate an inbound contact, they can alleviate any time consuming telephone conversations and give prospective customers immediate response to their queries. Think this is impersonal? Think again. The text message itself is evolving to be one of the most highly personal and frequently used methods of communication.

Texting also means that there is virtually no downtime in waiting for someone to read the request and respond appropriately. Small businesses owners are often glued to their cell phones. They become extensions of their person. Because of this, cell phones become an excellent method of communication when contacting a small business. Cell phone communication via voice can be somewhat intrusive if the business owner is meeting other clients, engrossed in their daily operations, or otherwise unable to speak.

The beauty of the text message is that cell phones can be checked practically everywhere in a noninvasive manner. There is no need to leave the room, worry about cell phone ringers, or insult any parties you may be engaged with by answering your phone. In addition, if a small business is using an answering service to manage their phone calls, most services be willing to offer text messaging as a means of communication.

Text messaging also serves as a great way to let people know about longer requests that may necessitate an email. Most telephones are equipped to receive emails but the text message can give the business owner a quick “heads up” limiting the need to read or correspond with the email. Imagine how convenient it would be to schedule to communicate with your local plumber and schedule an appointment via text message.

Text messages are essentially a guaranteed, noninvasive means of communication in the business community. As a whole, small businesses benefit from text messages because they serve as quick alerts, reminders, mini messages with names and phone numbers, short questions, and can be used when it is imperative that contact be made. Seating text messages in a more prominent position at your communication table means you will be keeping up with the changing genre of communication as well as embracing new ways to improve customer service.

Author’s Bio: Howard Gibbs of Specialty Answering Service has been reading, writing, and breathing telecommunications for the last 25 years.

We are pleased to publish a guest post about affiliate marketing by Kenneth Parkar, a contributing writer associated with the Debt Consolidation Care community.

Due to the tough economy, many people are starting businesses at home. This often includes creating a strong online presence through your own website, social media pages, and blog postings. Unfortunately, even when you have a good idea, many people are at a loss as to how they can popularize their website so that the business grows and makes more money.

One excellent way to jumpstart your business online is to create your own affiliate marketing program. Affiliate marketing is a very widely used marketing technique and there are thousands and thousands of companies that have set up such programs.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing is a type of structured marketing program which engages other people to promote your website, your products, and your services. Affiliate programs come in many forms, so you will need to make some choices about how to set up yours so it fits well with your business.

Once you have your affiliate program in place, you will need to figure out ways to promote it so that people see it and are persuaded to join it. People who join your affiliate marketing program are known as ‘affiliates’.

Once an affiliate joins your affiliate marketing program, you will provide them with links and banner ads that point to pages on your site that you want to promote. Typically, these will be custom designed landing pages engineered to convert visitors into sales, but they can also simply point to your home page (or any other page you want).

The affiliate will include these links and banner ads on their own websites, social media pages, blog postings, etc. It is up to them where and how these links are used.

They are responsible for driving traffic to their own content and you benefit from their efforts because those visitors will see your links and ads. As people visit that content, some will click on your affiliate links and be directed to your website. Once these visitors land on your website, it is up to you to have good content that helps to convert them from visitor to customer.

Of course, you will need to pay your affiliates for their help in marketing your business, but the really great thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t pay anything upfront to your affiliates. You pay only when they deliver a tangible result to you – typically that’s either a sale or a lead. To pay them, you can set up a commission schedule pay them for any sales they generate. Or you can pay them on a per lead basis or you can use any other mechanism which makes sense for your business.

Does Affiliate Marketing Really Work?

Yes, definitely. Affiliate marketing programs are being used successfully by thousands and thousands of companies around the world. They can work for most any type or size of company.

They work because if you are able to get lots of affiliates to put your ads on their sites, you can get a huge amount of visibility with no upfront cost. This can dramatically increase traffic to your own website – and this can lead to a big increase in your sales. Since the affiliates get paid too, everybody wins.

Of course, for your affiliate marketing program to be successful you will need to provide really good services or products that people want to buy. If you can’t do that, then you won’t be able to keep your affiliates interested in working with you. But if you can do that, then affiliate marketing can help take your business to the next level while helping you to make more money.

Author’s Bio: Kenneth Parkar is a contributing writer associated with the Debt Consolidation Care community and has written articles for various financial websites. He has expertise in the Debt Industry and has made significant contributions through his articles. Follow the company on twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/debtcc.

I’ve just figured out how to add a comments policy to a WordPress blog. It was a little more difficult than I expected.

Basically, I just wanted to add a short statement to my comment form saying “spammy comments will be deleted…”.

Perhaps I am using the wrong terminology to search (‘comments policy’, ‘how to add comments policy’, etc.) or maybe there aren’t that many people who are trying to add such a policy. Who knows.

I finally found a simple plug-in from AlexKing.org called Comment License which is posted on WordPress.org.

Perhaps ‘comment license’ is the more proper term for it vs. ‘comment policy’. But actually, based on his default text, I think he had something a bit different in mind. His text is, in fact, more like a ‘license’ whereas I am looking to add something more policy oriented about what type of comments will be approved.

His text:

“By submitting a comment here you grant this site a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution.”

I wanted my text to be a bit different, partly because I intend to change the default comment links setting from ‘nofollow’ to ‘dofollow’ while retaining an option to selectively mark some links ‘nofollow’ and/or to delete them. In other words, I want people to know that I support dofollow links, except when the link points to a ‘bad neighborhood’.

So my text looks something like this:

“Unconstructive or spammy comments will be deleted. Comment links are ‘dofollow’ by default, but spammy links will be converted to ‘nofollow’ or deleted.”

Probably I should have Alex’s concept in there, too, but we’ll leave it out for now.

I would have preferred for the policy to be positioned above the comment body field, so people see it before they start typing as opposed to when they are clicking submit.

But no big deal. The plug-in installs quickly and works perfectly, so I’m happy.

Also, I did add a tiny bit of CSS to my main stylesheet to make the comments policy stand out a bit more:

Thanks, Alex!

In the space of 24 hrs, Target has permanently lost me as a customer.

I used to think they were an excellent company: good products, good prices, and consumer oriented. The first two are probably still true, but the last one isn’t – and apparently I’m not alone in thinking that.

Here’s why Target sucks: I bought 5 plastic storage boxes 2 weeks ago. The boxes appeared to be on sale for $5.44 each – there were big ‘SALE’ tags stuck over the regular price labels on the shelves. I happened to like the boxes, but this was purely a price-driven choice – these were the lowest priced boxes they had. I grabbed 5 of them and headed for the checkout counter.

At checkout, I noticed the total charge was higher than I had expected, so I made a mental note to double check later (I should have done it right then, but I was in a hurry). I checked that evening and saw I was charged $9.99 each for the boxes – and I was charged twice for another item that they’d called for a price check on.

After noticing the problems, I immediately called the store and explained the situation. The woman said it’d be no problem, if I could come in, they’d sort it out. I told her the store was quite a distance and I might not be able to make it over for several weeks. Again, she said that’s fine, we’ll handle it.

But it didn’t work out that way at all…and now I won’t be shopping at Target ever again.

Fast forward 2 weeks to yesterday when I was able to get back to the store. At customer service, the double charge was refunded no problem, but the front line rep choked on the sale item refund. She immediately escalated to a ‘GSA’ named Tracy.

Tracy was thoroughly unimpressed by my story: Why had I taken so long to come back? (because the rep said it would be okay.) Why hadn’t I gotten the name of the rep I spoke to on the phone? (I didn’t know I’d needed it.) Why hadn’t that rep recorded the call in their records? (how could I know she was supposed to do that?) Did I have any proof that the item was on sale? (no, I didn’t know I’d need proof.)

After pressing the issue, she found a circular from that week that showed that the same item, but in a different color was on sale that day for $5.44. My actual item – or more specifically, my color – was not actually on sale.

So technically I hadn’t been mischarged – instead, Target had stocked the wrong item in the sale racks. This still seemed worthy of a refund to me since I’d never seen the circular and even if I had I wouldn’t have detected the subtle difference in the sale vs. non-sale items anyway. Tracy remained unmoved. The possibility of mis-stocking an item apparently seemed unlikely to her (the items were still in the same place today when I was there, although the ‘sale’ sign had been removed).

To get me off her back, Tracy escalated the decision to her boss over the com system. The ruling: no refund. Period. Sorry, Charley.

Are you kidding me? I was dumbfounded.

The next day (today), I called the main customer service line listed on the company website (they don’t make it easy to figure out who to call in such situations). Again, the front line guy heard my story and immediately escalated the issue. The next woman then asked a series of questions which implied that she was deeply skeptical of my story. 15 minutes and lots of product codes and receipt numbers later, she said ‘no’. I protested, so she escalated to her boss. Same verdict: no refund.

6 Target reps and not one seemed even the slightest bit interested in giving me a refund – not one seemed to show any concern whatsoever that maybe they’d actually made a mistake and mis-priced the item. Simply wasn’t  in their DNA to give a shit.

So this afternoon, I packed up a pile of stuff I’d recently bought at Target – about $100 worth – and drove back to Target and returned it all. When the rep asked why, I said ‘I was pissed at Target and was never going to shop there again.’ She said ok and proceeded to process my refund. Not a glimmer of interest in why.

After doing some searching tonight for this blog post, now I know why she was completely unfazed: she probably gets that all the time. Turns out there are lots and lots of people who have bad customer experiences at Target.

A quick search pulls up all sorts of sites dedicated to angry customers venting: Target Sucks, I Hate Target. Plus, there are plenty of individual blog posts like this one. And it sounds like the employees aren’t too happy either. They have their own sites: Target Sucks and Target Stores Suck. Looks like publishing anti-Target stuff is something of a cottage industry.

Some of the stories are quite funny. There’s the woman who had a light pole fall over and total her car in the Target parking lot. She got nothing from them. And another guy who put big signs to put on his car saying how target had ripped him off. He eventually got a refund and agreed to remove the signs.

Sorry for the off-topic post, but I needed to vent.

—-

I’ve helpfully posted this complaint in a number of other spots. My day job as a web publisher comes in handy in situations like this. My3Cents.com

I am very disappointed by the new version of Google’s Keyword Tool. In my opinion, the new keyword tool is a big step backward and basically sucks.

Google’s Keyword Tool is a keyword research tool that is part of Google AdWords. Until now, it has been the most accurate, most accessible, and most useful keyword research tool available.

But there are major problems with the new version which result in much lower quality and accuracy keyword suggestions.

Sadly, Google announced this week that the new version of the Keyword Tool is coming out of beta at the end of August. At that time, the old tool will no longer be accessible. In recent months while Google has been testing the beta in general release, Google has provided an prominent link from the new interface to the old interface. That has allowed me to put off the day of reckoning.

But with the imminent demise of the old version upon us, I’ve taken some time to carefully test and compare the two versions side-by-side. The result is not pretty. My conclusion: Without a doubt that the new version generates just incredibly, dramatically worse keyword lists than the old version.

New vs. Old: Suggested Keywords Comparison

The main problem with the new version of the tool is that it generates much less useful and relevant alternative keywords than the old interface does. Like by a HUGE margin. It is shocking how different the results are.

I just compared the suggested keywords generated by the two versions using a set of ~35 keywords/phrases related to ‘web tools’ (list pasted below). While the new tool always generates worse results, this particular set of terms really highlight how extremely bad the new tool is.

New Version Results

The new tool generated a list of 800 keywords (as it does for every set of keywords no matter how long it is). The vast majority of these 800 suggested terms had absolutely nothing to do with ‘web tools’.

When sorted by ‘global search volume’, only 7 of the top 50 results even contained or was even vaguely related to ‘web tools’. Instead, as you can see in the screenshot below, the results are full of irrelevant terms like ‘joomla’, ‘drupal’, ‘ecommerce’, etc. Even wackadoodle terms such as ‘art design’ and ‘fashion design’ make it onto the list.

In other words, the new version generates a list that is essentially useless.

Old Version Results

On the other hand, the old version generates a highly useful list of 150 terms all of which are tightly related to ‘web tools’. Every single one of the terms in the list contains the word ‘tool’ combined with variations on ‘web’ and related ideas: ‘webmaster’ ‘web design’ ‘free website’ ‘seo’, ‘online’, etc. There is not one term that’s off target – and certainly nothing remotely approaching the uselessness of ‘art design’.

In other words, the old version generates an extremely useful and accurate list of suggested keywords.

As you can see plainly by comparing the two lists, the difference in keyword relevance between the old version and the new version is night and day. It is quite remarkable.

Other Problems

There are at least two other major problems with the new version:

1. In the new version, when you click the advanced option to include only ‘ideas containing my search terms’, the new tool, which moments before eagerly pumped out 800 terms, suddenly becomes incredibly parsimonious and oftentimes offers up just a handful of terms. When I tried this for the list of 35 or so ‘web tools’ terms, I get LESS terms than I started with – only 26! And even the new ones in this list are not terribly relevant or useful. This boggles the mind.
2. The old version had a fantastically helpful option to see data limited to just ‘the keywords I entered’. This generated search counts and CPC stats, etc. limited specifically to your target list. The new version simply does not have this feature at all. That means that even if I can piece together a decent master list on my own (with or without the help of the new Keyword Tool), I can’t even validate this list using Google search volume and estimated CPC data.

I have to assume these major changes have been made by design and that Google has purposefully chosen to restrict/reduce the accuracy and relevance of the keyword data that they are sharing with us customer types.

Needless to say, I am not looking forward to losing the old version at the end of August.

List of ‘web tools’ related terms that I used to test both versions.

Buzzr is a new hosted website building platform based on Drupal, a popular open source content management system (CMS).

Buzzr aims to make it much easier to build websites in Drupal by creating a user-friendly front end for the Drupal CMS. In a sense, Buzzr is a sort of WordPress-for-Drupal.

However, while WordPress is primarily designed to build blog-based websites, Drupal is fundamentally a more powerful and versatile website development platform that can be used to make virtually any kind of website. However, with this richness comes complexity that puts Drupal out of reach for many people.

Buzzr is trying to capture some of the superior functionality of Drupal while improving the interface to make it accessible to a much wider range of people. I think they have been largely successful in doing so.

Buzzr has been developed by Lullabot, a renowned Drupal development shop based in Rhode Island. Buzzr is in the early stages of roll out.

Buzzr is similar in concept to Drupal Gardens.com which recently launched in open beta. DrupalGardens is another simplified version of Drupal that has been developed by Aquia, another leading company in the Drupal community.

In the past week, I have tried using both Buzzr and Drupal Gardens to see how they work. I use Drupal to build most all my sites and I was interested to see how these new hosted Drupal platforms compared with the ‘real’ Drupal.

I will be posting separately about Drupal Gardens at some point, but this post is focused on the features of Buzzr.

Goal: Build a Simple Content Site

To make my testing as real as possible, I tried to put up the same relatively simple content website on both Buzzr and Drupal Gardens. This is a site is actually want to build, so I was looking to see if either platform would make it easier for me to create than doing so on a normal Drupal setup.

The site I tried to build had the following characteristics:

• How-to oriented website with ~20 web pages
• Webpages are largely text-based with a few images per page
• Design is a fairly basic 3-column layout
• Needs to support running advertisements, including header ad, ads in sidebars, and ads in body text
• Need to be able to fine-tune page layout, text styling, etc., ideally using custom CSS to augment default options
• Needs to support ‘taxonomy’ – the Drupal term for ‘tags’
• Needs to support ‘views’ – a powerful Drupal method for organizing content into lists

The above features are slightly more complex than a basic content site you might see for a small business or an artist or a personal website, but not a whole lot more. As well, it specifically includes some features (esp. ‘views’) that are somewhat unique to Drupal.

This type of site would be relatively easy to build in regular Drupal (at least it would be if you already knew Drupal and had a development environment in place to do it which I do). This type of site cannot be built in WordPress – the problem being that WordPress has no well functioning equivalent to Drupal’s Views module.

Buzzr Capabilities

Buzzr (and Drupal Gardens) have a wide range of built-in capabilities and I wasn’t able to look at all of them. Since I was trying to build a real website as quickly as I could, my focus was mostly on the capabilities required for getting this site built. As a result, there are a goodly number of Buzzr features – e.g., image galleries – that I didn’t look at in any depth.

Here’s a overview of Buzzr’s capabilities grouped into 4 major buckets. Again, I had a specific focus, so your experience may differ from mine, particularly in areas like ‘capabilities’ where specific website requirements are likely to vary quite substantially.

Admin User Interface

Buzzr has a very nice looking user interface (UI) for the ‘admin’ side of using the platform – basically the menus and other stuff you use to build and manage your website.

The buzzr admin UI consists of up to 3 menu bars across the top of the page, plus various editing and configuration layouts on the main page. You can find many pics and videos of the Buzzr admin setup in the Buzzr 101 section of the site.

I would say this interface is pretty darn nice. It is very graphical and much more intuitive than Drupal’s native admin controls which can be awfully cryptic.

The main admin options of ‘add content’, ‘manage content’, ‘design and layout’, ‘manage users’, and ‘site settings’ seem pretty sensible.

I won’t go into each piece part, but I wasn’t crazy about some of the screens. For instance, I did not like that there is no ‘menu’ option directly in the webpage editor – and there is no way to modify a menu title separately from the page title. As a result, when you initially create and save a page, the entire page title pops up in your main navigation menu. You can visit the ‘navigation menu’ page to change this and have it be subordinate to another menu item, but this isn’t too satisfying – and you still can’t change the menu item title there either.

A general criticism I’d offer of the layout is the size of the admin menu bars: they take up too much screen real estate. With all 3 menu bars open, they take up the top 180px of your screen. If you are on a 1080px or 1024px tall screen, these menus are taking up nearly 20% of total height – and that doesn’t include your browser frame and whatever toolbars you’ve got going. As well, many of the admin page layouts are too generously proportioned – e.g., the ‘Manage Static Pages’ page. This all needs to be more economically done to avoid too much scrolling and loss of focus.

Functionality

One way that Buzzr (and Drupal Gardens) keep the Admin UI clean and simple is that they support only part of the entire range of functionality available in Drupal proper. Since Drupal proper supports an enormously wide range of capabilities through ‘contributed modules’, this is a necessary thing for Buzzr to do.

The question is: has Buzzr chosen the right functionality to include to meet the needs of the most people? I think the answer to that is probably yes – or at least it is within striking distance. Since I know they will be adding additional features over time – e.g., I was told that they will be adding groups, calendars, contact page, and color picker functionality later this month.

The main things I personally needed to build my site were these:

- Basic content pages supporting text and images
- Upload and manage images for webpages
- Taxonomy (aka, ‘tags’) to allow grouping pages together
- ‘Views’, a special Drupal module that allows you to create lists of pages based on certain parameters (e.g., a tag)

Before I run through these quickly, I wanted to note a very important feature of Buzzr that was not required for my website, but that looks like it would help lots of other folks: their innovative Form Builder. This is a really outstanding Buzzr feature that combines two very complicated Drupal capabilities – CCK and content type manager – into one simple to use interface. This module allows you to very easily build a ‘custom form’ that contains any number or type of content fields. Using this tool you can create, for instance, a complex custom page for product spec sheets or product reviews or any other similar type of page that requires structured content. As an added bonus, Buzzr / Lullabot have contributed this module code back to the Drupal community in the shape of the Form Builder module.

Basic content pages Buzzr handles basic content pages very nicely using the ‘static page’ content type. A ‘static page’ contains several fields: page title, body text, tags, and date and time. It does not contain a ‘menu’ field as mentioned above. You are able to upload images to a static page.

In addition, Buzzr offers a number of additional pre-defined content types, including image galleries, blog posts, ‘press post’, and ‘custom pages’. The WYSIWYG editor is very nicely implemented. There is an option to switch to an HTML editor, too.

Upload images In the WYSIWYG page editor, Buzzr allows up to easily upload an image from your hard drive. The uploader allows you to adds image a title, tags, and other descriptors. You can also change the image size to fit properly on your page. You can also adjust aligned (e.g., left, right, center).

The part I did not understand was how the image library worked. While it worked fine to upload into the page directly, I would have actually preferred to upload into an image/media library so I could reuse the image on multiple pages with just the one upload. The images I uploaded directly to a page did not show up in the media library and I could see no other way to upload an image. Perhaps this is in the tutorials somewhere.

Taxonomy (aka ‘tags’) Tagging is a pretty basic capability that most all website builders offer and Buzzr is no exception. Buzzr allows you to tag every piece of content (pages, images, etc.) with one or multiple tags. These are nicely displayed on each page in the default templates.

That said, I would have liked to see a bit more full featured implementation of tagging. For instance, there is no master screen where you can look at and refine your tags and you can have only one tagging ‘vocabulary’ whereas Drupal proper and Drupal Gardens allow you to have more than one. This is useful if you want to tag one type of thing (e.g., pages) with one set of tags while tagging another set of things (e.g., images) with a different set of tags.

‘Views’ capability One of the best features of Drupal is the ‘Views‘ module which allows you to create lists of content based on user-specified parameters. For example, you can create a list of all content pages with the tag ‘websites’ or all pages of a certain content type or published by a certain author. In Drupal proper, Views is extremely flexible and supports very complex parameters.

My needs with my sample website were more modest: In Buzzr, I simply needed to create pages based on individual tags. So, for example, I needed a page that lists all pages with the tag ‘websites’; and another showing all pages tagged ‘SEO’, etc.

Unfortunately, I almost was not quite able to do this in Buzzr. Buzzr does have a simplified Views module, but it turns out to be a bit too simplified. Instead of generating a page with just posts tagged ‘websites’, it created a page with links to all tags used on the websites. While I maybe could have worked with that, it turns out each of these subpages contained the same complete list of all posts on the site. I’m thinking the feature isn’t working quite right – or maybe I didn’t configure the page correctly.

[Update: Via email, Buzzr CEO Ed Sussman has offered several clarifications about the Buzzr custom pages (aka 'simple views') feature. First, he said that there is a bug in Custom Pages that is causing the tag links not to work properly. He says this will be fixed shortly. Second, he noted that they have not enabled the ability to generate 'single tag pages' using Custom Pages, but that this is built into the code and may be enabled in the future. Lastly, he pointed out that Lullabot / Buzzr actually built the underlying code for this feature and contributed it back to drupal.org as a contributed module called Simple Views. This looks like a really fantastic module that hugely simplifies the well known 'Views' module in Drupal. They are to be commended for contributing it back to the community.]

Design

Buzzr has some very good design tools, but overall I would say it needs some further work. It is probably a step or two behind the theme editing features that I saw on Drupal Gardens.

The design interface has several parts: ‘select style’, ‘navigation menu’, ‘design tool’, ‘design (advanced)’, and ‘widgets/layout’.

‘Select style’ allows you to select from a dozen or so ‘themes’ (the Drupal term for ‘template’). These all have basically the same page layout and vary mostly in terms of the ‘skin’ – meaning background colors, font styles, and colors, etc.

‘Navigation menu’ allows you reorder items in your main navigation menu via a drag-and-drop interface. As far as it goes, this works very nicely actually, but it looks like you can have only 1 menu and that’s not ideal for many situations.

‘Design tool’ allows you to change various theme relates settings. For instance, the global font and font size are set here. Backgrounds for the header and the site are also set here. The site logo and favicon are also here. This is good stuff, but pretty basic stuff.

‘Design (advanced)’ is a simple interface that allows you to see and edit the entire CSS file associated with your theme. You cannot change basic page layout here, but you can change lots of other styling elements of your website. For people who know CSS, this is great, but others will struggle to know what to do here.

‘Widgets / layout’ is one of the most interesting parts of Buzzr. It is basically a drag-and-drop tool that allows you to manipulate the layout of your website. Here is where you determine how many columns your site has. It also has a bunch of pre-defined widgets (called ‘blocks’ in Drupal-ese) which you can add or move around on your page. These widgets are basically small content blocks which you can put into your columns. The pre-defined widgets include ones for text or images, for tags, for a mini-gallery slideshow, and so forth. There are also widgets showing users and social widgets for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

In terms of my specific needs, it appears that most of what I needed design-wise could be done reasonably easily in Buzzr. The drag and drop widget tool is very effective.

One sticking point was reformatting the header to get a 728x90px ad to fit alongside the site name and site slogan. With some encouragement from CEO Ed, I found that I could manipulate the CSS for the header to achieve the desired positioning. This involved firstly adding a new block to the page via the ‘widgets’ editor and then using the ‘design (advanced)’ editor and Firebug (a Firefox plug-in) to modify the CSS for the default header block and my new ad block. With a bit of fiddlign, I was able to put the two blocks side by side in the header.

Help / Support

Buzzr provides pretty strong and easy to understand documentation. The website provides a very helpful how-to section plus hands-on demos in a series of nice video tutorials. Since the whole thing is designed to be straightforward and user friendly, this documentation is plenty to get you going in building out your website.

While the documentation is quite good, a concern I would have is that there is no obvious venue for support beyond this info – like if you still don’t understand something, how do you get help? On Drupal Gardens, they’ve got very active user forums to help you out. I found these invaluable as I worked through building out a site there. It may be that Buzzr is intended more as a platform for Lullabot clients than as a general use website builder. If that’s the case, they don’t make that obvious.

But I can’t complain too much about support because I received an immediate response to the one query I did send them via email – and that came from their CEO, no less. Obviously that’s not scalable, but it does suggest their commitment to the product.

[Update: Ed Sussman, the Buzzr CEO, has now sent along numerous emails clarifying various points about Buzzr. He's been very helpful.]

Pricing

Buzzr has a tiered pricing scheme that seems fairly reasonable if you are planning to put up one or two sites. Prices start at $19.95 for the ‘Bronze’ plan. This seems designed for a smaller site typical of a small business or independent professional. If you have a larger site and require more hosting resources, then you can choose one of the 3 more expensive plans ranging from $39.95 to $119.95 per month.

The monthly price includes on-going upgrades of the Buzzr platfrom. This is a major benefit over a self-hosted version of Drupal since, unlike WordPress, the upgrading process is not automated and really quite a pain in the a**.

Buzzr has a 7-day trial period where you can demo the platform. This a great way to try out the platform and see if it is a good fit for your needs. I used only this option because it took just a few hours to conclude that I wouldn’t be able to do what I wanted to build out my site.

Even if I’d been able to get the website up and running, pricing might have been an issue for me because I would have wanted to host multiple small websites on Buzzr. Via email I learned that you may be able to get a price break if you put up a number of websites.

Conclusions

Buzzr appears to be very promising Drupal website builder. It is a relatively new product, but has many outstanding features and excellent potential.

Via email, CEO Ed Sussman offered this comment about Buzzr and it’s future:

“Buzzr is designed to be a real time saver for the average website owner who wants the power of Drupal in a more user-friendly package. We’re very pleased with the capabilities of Buzzr today, but we’ve got many important enhancements in the pipeline for the coming months. When the fully packaged version of Buzzr is released in September, you’ll see some really great new time saver tools beyond anything now in the public beta. I think people will be excited and they will clearly see things that set us apart from Drupal Gardens.”

Unfortunately, despite the great features, I was not able to get my website built in Buzzr. It currently doesn’t quite support my needs. Some of the problems I had were:

• Couldn’t generate ‘views’ type pages for individual tags
• Couldn’t [easily] manipulate layout of header to include an ad [as described above, this was eventually accomplished via custom CSS]
• Couldn’t change menu item titles [turns out this is wrong - titles can be edited, but the edit screens are very confusing and should be clarified]
• Cost to host multiple small websites on Buzzr is too high [but it should be noted that Buzzr costs are comparable to other similar tools - they appear high only in the context of my specific set of needs which calls for many small sites]

Note: Text in brackets above are edits / clarifications added after the original post went live.

Despite these issues, I would definitely recommend that others try Buzzr and see what they think. There are a number of really strong positives and surely the platform is going to continue to expand and improve.

Here’s my take on Buzzr’s notable features:

• Modern, very easy to use admin user interface that makes Drupal very accessible to non-programmers
• Strong set of Drupal functional capabilities that will meet the needs of many websites
• Excellent Drupal feature innovations in both the ‘simple views’ and ‘form builder’ modules that simplify and enhance Drupal usability
• Commendable generosity on the part of Buzzr / Lullabot to contribute their module innovations back to drupal.org
• Nice mix of content types and other specific features out of the box
• Built-in support for image galleries with lightbox-type overlay/slideshow (caveat: I didn’t test this too thoroughly)
• Simple, easy to understand theme structure (in contrast to Drupal Gardens which has mind bogglingly complex themes)
• Beautiful drop down menus based on Drupal ‘Nice Menus‘ module (note these may require a bit of CSS styling to get the right look)
• Excellent drag-and-drop widgets tool that makes it very easy to organize your website page layout
• Nice social media, newsletter, and other community features

If your website needs match up well against Buzzr’s current capabilities, you could be up and running with a high quality Drupal-based site in a matter of hours. Since using Buzzr is so straightforward, it’s well worth giving it an hour or two to see if it’ll work for you.

When I switched to Google Reader from Netvibes Wasabi, I created a custom skin using a Google Chrome extension called Reader Plus. The result was to make Reader look a bit like my old Wasabi layout which I found so much more readable.

Here’s the details:

Netvibes Wasabi – A Very Readable Layout

Here’s a screenshot of my old Netvibes Wasabi reader – one of the basic ‘official’ themes of the zillions they offer. This layout was just a dream to read. I loved the spacing, the use of favicons, the nice date headers in the item stream, and the colors, among other things.

In general, Netvibes comes with a lot, lot more configuration and, especially, theming options than does Google Reader. One feature that I especially liked with the “Give feed items more space” option – this incrementally opened up the spacing giving feed items just the right amount of breathing room.

Google Reader – Too Dense and Cluttered

Here’s a screenshot of the same feeds in the default Google Reader skin.

The main differences are too much white, item list and feeds sidebar are much too dense, and there’s a lot of unnecessary visual clutter (e.g., stars on every item). It’s hard to believe that the same company that designed a clutter-free search page and it’s highly efficient and readable search results format came up with this.

Apparently a lot of people like this density and visual style, but for me it makes my eyes glaze over.

Google Reader – With a Simplified New Skin

Once I found that I could do some fine tuning of the Reader skin using the Reader Plus extension, I focused on opening up the spacing in the sidebar and item feeds, removing unneeded stuff (stars, folder icons), and refining the fonts types, font sizes, and font colors. The changes to the sidebar are more dramatic than the ones to the item lists.

Here’s Google Reader after I’ve applied the custom CSS to make it look more Netvibes-like.

Obviously, Google Reader still looks mostly like Google Reader, even after applying 40-50 new bits of CSS. But still, the new bits change the layout just enough to make Reader a lot more readable – at least for me.

I’d like to (and probably will) do more with it as time goes by, but at least this gets me to a place where I can scan Reader every day without too much eye strain.

What’s Still Missing from Google Reader?

Even if I tweak the CSS for a while longer, there are some things i can never get to with Google Reader. They require real programming and/or maybe not even that will do it.

One key thing that can’t be changed via CSS is the lack of date headers in the item stream. I really like having date headers to separate out one day’s items from the next. Netvibes has beautiful fat date headers. My favorite iPod Touch RSS Reader, an app called ‘Reeder‘, also has very nice date headers that float along as you scroll thru the feed items.

The other thing I’d really like to have are favicons in the item streams in folder views. Netvibes does this nicely and I think it helps with readability. I’ve put in a request to the ‘Reader Plus’ developer to possibly add this. He’s got something close already, but it requires a bit of tweaking to show just the favicons only in the folder views.

Google Reader – CSS for Custom Skin

I’m not sure the image above does it justice, but if you are interested to give this layout a try yourself, please install the Reader Plus in your Chrome browser.

Then go to the options screen and choose ‘Themes/skins’ > ‘Relook’. In the textfield that opens up, please paste the following CSS (delete what is there):

As I was writing the previous post, there was a cool looking lizard with a red head lounging on the patio. I am new to northeast Florida and hadn’t seen this variety before. He scooted away when a small bird landed nearby.

Quick bit of research indicates this was a male broad-headed skink. Apparently this is the same fellow I sought to identify the other day, except now he’s got a big red head. I gather this is a springtime thing.

I didn’t take photos, but the first photo below is what I just saw and the second photo is more like what he looked like a short while ago.

Update: Now he’s back and he’s found a mate. They are getting busy as I type this. She is much smaller and her head is not so red. Here’s a picture. They lounged about in the sun afterwards for quite a while before wandering off. Part of the time, they were snuggled up against one another.

The New York Times had another extraordinary editorial today so full of wrong-headed thinking you don’t know where to begin. More Help for the Wealthy.

The piece is about supposedly outrageous efforts by the GOP to implement new laws covering small business. The net effect, The Times believes, is to give the wealthy yet more tax breaks.

Whatever the merits of taxing or not taxing the wealthy more, they lose me immediately in the first paragraph with this line that the effect of the laws will be to ‘…starve the government of needed revenue…’. This is like denouncing calls for the fattest man on the planet to eat just 9 hamburgers instead of 10 today. 

Among other wrong-headed ideas, the piece appears to be animated by an underlying belief that the Federal government has to be much, much larger to accomplish what needs to be done. I don’t buy that at all.

Update: My friend Veronica read the piece and wrote back about another outrageous assertion they offer:

“Did I really read this????

 

“The best way to encourage [small business] success is with continued government spending to support demand”

 

OMG!!!”

A New York Times editorial today, They Have Very Short Memories, restates a very popular liberal belief that has influenced much of the left’s thinking about our economic situation.

They write (boldfacing added):

Never mind that reams of Congressional testimony, market analysis and academic research have shown that regulation has not been an impediment to raising capital. In fact, too little regulation has been at the root of all recent bubbles and bursts — the dot-com crash, Enron, the mortgage meltdown. Those free-for-alls created jobs and then imploded, causing mass joblessness.

To me, ‘too little’ is simply wrong.

It would be more fair to say ‘ineffective regulation’ where ‘ineffective’ means that the regulations were not well designed or did not work as intended or did not cover the specific circumstances that developed on the ground. Some might argue that some / many regulations on the books actually contributed to or served as catalysts for the dysfunction that emerged. For example, anti-discriminatory lending regulations seemed to offer a major boost to subprime lending.

Or it might be fair to say ‘poorly executed regulated’ as in that the regulations on the books were not properly or well interpreted and implemented on the ground in real time by the regulators. For example, as when Fannie and Freddie became major enablers of the surge in subprime lending.

Or even more likely, it was some of each.

But an actual shortage of regulations, I don’t think that construct offers us much insight and is, in fact, deleterious to effective interpretation and response.

And this bad idea is just one of several bad ideas contained in this short editorial. 

The left, and even the President himself, are making a lot of noise about how domestic oil production is up under President Obama policies and leadership. Heretofore, I have understood this increase to be due largely to increases in production on private and state land that is not subject to Federal permitting.

This issue has been highlighted in today’s news stories and it turns out the issue is well studied. Not surprisingly, there is data to illustrate the situation.

According to data published by the Institute for Energy Research, production on Federal lands has declined significantly over the past decade, including a 10%+ decline in 2011. IER is a conservative group and it’s data will, no doubt, be dismissed out of hand by the left. As I often do, I looked for alternative sources with a leftward bent, but none are to be found.

There’s been a disturbingly large decline in US IPOs (initial public offerings ) since the late 1990′s. I mentioned this briefly in a post in 2011 – Surge in Regulations - including a great chart showing the time series data (reposted below).

Here is another chart with data updated through 2011. The chart below is tech IPOs only – that’s why the figures are systematically lower than the Kauffman chart above which includes all IPOs.

Today, there was more coverage of this issue in the Wall Street Journal – Restarting the U.S. Capital Machine. Written by a Democrat, no less. A fellow named Jack Markell, the Governor of Delaware. No doubt he will be ridiculed by his compatriots, but what he discussing is awfully important.

He notes several stats:

• US IPOs have declined from 360 annually in the 1990s to 100 or less per annum now
• Companies listed on US stock exchanges has fallen from 8,800 to under 5,000 today
• The US share of global IPOs has dropped from 48% in the late 1990s to under 10% today

He argues, quite rightly I believe, that this has a huge deleterious effect on job creation in the US. He cites a study by Grant Thornton that estimates we’ve lost 10 million jobs as a result of the IPO decline.

That’s because a large percentage of new job creation historically comes from the kind of high growth companies that go public. He notes that something like 92% of a company’s employment growth occurs after an IPO. That means we are losing all the jobs that might otherwise have occurred had we not lost our position in the global IPO marketplace.

There is also a lost cumulative effect from this – we’re voluntarily taking ourselves out of the ‘virtuous cycle’ that leads to ever greater innovations and wealth. I’m talking about the sort of dynamic that leads to places like Silicon Valley and, to a lesser extent, Boston. Even here in the US, it is very hard to create self-propelled economic centers like this. If you think of the entire US as a country-level Silicon Valley compared to the rest of the world, but we are willfully allowing that to be eroded.

It is the type of dynamic that has helped southeast Asia become the dominant hub for global manufacturing. They have built up a formidable and interconnected web of companies that can’t be easily replicated and that delivers long-term strategic advantage to the region. This was was well described in the New York Times not long ago when they wrote about Apple’s use of Foxconn for manufacturing.

Not surprisingly, he attributes this sharp falloff to some obvious problems which he thinks need to be fixed.

• Excessive regulation of the capital markets, particularly Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd Frank laws
• Unfavorable corporate tax laws compared to other countries

It also points out to me another example of where Democrats (largely) in their never ending quest to protect regular folks from the greed of corporate evil doers, often in the long run produce the opposite effect – they dampen overall growth and productivity for everyone. Another example is the inevitable increase in consumer banking fees that we’ll all be paying soon enough. I guess we are all safer and perhaps better informed for these efforts, but we are also all irreparably poorer. But apparently communal poverty is not too high a price to pay to ensure the wealthy are kept in check (and that, by the way, isn’t even really happening…).

David Brooks is one of my favorite commentators. So often he gets things right – at least in my opinion.

Again today, he’s written something that resonates – The Possum Republicans.

He offers some perspective on why the Republican party behaves as it is doing. While everyone on the right profess to want to defeat President Obama, day-to-day behavior seems determined to ensure that does not happen.

I can’t begin to do his writing justice, so I will offer a few telling quotes:

Republicans on the extreme ferociously attack their fellow party members… Republicans on the extreme are willing to lose elections in order to promote their principles. Those in the mainstream are quick to fudge their principles if it will help them get a short-term win…

In the 1960s and ’70s, the fight was between conservatives and moderates. Conservatives trounced the moderates and have driven them from the party. These days the fight is between the protesters and the professionals…

Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity.

I like that last bit – ‘heresy trials’. Sure feels that way.

Lately, I am feeling a bit more skeptical about politics that usual. I think Republicans generally have better policies, especially about economics, but the dynamics of the race are pushing people to do and say ridiculous things on a regular basis.

I also think the party orthodoxy is not flexible or creative enough to address the size and depth of the problems the country faces (same being true for the Democrats). It feels like we’d be better off with the GOP in charge, but I’m not sure we’d actually be doing as well as we could or need to.

It would take a person with tremendous powers of persuasion (and intellect) to move us collectively towards the nuanced and sometimes complicated positions that are probably in our long term best interest – and neither Romney or Santorum are demonstrating they have those powers.

One of the reasons I voted for Obama was that I thought he possibly had the potential to do this. Turns out he didn’t – or maybe he did, but he never had any intention of doing so and it was just a ploy to get elected.

Whatever the case, it is clear that the Republican candidates, Romney included, are being forced to take very hard line positions across a number of fronts that a) can’t be good for winning the general election, and b) probably aren’t great solutions anyway.

Case in point lately for me is the issue of environment vs. oil/energy. Seems to me the best position is a nuanced one where we acknowledge high standards of environmental stewardship while pursuing an aggressive pro-growth energy strategy. However, the loudest voices in each party push their leaders towards fairly extreme positions – too much environmental stuff from the left, too little of it from the right. It doesn’t appear that anybody can rise above the doctrinaire to speak in the right proportion for each thing without alienating their ‘base’.

I could be wrong (as I was about Obama), but I think in his heart of hearts, Romney wants to be more centrist, but he is simply not nimble enough verbally (and maybe intellectually) to be able to make the case. I think if he had it in him, we’d have seen glimmers of it by now.

For me, that means that even if he wins the election, instead of balanced, nuanced policy, we are going to get a sharp lurch to the right. Overall, that’s a good thing compared to where we are going now, but, in short order, the party will take it too far and make a huge swath of people on the left extremely angry. Which means they’ll soon lose whatever power they had as they get voted out of office. I guess that’s the pattern we are destined to be in for a while – lurch one direction for a while, then lurch the other direction. Maybe it has always been so.

Maureen Dowd’s column today, Ghastly Outdated Party, captures this dynamic fairly well. Naturally, she goes over the top as is her wont, but unfortunately a lot of what she says strikes me as approximately correct.

The second paragraph would be completely hilarious if it weren’t substantially true.

“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”

The paragraph that captures the essence of her point is this one:

The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it.

Her language is a bit dramatic, but I think it is essentially right.

In watching the debates, time after time, every one of them has taken a hatchet to one of the others for saying something even slightly offkey / nuanced. As this seems to work to kill candidates off, it has forced the remaining people to tow an ever harder line. I imagine if you are even slightly left of center (the people the GOP needs to capture to win), this has to look pretty scary. It often looks scary to me and I’m definitley right of center.

She also writes:

President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals.

This is also definitely true.

Possibly the eventual candidate can tack back to sanity, but if the nomination race carries on for the many more months as it seems likely to do, he won’t have much time – and the bridges may all be burnt by then in any event.

Sadly, this will not only limit chances to unseat Obama, it could have an dampening effect on all Republican candidates – i.e., for House and Senate. That would mean four more years of Obama and possibly a supercharged Obama. That is a truly frightening thought.

I think a lot of people see this, but the dynamic probably can’t be reversed.

Obama’s 2013 budget was released yesterday. In today’s papers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have shared their reactions. They could not be more different.

In their piece titled A Responsible Budget, the NYT totally buys into the Democratic narrative of how the world works and what the Federal government’s priorities should be. Even as it runs up an unprecedented fourth year in a row with a $1T+ deficit, they do not question a single thing, except to assert that Obama was too soft on defense and could have found more than a measely $5b in cuts.

As is common in liberal analysis (even analysis of budgets), they use very few numbers or charts. In this case, their write-up contains a grand total of 4 numbers (dollar amounts, percentages, dates, etc.) and no charts at all. You’d think that commenting on such a numerically-driven document would require greater use of figures, but why get bogged down with objective reality? The NYT keeps their focus squarely on the liberal plotline.

Not surprisingly, the WSJ has a completely different take in their piece titled The Amazing Obama Budget. Not surprisingly, they don’t like much of anything about it – and offer solid reasons why. I agree with most of them.

Being more rigorous and quantitatively grounded, they use about 38 numbers in their write-up (dollar amounts and percentages) while citing a dozen or more dates as a basis of comparing this current budget with prior ones. They also include two charts with time-series data going back to 2000 (shown below). They use these numbers to explain to their readers what the budget actually does — what an old-fashioned idea.

I find this difference in the use of numbers striking. I see it over and over again when comparing commentary from left and right. My conclusion: Democrats are drawn to abstract narrative like moths to light and they think that numbers are for a**holes. Republicans are drawn to more rigorous analysis and believe numbers are crucial to comprehension.

This difference is one of the main reasons Republicans and Democrats cannot communicate easily, let alone formulate ‘compromises’. It’s like the idea behind the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ book: the two sides are speaking a different language borne of differences in perception and belief.

So I lived in Massachusetts until last year and was there during the years the health care law changed over. It was controversial at the time, but nothing like the venom that has been unleashed by ObamaCare.

I think one big difference there was that a clearer economic argument was made to justify the shift – it was understood by most everyone, including business people, that a tremendous amount of money from private insurance plans was already being funneled off to pay for uninsured residents.

A second big difference was that the focus was on covering the relatively small percentage of the population that was not covered – I seem to recall it was 8% uncovered. Since MA had fairly extremely high coverage rates already, this seemed fairly achievable.

A related third point is that little was said about the coverage offered by private insurers to the 92% of people who had existing coverage. Maybe there are some basic rules about what should be in private policies, but I don’t believe there was any significant mandating of coverage requirements – that’s not something I saw or read about. The more I learn about ObamaCare, the more I see that it will dramatically reshape private policies – hence the controversy now roiling the Catholic Church. I don’t recall anything like that happening in MA about contraception or anything else.

Another big factor is that the MA constitution allows for the state to mandate costs to its residents and the state had already implemented such mandates before. For example, for as long as I can remember everyone with a car has had to carry auto insurance. This meant that creating an additional obligation for health care insurance was not so ground breaking as at the Federal level where it is unprecedented and of questionable legality (we’ll see what the Supreme Court rules on that in the spring).

Of course, it didn’t hurt any that the state is dominated by Democrats.

My own main concern at the time was that the law did not address another key issue: health care costs. At the time and by design, this was put off for a later date. Everyone who was paying attention understood this: coverage now, cost control later.  For myself, I was personally ok with this and I appreciated that it was explicitly discussed and recognized as being both very important and very difficult. The idea of breaking the problem down into component pieces sounded sensible.

One thing I have hugely disliked about ObamaCare is that it conflates coverage and cost. The coverage piece is arguably relatively easy, but the much harder and less well understood part is the cost control. To bind them together on the scale that ObamaCare did, all we could do was say a prayer and hope a cost control solution became apparent.

Then they went even further than this to mandate coverage standards not just for the new people they were going to insure, but for everyone. I did not appreciate the significance of this part until recently as a result of the Catholic Church brouhaha. Now I realize that they intend to reshape all policies – public and private – to meet some set of standards they are defining as they go. To my knowledge, MA law did nothing like this.

At the time when the ObamaCare bill was still in draft form, I read thru the entire thing (or very large parts of it) and was amazed that everywhere it talked about cost control, it was all pure speculation. They clearly had no concrete idea how cost could be controlled – but trust us, we’ll figure it out. Time after time, they’d reference some study that was done somewhere that showed promise about this thing or that thing. But nothing that was actually proven to work and, certainly, nothing done on any scale in real life (like in a state, for instance). It struck me as massively speculative and premature – and we will likely pay for that as time goes by.

But back to MA: Until now, I had been under the impression that the cost control piece was not working out that great – it is a very, very tough problem, much tougher than the coverage problem. I recall huge battles as the Governor, Deval Patrick, tried to impose cost escalation limits in insurer policies (a power he has that few other Governors possess). This created a firestorm as insurers complained they could not cut costs at the same time that the people they have to pay (i.e., the hospitals and other providers) were increasing them. Sounded like a tough situation.

I haven’t heard much about it lately since I left the state, but today I came across a piece from NPR that apparently aired recently (yesterday?) that updates me on cost control and other elements of the program. The article is here: Health Care In Massachusetts: ‘Abject Failure’ Or Work In Progress?

There were a few interesting points.

First, the Mass health law is not called RomneyCare in Massachusetts. It is only used at the national level, mostly by his fellow presidential candidates to discredit Romney. I never actually thought of that before, but it is certainly true. He was one of many involved with it.

Second and more important, I am most interested to learn that the cost control piece appears to be working – and not just because the state has forced prices down by fiat to the detriment of quality of care. Sounds like Patrick capping the insurance rate hikes was a ‘turning point’ that shook up the entire health care system and got everyone, including care providers, to start reworking their business models.

One promising shift has been to move a lot of patients from a fee-for-service model to a per patient model. One insurer calls it ‘global payment’. I recall this idea being discussed at the time (and it is mentioned in ObamaCare, too), but it hadn’t really been tried or proven to work in any large scale system in the USA.

The various steps seem to be working to moderate Massachusetts’ historically high health care inflation rates. “We’ve got some more work to do here,” the governor says, “but average premium increases were almost 17 percent two years ago. They are less than 2 percent right now.”

They also note that there is talk of holding health care expenses to a certain percentage of expenses. This seems to me a good idea, but I know liberals tend to dislike anything that tries to manage costs like you would in a business. For instance, they seem completely opposed to any notion that Federal government spending should be x% of the GDP. Any such measure, even if done in some sort of band to account for year-to-year variations, would hamstring their efforts to endlessly expand government. So I am surprised, but pleased to hear such a sensible idea is taking hold in MA in regards to health care. Maybe we’ll get Democrats nationwide to think in terms of fiscal responsibility one day.

Lastly, it sounds like the law is spawning lots of benefits in terms of quality of care: more people are going to the doctor, there are fewer emergency room visits, etc. This is goodness.

I have also read that the costs of the program have been higher than expected and that has created some problems. The topic isn’t mentioned here, so I assume it is getting sorted, but I’d be interested to more on that.

The New York Times yesterday ran a long article on benefit programs administered by the Federal government. Naturally, they couldn’t just show the data, but told a political-motivated story around it and hence the title “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It“.

To me, the most remarkable thing is the time-series data that show how the share of Federal household income from government benefits programs has grown over time, especially recently.

1969: 7.8%

1979: 11.2%

1989: 11.5%

1999: 12.6%

2009: 17.6%

They don’t really go into this data too much, but the storyline seems to be that everything was fine beforehand and the recent jump is largely a function of the recession and that it does not relate to any permanent underlying changes in programs or economic structure. Count me as skeptical of that – I highly doubt these income levels will drop back to 12%’ish range that existed in the 1990′s and 2000′s.

They have a great chart which shows the distribution of this federal income by region across the country: The Geography of Government Benefits. The print version of this is much better because it uses different colors to highlight the steep regional variations – the online version is shades of brown.

The second thing that is remarkable about the data they use is how rapidly the beneficiaries of Federal aid programs has shifted from the poor to the middle class. They don’t have these graphics on the web that I can find, but the key learning for me is that benefits going to the poor (defined as the lowest quintile) has plummeted from 54% in 1979 to 36% in 2007. Wow!

Benefits to second lowest quintile are pretty stable at 18% – 22%. Benefits to the top 3 quintiles (top 60%) have all grown significantly – even the top quintile.

At least to my ear, Democrats seem mostly to argue that more and more money must be spent to increase benefits to the poorest among us – that there remain many, many severely disadvantaged folks that need help. This is a worthy goal, but the reality of the spending points to a different outcome – or maybe the claim is shifting: now the idea is that everyone (the 99%) is disadvantaged except the rich. We all need and deserve help.

The third remarkable set of stats concern the percentage of households that receive Federal entitlement benefits.

1998 – 37.7%

2006 – 44.5%

2009 – 48.5%

We keep this pace up for another twenty years and we’re looking at 65% – 70% percent of households receiving Federal money by 2030. No idea how one funds a social structure like that – lots of borrowing, probably.

****

In Washington, the Democrats seem intent on continuing these trends indefinitely – perhaps even to accelerate them. I see no appetite from them to even moderate the cost curve, let alone to reverse it in some way. On occasion, there is lip service about restraint, but no passion whatsoever. They are passionate mostly about two things: more benefits for everyone and taxing the rich. They also care a lot about the environment, ensuring more individual rights, and ensuring we are all safe from corporations.

One thing I don’t understand about their program is that even if we taxed the rich into oblivion, that wouldn’t cover the cost of these programs today, let alone in the future (assuming it didn’t destroy the economy in the process). So even in the best case, the majority of the money to cover entitlements has to be borrowed. This approach might feel good for a while, but I don’t see how it can play out with a happy ending . Unlike Greece, there is nobody out there to bail us out – we are simply too large, even for China.

Republicans are at least trying to shift the dynamic – even as they are called heartless and uncaring by the other side. I give them kudos (and my vote) for that.