Starting Points: Blogger

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May 7, 2010

Blogger Buster - eBooks, Updated Links

As many Blogger Buster readers have reported, the links to download my eBooks had become corrupted during my extended hiatus.

Today I have uploaded both The Blogger Template Book and The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger templates to Google Documents, a relocation I hope will prove far more reliable than my previous hosting solution!

I've updated the download links for these eBooks and hope everyone can now read and download these resources without any problems.

It's been a long time since these eBooks were released, so here's a quick overview of both offerings for new readers and those who may have missed the documentation upon their initial releases:

The Blogger Template Book

Choosing and using a new template for your Blogger powered blog can be quite a daunting task. What is the best method for installation? How can you choose the design and layout most suitable for your blog?

The Blogger Template Book is a free complete guide to Blogger templates, from choosing the best layout and design to suit your content, to foolproof installation methods and optimization.

Learn more »

Download The Blogger Template Book (PDF, 114 pages)

The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger Templates

Originally published back in January 2008, this eBook will offer you many options and examples to customize your existing Blogger template quickly and easily, whichever style of template you are using!

Admittedly some of the techniques described in this eBook are outdated in lieu of Blogger's new Template Designer, though I hope many will still find this useful for learning the basics of Blogger template customization.

Learn more »

Download The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger Templates (PDF, 53 pages)

A new eBook in progress...

I'm currently working on a new premium eBook for Blogger users which I hope to release in the summer.

The Blogger Book will provide a comprehensive guide to using Blogger's publishing service: from initial creation through to designing custom-made templates and hosting an entire website on Blogspot, this guide will help you learn tips and techniques for developing a truly amazing Blogger-based site.

Stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed or the new email newsletter and you'll receive updates (plus sneak previews) of the forthcoming book in addition to our regular content.

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You may also like to subscribe to Blogger Buster's RSS feed or receive free email updates of our latest posts.

Aug 16, 2009

Blogger's Case May Test Limits of Political Speech

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 16, 2009

CHICAGO -- Internet radio host Hal Turner disliked how three federal judges rejected the National Rifle Association's attempt to overturn a pair of handgun bans.

"Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed," Turner wrote on his blog on June 2, according to the FBI. "Their blood will replenish the tree of liberty. A small price to pay to assure freedom for millions."

The next day, Turner posted photographs of the appellate judges and a map showing the Chicago courthouse where they work, noting the placement of "anti-truck bomb barriers." When an FBI agent appeared at the door of his New Jersey home, Turner said he meant no harm.

He is now behind bars awaiting trial, accused of threatening the judges and deemed by a U.S. magistrate as too dangerous to be free.

Turner's case is likely to test the limits of political speech at a time when incendiary talk is proliferating on broadcast outlets and the Internet, from the microphones of well-known commentators to the keyboards of anonymous netizens. President Obama has been depicted as a Nazi and slain Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller as "Tiller the killer." On guns and abortion, war and torture, taxes and now health care, the commentary feeds off pools of anger that ebb and flow with the zeitgeist.

Mark Potok, an editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center who tracks extremists and hate speech, says he thinks "political speech has gotten rougher in the last six months."

While federal authorities moved swiftly to stop Turner, scholars note that the line between free speech and criminality is a fine one.

Turner's attorney said the prosecutors overreacted.

"He gave an opinion. He did not say go out and kill," defense attorney Michael Orozco said last week after unsuccessfully seeking bail. "This is political hyperbole, nothing more. He's a shock jock."

That is not how U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald and his prosecutors see the case. They charged Turner, a blogger admired by white supremacists, with threatening the lives of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit: Frank Easterbrook, Richard Posner and William Bauer.

Threats against federal judges are taken particularly seriously here: The husband and mother of U.S. District Judge Joan H. Lefkow were slain in February 2005 by a disgruntled plaintiff. He hid in a closet in Lefkow's home, waiting for the judge to return home, but her husband found him first.

Turner, 47, was first charged in June by Connecticut's Capitol Police with inciting injury after he urged residents to "take up arms" against two state legislators and an ethics official when the lawmakers introduced a bill to give lay members of Roman Catholic churches more control over their parishes' finances.

Later that month, federal authorities filed charges in the Chicago case.

Writing on his blog, which has since been taken down, Turner disputed a June 2 ruling by the three judges, who said a federal district judge had properly dismissed the NRA's lawsuit to overturn handgun bans in Chicago and Oak Park, Ill. It was a Supreme Court matter, the judges said.

Turner called the judges -- including Posner and Easterbrook, two of the nation's most prominent conservative jurists -- "unpatriotic, deceitful scum." He said the only thing standing in the way of the judges and "the government" achieving ultimate power "is the fact that We The People have guns. Now, that is very much in jeopardy."

Quoting Thomas Jefferson, Turner said, "The tree of liberty must be replenished from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots." He added his own words: "It is time to replenish the tree!"

Timothy McVeigh, who detonated the Oklahoma City bomb that killed 168 people in 1995, was wearing a T-shirt with Jefferson's words when he was arrested. Last week, a pistol-carrying protester outside an Obama town hall meeting in New Hampshire carried a sign that said, "It is time to water the tree of liberty."

On his blog, Turner cited another 7th Circuit ruling against white supremacist Matthew Hale, who once called for Lefkow's assassination. Turner also mentioned the Lefkow murders, although they were unrelated to the Hale case.

"Apparently, the 7th U.S. Circuit court didn't get the hint after those killings. It appears another lesson is needed," Turner wrote. "These judges deserve to be made such an example of as to send a message to the entire judiciary: Obey the Constitution or die."

Turner, who authorities said had three semiautomatic handguns, a shotgun and 350 rounds of ammunition in his North Bergen, N.J., home when the FBI arrested him, worked at times as an FBI informant. Although Fitzgerald's office says he provided occasional information on right-wing extremists, Orozco said he was recruited as an "agent provocateur" to get leftists to act in public against him and reveal themselves to the FBI.

First Amendment scholar Martin H. Redish said much of what Turner wrote is protected by the Constitution, including his declarations that the judges should be eliminated. But he said Turner probably crossed a line when he printed information about the judges, their office locations and the courthouse.

"I would give very strong odds on a thousand bucks that once he said that stuff, it takes it out of any kind of hyperbole range," said Redish, a professor at Northwestern University Law School. "I just don't see him being protected."

Michael Harrison, a former talk radio host and publisher of Talkers magazine, says examples of incitement to violence are rare. He termed them "random." As he surveys the landscape, he said, "It's easy to take a look at this and say, 'Is this some kind of trend?' No, it isn't.

"I remember plenty of people comparing George W. Bush to a Nazi, to a fascist. Of course there are suggestible people and there are mentally ill people who can react to anything. But what are you going to do -- stop political discussion, stop criticism, stop free speech?"

James W. von Brunn, who killed a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in June, had a history of hateful writings about religious and ethnic minorities and a felony conviction for attacking the Federal Reserve headquarters. But he was not the subject of a criminal investigation before the shooting.

"Law enforcement's challenge every day is to balance the civil liberties of the United States citizen against the need to investigate activities that might lead to criminal conduct," Joseph Persichini Jr., chief of the FBI's Washington field office, told reporters. "No matter how offensive to some, we are keenly aware expressing views is not a crime and the protection afforded under the Constitution cannot be compromised."

Yet all speech is not alike, Potok said. Just as the disruptions directed at Democratic town hall meetings on health care are spawning a debate about the contours of civil discourse, the sometimes bitter skirmishes on the airwaves and the Web raise questions about where such talk can lead.

Some conservative commentators "really are provocateurs," Potok maintained. "They have specialized for years now in pushing the First Amendment to its limits, and they've gotten very good at it."

Aug 8, 2009

Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter

By JENNA WORTHAM and ANDREW E. KRAMER

The cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.

During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor’s Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.

The attacks were “the equivalent of bombing a TV station because you don’t like one of the newscasters,” Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer of the Internet security firm F-Secure, said in a blog post. “The amount of collateral damage is huge. Millions of users of Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook have been experiencing problems because of this attack.”

The blogger, a refugee from the Abkhazia region, a territory on the Black Sea disputed between Russia and Georgia, writes under the name Cyxymu, but identified himself only by the name Giorgi in a telephone interview. Giorgi, who said he taught at Sukhumi State University, first noticed Thursday afternoon that LiveJournal, a popular blogging platform, was not working for him. “I decided to go to Facebook,” he said. “And Facebook didn’t work. Then I went to Twitter, and Twitter didn’t work. ‘How strange,’ I thought, ‘What a coincidence they all don’t work at once.’ ”

Security experts say that it is nearly impossible to determine who exactly is behind the attack, which disrupted access to Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and some Google sites on Thursday and continued to affect many Twitter users into Friday evening.

But Beth Jones, an analyst with the Internet security firm Sophos, said the assault occurred in two stages.

Early Thursday, the attackers sent out a wave of spam under the name Cyxymu, which is a Latin transliteration of the Cyrillic name of the capital of Abkhazia, Sukhumi. This technique, a “joe job,” is intended to discredit a Web user by making him appear to be the source of a large amount of junk e-mail. “These hackers wanted to make him look responsible for millions of spam e-mails,” said Ms. Jones.

The messages contained links to Giorgi’s accounts on several social networks and Web sites, including Twitter.

The next leg of the attack, Ms. Jones said, was a distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attack aimed at knocking Giorgi off the Web. The hackers used a botnet, a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers, to direct huge amounts of junk traffic to Cyxymu’s pages on Twitter, LiveJournal, YouTube and Facebook in an attempt to disable them, Ms. Jones said.

The junk messages overwhelmed the services, slowing them, and in the case of Twitter and LiveJournal, shutting them down entirely for a time.

Giorgi said his pages were providing a place for refugees from Abkhazia to exchange memories of their home. The Twitter page had a sepia photograph of a palm-lined city street. “It was nostalgia,” he said.

This week, he began posting day-by-day accounts of the run-up to the conflict that drew partly on posts from his readers inside of Abkhazia, who he said had been describing how the Russian army staged its forces in the region in early August 2008.

“I feel a bit ashamed for the people who lost service because my blog was blocked,” said Giorgi.

The hundreds of millions of Internet users affected were simply “collateral damage,” said Ms. Jones.

The attacks and their aftermath show just how vital Web tools and services are becoming to political discourse — and how vulnerable they are to disruption.

“They aren’t set up to play the role of a global communications network, but very quickly they’ve come to represent that,” said John Palfrey, a law professor and co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The attacks that felled Twitter shed light on the fragility of the popular microblogging service, especially compared to its competitor Facebook, which quickly recovered from the pummeling, said Stefan Tanase, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an Internet security firm. Twitter, a small San Francisco company, has been struggling to improve its security even as it tries to manage hypergrowth in the number of users and messages it handles.

But, Mr. Tanase said, “Twitter is definitely a company that is learning fast and reacting fast.”

The outage frustrated many Twitter users. Some migrated over to better-functioning social networks like Facebook and FriendFeed to send messages and follow conversations, said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research and a prolific tweeter.

“If Twitter goes down or shuts down permanently, the conversation just shifts somewhere else,” he said.

For others, solving the problem wasn’t quite as simple.

Soren Macbeth, founder and chief executive of StockTwits, a service that lets investors trade news and information about companies, said his service, which is built on Twitter’s infrastructure, was offline Thursday and still hadn’t fully recovered Friday.

“Having the service be intermittent is almost worse than having it be totally down,” he said. “It makes it seem more like our issue, a problem with our service.”

Mr. Macbeth said the service, which receives as many as 10,000 postings a day, had been at Twitter’s mercy since its inception. “It’s very challenging to run a business on top of Twitter,” he said. The difficulties of working with Twitter had already prompted StockTwits to begin developing a stand-alone platform, which the company plans to introduce on Sept. 1.

But for most businesses, Twitter is merely a supplemental marketing tool.

Ben Van Leeuwen, who runs trucks that serve scoops of ice cream to customers around New York City, said he didn’t even notice the service was down. “Sales were the same yesterday as they were the day before,” he said.

Aaron Magness, who heads up new business development and marketing at Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer with a sizable following on Twitter, said in an e-mail message that the outage didn’t affect the company.

“Twitter is one of many communication tools we utilize,” he said. “Luckily, we love talking to our customers and Twitter going down doesn’t impact our phones."