If you’ve ever tried to register for the site and were not successful the reason is: ever since I moved howardowens.com to the current hosting service, e-mail hasn’t works, so there are no e-mail notifications going out for registration.

Also, I get a tremendous number of spammers trying to sign up for accounts. This leads me to (combined with how busy I am running The Batavian) not to ever look at the new account list.

So, if you have a registration pending: e-mail me and I’ll approve it (if I believe you registered with your real first name and last name).  And in the future, new registrants will be asked to contact me via e-mail to request account approval.

I’m at gmail and the username is howardowens (humans will know how to turn that into an e-mail address).

I’m feeling a little inspired by this post from Leo Laporte to turn away from social networking sites and post a little more here.  If that happens you can expect a mix of subject matter, from the more personal stuff I would most likely share on Facebook, to more profession oriented stuff I generally saved for Twitter.

Right now, I’m not thinking of dropping either service (twitter is how I get most of my profession’s news these days), but I’d like to do a little more with this blog.

Bottom line is: People in the business who expect nothing from me but profession related posts will be disappointed.

On May 1, we launched a project in Batavia, NY to work out how to build an online-only, local news business. We wanted to go to a town where we didn’t have a newspaper so that we could have the freedom to experiment without concerns about disrupting one of our own publications.  We picked Batavia because it’s a neat, vibrant town; it’s close to our home office; and the daily newspaper there was doing nothing on the web.  Scott Karp has been aware of the project almost from its inception and after a couple of regional bloggers uncovered it as a GHS project, Scott nudged me about doing a post himself.  Here’s his post.

The Fighting 29th did an earlier post about the site. Rochester Turning also picked up on it.

The site is still very young, still under development (we’re working on a new design and adding additional features as we speak), but the local reception has been pleasantly strong so far.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, many newly minted bloggers expressed frustration at the mainstream media’s (soon to be dubbed MSM) lack of attention to serious international news.

Case in point was cable news obsession with Chandra Levy’s death.  So, when on the E&P site today, I saw a link about the WaPo getting ready to launch a 12-part series on the forgotten cold case, it intrigued me.

But that’s not the point of this post.

The point is, this quote at the end of the article:

Throughout the series, this blog will feature a daily update and preview of the next chapter from the reporters. Stay tuned.

Uh? This blog?

Go look at that link — in what was does it look any different from a typical E&P story? How is it written any different? Not only does the “post” lack the personal voice, insight and perspective of a good blog, it lacks a person — it’s just a generic “E&P staff” byline.  Nor can you leave comments on it, nor can you get to, from that post, any sort of blog home page.

If E&P is running any blogs, there’s no evidence of it on their navigation or from their home page. (Hey, but they do have a podcast).

So if the biggest trade publication in the industry is so clueless about the web, what hope do we have for the rest of the industry?

Or am I just missing something? Is it just bad site design?

I just got through saying that registration doesn’t cut down on participation on a newspaper.com. I’m pretty sure the same doesn’t hold true for a blog.

There is something fundamentally different about a blog audience and a newspaper.com audience — whether it is that the newspaper.com audience is less web savvy, or not as busy sucking up every morsel of information, or just more trusting of the local newspaper brand … I don’t know.

But it is highly likely my already pathetically low level of reader comments will decrease with registration, and it is unlikely that participation will ever again return to its current levels.

In part, maybe it’s because while adding registration to a newspaper.com helps solve a problem that both readers and editors recognize (getting rid of the idiots), such idiots aren’t really a problem on most blogs (especially ones mainly trafficked by same-industry professionals, such as this one).

Really, I’m not solving a problem for readers with registration. I’m solving my own problem, so why should you want to help? What’s the benefit for you?

Well, maybe, just maybe, without open comments, it will make howardowens.com a little less easy to hack.

I’m just damn tired of getting hacked, and can’t imagine when I’ll have time or energy to convert to Drupal, so I’m going to try the WordPress registration scheme (which is pretty simple, but does require an e-mail confirmation).

So, I’m really solving my problem, not yours, unless, of course, you find howardowens.com valuable enough that you would rather see it escape a few future hacks (with the subsequent downtime), too.

UPDATE: Pretty cool — six people registered within 30 minutes of this post going up.  Though, one of them might not have been a person, but a computer.  Since the default WP registration is very, very basic, I went out and found a plug in that contains CAPTCHA (though very simple CAPTCHA) and some additional registration fields.  It would be cool if I could link a person’s name on a comment to a profile page — that would add some value to registration, I think — but I haven’t been able to figure out how do do that yet.

It looks like I’ve successfully restored my blog … and within the bounds of “well, this is WordPress,” some degree of confidence that the site is currently hack free. (Check this TechCrunch post for more on WP and security).

It turns out that the reason my initial restoration effort failed was the following bit of code had found it’s way into my header: <?php wp_end(); ?>.  I found that only after completely wiping out all WP files and databases on my server, then reinstalling … but I did keep my WP theme, which I’ve modified a bit … so after seeing everything working with the default theme, I restored my back up custom theme … and the site stopped working again.

The main delay in my bringing the site back was a combination of being busy and choosing other priorities (such as my wife, garden and dog — you can find out a little more about how I’ve been spending my free time on Back Channel).

For the record: I hate all spammers.  It’s not like me to hate.  I hate spammers.  No punishment the devil might devise for spammers is appropriately cruel.