The Bush Inbox Blog  

To twist the words of C. Montgomery Burns, “Invite the hounds!”

I’ve put away the Beta flag and invited search engines — that is, the hounds — to index the (small amount of) content we have.

Um, that’s a launch. Cool!

However, I’m deferring the launch celebration until I get some more content and some semblance of a flow of traffic in here.

Doggies, check back again soon. Next time I’ll have some doggie treats for ya.

I’m extending the Beta testing through September 9. Have to admit I’ve been distracted by John McCain’s sick joke, his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Bush Inbox opened this past Saturday, August 16, for Beta testing with placeholder content. Approximately 60 people (plus an unknown number of their friends) are aware of its existence.

The number of folks who have thus far helped with testing is in the extremely low single digits. But that’s OK and is to be expected. With all the demands on peoples’ time these days, who really has time to donate time to such an effort?

Fortunately, I have an ace in the hole. One of the younger members of my household — too young to get working papers — has agreed to do some paid testing. I haven’t been able to get him started yet, as it’s been a fairly busy week on the home front.

Meanwhile, in addition to testing, I’ve been compiling a list of URLs of previously published open letters to Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rove. I’ll be contacting the authors and/or the publishers to request permission to publish them here.

And now on to the pressing issue: What are tiskets and taskets? A search of Dictionary.com yields nothing. Wikipedia says:

A Tisket, A Tasket is a nursery rhyme from the 19th century. In 1938 the rhyme was used as the basis for a song written by Al Feldman and Ella Fitzgerald. Ella’s recording of this song in 1938 was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1986, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have “qualitative or historical significance.”

Fitzgerald also performed the song in [the film] Ride ‘Em Cowboy (1942).

So it seems we can regard tisket and tasket as nonsense words.

The title of this post is in quotes because I’d like readers to imagine it being spoken — by a voice like George Costanza’s in Seinfeld. You see, the title is riffing on one of George’s catch lines, a line he would state emphatically: “We live in a society!“.

All that is a (very) roundabout way of saying, as I open the doors at Bush Inbox for Beta testing, that I fervently hope we build a community here.

Now I don’t harbor any illusions. I realize online communities are a dime a dozen and there seems to be almost as many entrepreneurs wanting to build them as there are potential members. Nevertheless, I’m taking my shot.

Heaven knows the last eight years have provided us with truckloads of fodder for open letters and discussion. The angles rife for exploration seem nearly infinite, don’t they? So pour out your heart, stir up some snark, interact with one another, and have some fun doing it.

And tell your friends.

Nope, that’s not a typo. Here’s what the post title means: I’m undecided as to whether to refer to this site as “BushInbox”, “The BushInbox”, or “Bush Inbox”. I’m currently using “BushInbox” to be consistent with the “official” domain name, bushinbox.com.

Speaking of:domain names, in addition to the official domain, I’ve registered two others:

• bushsinbox.com
• thebushinbox.com

They redirect automatically to the official domain.

Regardless of how I resolve the dilemma, I plan to continue to use bushinbox.com as the official domain since it’s the shortest and, easiest to read. (Bushsinbox.com, which is intended to indicate Bush’s having possession of the Inbox, is too easily confused with “Bush Sin Box”. Heh.)

The problem with BushInbox — and I think it’s relatively minor — is one’s first interpretation tends to be “BUSH in BOX” rather than the correct interpretation — “bush INBOX”. While a box wouldn’t be a bad place for him, that’s not what the site is about.

So I’m thinking that referring to the site as “The Bush Inbox” or “Bush Inbox” would be a way to address this issue. They both have the same drawback — inconsistency with the official domain name — more so in the case of “The Bush Inbox”.

There is also the question of the logo. If I were to choose to use “The Bush Inbox”, would I want to add “The” to the logo?

My inclination is to go with “Bush Inbox”. Being that “Inbox” is already a compound word, bumping it up behind “Bush” is pretty awkward. So I’ll make the change before Beta testing begins. However, I reserve the right to change my mind after I see the effect.

So there you go. I’ve resolved the dilemma by writing this post. Do you think I’ve made the right choice?

Don’t you love the smell of ripe FAQ ready for harvesting?

Well, it took a couple of editing passes — with hard copy (remember that?) — but the FAQ is lookin’ good! The only pending changes relate to email addresses — my own and Karl Rove’s. Hmm, me and Rove, what strange bedfellows. Bleahh! Makes me feel skeevy just thinking about that.

Anyway, I need to find Rove’s official email address at FOX Noise, as Keith Olbermann calls FOX News. I didn’t think that would be as hard as it’s turning out to be. Can anyone out there help?

Right now I have my (obfuscated) personal email address in the FAQ. When I get Gmail set up for the BushInbox.com domain — which will happen before I invite any Beta testers — I’ll replace my personal address with one (of several) I’ll use for BushInbox correspondence.

I fixed the problem with the submission form. It was really a dumb error, and I was lucky to have happened to notice it as soon as I did. So BushInbox can handle submissions!

Then I had to fix a problem with apostrophes in submissions. I found a very easy to implement solution for that and it worked.

Nice to be on a roll. Now i can get on with the stuff I said I was going to do in the last post.

BushInbox is deployed! That’s the good news. Pretty damn exciting, really!

The bad news — the submission form doesn’t work yet — wasn’t entirely unexpected. I knew the WordPress plugin BushInbox will use to display and process the email submission form hasn’t been updated for WordPress v2.6 yet. The plugin developer returns from holiday at the beginning of August. He has said the first stop on his roadmap is 2.6 compatibility. Here’s hoping the upgrade

• isn’t difficult
• happens soon
• doesn’t break any of my customizations

While I’m waiting I’ll be working on

• the FAQ — it’s been written but I need an editing pass, and I’m sure I’ll be adding some stuff
• Beta test procedures
• setting up email for the domain
• seeding the site with some good content that has been previously published on other sites (with, of course, the permission of the author and, where applicable, the original publisher)

When I start to publish some good content, I’ll hide the nonsensical placeholder emails now littering the inboxes.

Here in the home stretch toward Beta testing, I’ve been wrestling with the issue of whether to require users to register and sign in — that is, authenticate — in order to submit emails or even just to post comments. Not only does BushInbox currently not require registration, registration is not even possible in the parts of the site intended for public consumption. (Hereon when I refer to “registration,” I mean “registration/authentication”.)

I’ve been under the impression that pretty much any community-oriented site developed these days that’s worth its salt will require registration. I did some reading yesterday and found that’s not necessarily so. This article on Performancing.com summarizes the pros and cons pretty nicely.

While registration is a barrier to spam, it is also a barrier to participation and — let’s face it — a nuisance. WordPress, the script powering BushInbox, makes it rather difficult to keep registering and registered users from having to access the site’s administrative section, which looks entirely different than the public sections. WordPress was made for blogging, after all, so it was not built to accommodate mass numbers of contributors.

Either way, I’m hoping spam won’t be a big problem. When Beta testing starts, I’ll be switching on a powerful WordPress plugin for spam prevention that furthermore is now supported by the plugin I’m using that displays and processes the email submission form. In addition, I’ll be running a spam prevention measure I just thought up past the latter plugin’s developer. I hope I’m on to something with it, but of course, it doesn’t behoove me to share the specifics.

So for the reasons I’ve discussed — and for plain old expediency — simplicity will rule: BushInbox users won’t need (or be able) to create an account, at least for the first phase of Beta testing.

If you have any thoughts about this issue, please post a comment.

Much progress in the last several days! There’s a fair amount of fine-tuning left to do, of course, but as far as I can tell there aren’t any major obstacles to completing the functionality.

As with any software, Beta and usability testing will be necessary. I’ll be asking friends and acquaintences to join me in performing this testing. Before I do so I’ll need to write the FAQ, a test plan, and deploy the site on Dreamhost.

On many Web 2.0 sites, the founders publish a blog to bring whatever happens to be on their mind to their users’ attention, typically site status and development progress reports but sometimes more traditional weblog fare. I think the main principle underlying such blogging is transparency. Well, I’m all for that. So check back now and again to find out how things are going as BushInbox progresses toward launch and beyond.