I’m setting up a new website with a weblog for J. Grundy’s Rueb ‘n’ Stein, a bar and restaurant in downtown Northfield.

Owner Joe Grundhoefer (pictured above on the left with his dad, Northfield attorney Marv Grundhoefer) should be blogging soon.

The Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman wrote a column yesterday titled: Blogged down in Web fantasy. Eden Prairie City Manager Scott Neal alerted me to it and said he emailed a response to Coleman. I decided to do likewise:

Nick, I don’t blame you for being ticked at some of the bloggers but blogging is a web technology tool that can be used for many purposes. I’m a self-employed weblog coach and among my blogging clients are two police chiefs, one city manager, one state house representative, and many non-profit staffers… and a couple dozen small business owners. FYI, our Northfield police chief’s blog was mentioned in the Strib’s South section yesterday: “Police employ technology to get closer to community”

Among many advantages, these organization/leadership weblogs help bring “an authentic voice” to normally dead web sites. And here in Northfield, a local non-profit (Northfield.org) is just getting going with a “civic blogosphere” project. We think it’s good for democracy for citizens to be more than passive consumers of media. We see weblogs as an effective and inexpensive tool that can be used for “public journalism” or “citizen-driven journalism” in ways that strenghten the civic fabric of the town.

So yes, whack away at bloggers who are irresponsible.

But keep an open mind to the other beneficial purposes that many bloggers are engaged in and don’t lump one group in with the other.

I’ve been asked to make my outline available on this topic.

View the Online Civility PDF or the web-based PowerPoint presentation.

I’ve started using a service called Blogrolling to maintain a list of weblogs in a sidebar to the right or left of a weblog. See my client blogroll on the upper right of my home page — randomly ordered.

Anyone can create a Blogrolling account and then use their tools to create a list of web sites/weblogs that you want to have listed on your own web site.

You (or your webmaster) then takes a little snippet of Blogrolling code and embeds in an appropriate spot on your web site.

The advantage of using a service like this is that it’s easy for you, the site/blog owner, to subsequently add or remove sites/blogs from your blogroll — no webmaster needed. If you’re a client, let me know if you’d like a blogroll installed.

In today’s Star Tribune: Police employ technology to get closer to community

Community policing has been about building partnerships between police departments and the citizens they protect — combining the best parts of the era when everyone knew the cop on his beat with the professionalism of modern law enforcement.

Now, police have taken on added responsibilities for homeland security. As Eagan Police Chief Kent Therkelsen said, police in this new era “need partnerships more than we ever did.”

Building partnerships with citizens means sharing information, and technology is giving departments the ability to share more than ever.

Good examples can be found in Eagan, Lakeville and Northfield, where citizens are able — or soon should be able — to read the police chiefs’ weekly newsletters. The newsletters fill the gap between annual reports and press releases. They highlight the value of routine police work — “grinding it out does pay off,” Therkelsen said. Stories of jobs well done and lives — well lived and not so well lived — abound.

… Northfield Chief Gary Smith writes a Weblog (garygsmith.net) and links to his weekly newsletter, “Around the Block.” Smith’s blog carries news about his family and everyday stuff such as shopping at Target in addition to his thoughts on criminal justice issues such as medical marijuana (thumbs down). It makes readers feel like neighbors.

I’ve started advising my clients who send out an enewsetter/weblog digest to use a plain text headline format instead of a graphic/HTML format.

More and more people and organizations are blocking HTML-formatted email in an attempt to minimize offensive spam.

I’m setting up a new website with a weblog for the Northfield Golf Club.

Director of Golf Mike Luckraft should be blogging soon.

My 9-month old Gateway M675X notebook quit on me one Monday morning about a month ago, 2 hours after I did my weekly backups.

I was as grateful for the timing as I was exasperated at the occurrence. It took me a day or so to rebuild all my applications and restore my backups onto my old Gateway desktop… ‘coulda been a lot worse, I kept telling myself.

Gateway online-chat tech support assured me that I’d have it back within 5-7 business days. I then got conflicting reports (“You’ll have it on the day after Labor Day”) (“It’s at the service center but it’s not been looked at yet”) so I phoned them. “You should have been told that we’re experiencing a 4-week backlog at our repair center. No, we can’t expedite anything, even though you were incorrectly informed.”

Arrrgggghhh.

I had shipped the laptop to the Dallas branch of Teleplan, a 3rd party repair center. It just so happens that my son Collin Wigley lives in Dallas. When I checked Mapquest for the distance between his apartment and Teleplan — 12 miles!

It was a long shot but I asked him to pay them a visit with the hope that a little face-to-face intervention could expedite things.

He was warmly greeted at the Teleplan reception area and then introduced to Ashley Kimvoraphanh, Teleplan’s Sr. Program Coordinator for Gateway. In minutes, she located my laptop, assured him she’d have it looked at ASAP, and then — get this — gave him her direct phone line and told him to call her the next day for an update.

I was ecstatic, of course. I’d expected they’d give him the “I’m sorry but we don’t deal directly with customers. You’ll have to talk to Gateway support.”

A day later I got the bad news… the CPU was fried and they didn’t have a replacement in stock. No ETA on it, either. I asked Gateway Tech Support if they could ship me a new PC instead and was told this wasn’t possible, as my warranty was only for labor and parts replacement.

And then two days later, my Maxtor secondary hard drive on my desktop machine gradually died… the drive where I’d been storing most of my recent work. I’d been operating on the stupid assumption that another major meltdown would never happen so close together so I didn’t bother with backups. Big mistake. Maxtor offered to replace the drive for free but it was up to me to do any data recovery. When I checked around, the going price is $100 to just evaluate it, then a minimum of $600 more to actually recover it. Oy.

When another week went by and still no ETA on my laptop, I phoned Ashley at Teleplan and asked her if she could plead my case to Gateway for a replacement machine. A day later I got a call from Tom at Gateway telling me that they’d decided to ship me a new one, and that Teleplan would ship me back my old one for me to swap the hard drives. Yaaaaay!

The next morning, I got my old laptop from Teleplan as promised. But it’s been 3 days now and I can’t get a response from Tom at Gateway as to when my new one might arrive.

I guess it’s time to contact Ashley again. And meanwhile, plot a whole new backup strategy.

Why is it that all my clients laugh when I tell them I’ve been in computer hell for the last month?

9.23 update: I finally got an email order confirmation from Gateway. (It wouldn’t surprise me if Ashley was the one who got them to respond.) The replacement won’t be here till October 11th. AAARRRGGGHHH!

9.24 PM update: I got this note from Ashley’s boss today. Talk about responsiveness. These Teleplan folks should offer some training to the Gateway folks.

Griff,

It’s great to hear that your experience with Teleplan has been positive. We work very hard to ensure that our contact with our customers’ customers (the end user community) is positive, but feedback is sparadic and usually negative. As you might expect, Ashley frequently gets high marks from her customers, (I wish I could clone her).

Sorry that we haven’t been able to do more more you on the repair side. We are really good at that too, but we are dealing with some major shortages of various commodities coming from the far east right now and it has impacted service. If you don’t hear from Gateway soon on your replacement, Bryan can give you a head’s up when we should get the CPU’s back in stock. (We might have an ETA on them). If so, we might be able to get your unit in and out of our shop in one day. That could put you back in service pretty quick. Let us know and thanks for the feedback.

Best regards,

Ted Hawkins
Mgr. Repair Programs
Teleplan Dallas

I’ve set up a new website with a weblog for Circle Lake Estates, a new housing development in rural Rice County. I’m working with Bob Kuyper at The Kuyper Group – Re/Max Results.

I found a new web site today titled CEO Bloggers’ Club: International club of CEO Bloggers. I’ll check out some of them and report back.

I used my new camera phone to take this photo of Ray Cox this morning in his office. (Ray is a weblog/website client of mine – he owns Northfield Construction and is a state legislator with a weblog, Ray Cox.net.) I then sent the photo from the phone to this weblog and it showed up here about a minute later. (It’s a hassle to thumb in the text via the phone keypad to go along with it, so I’m adding this narrative after I returned home.)

Posting photos via phone to a weblog when away from your PC is one type of moblogging (mobile blogging).

If you’re a client of mine and would like to learn how to do this, contact me.

Eden Praire, MN Police Chief Dan Carlson asked me via email:

“Griff, what is your opinion about the length of a weblog post? I assume that they are as unique as the individuals who write them, but what is your professional opinion? I try to keep my posts to three paragraphs and I try not to repeat info that I can easily link to.”

1. Generally, it’s good to be shorter with blogs posts vs longer.
2. People are more likely to read shorter posts

Busy bloggers are likely to post more frequently if they’re in the habit of writing short posts that don’t take long to compose. But as long as a blog post is on a single topic, an occasional long post is fine… especially when interspersed among short ones. Sometimes you just need several paragraphs to get your point across. It helps visually to include links, graphic images, photos, and other “rich text” formatting in a long blog post, but again, sometimes the story is compelling enough on its own.