8 Ways to Sunday

I got a big fat load of comment spam for New Years Eve — about 300 spams, to be specific. Kitten’s Spaminator doesn’t seem to be doing the trick anymore, so I’m moving to Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma. It appears to be more aggressive at keeping spam out; unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to like the 1.2 pre-release version of WordPress that I’m running. The “mass edit” mode for comment deletion also doesn’t do anything in 1.2 RC1, which makes disposing of the remaining 245 rape-and-incest porn spams a real headache. Looks like it’s time for a blogware upgrade as well.

If the move to WordPress 1.5 (yes, it’s 1.5 now) and the addition of a new spam blocker cause havoc, please be patient. I hope to have the remaining spams gone by midnight, and I’m crossing my fingers that I don’t break anything in the process. Meanwhile I’ve beefed up my WordPress block list, so hopefully any spam posted between now and then will at least be shunted into the moderation queue. (more…)

First, a bit of background is in order so that the vast majority of people who have no idea what prospect research is will have some idea where I’m coming from.

If you’ve read my about page, you know that I work in a field called prospect research. What does this mean? When I’m feeling flippant I like to say that I find rich people for a living, but there’s more to it than that. The official description from the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA) does a pretty good job of explaining things, but it’s laden with just enough biz-speak to make it somewhat mind-numbing to those outside the fundraising profession.

Here’s my nutshell explanation: I collect information from the Internet, public records, and the electronic and paper records of the college I work for. I analyze and distill that information to help ensure that my school’s gift officers (the people who ask in person for the big donations) are spending their time and the school’s money visiting only those alumni and constituents who have both the financial capacity to make a large gift to the college and the affinity to do so. If someone doesn’t have both ingredients — or at least the potential to have them in the future — then they fall into another pool of potential donors, suitable for phone and mail solicitation. In short, people like me help make sure that your alma mater doesn’t come knocking on your door with its hand out for $25,000 unless you can really afford it.

“That’s great,” I hear you saying, “but what are the privacy implications of work like this?” Glad you asked, O theoretical reader in my head!

APRA’s Statement of Ethics, which members must adhere to, contains very specific guidelines and limitations on the gathering, storage, and dissemination of donor and prospect information. Discussions of ethics and privacy issues occur regularly on the prospect research mailing list, and I have never seen any other professional community so earnestly preoccupied with ethical behavior and privacy issues. Along with the Statement of Ethics, APRA also supports a Donor Bill of Rights and has issued a position paper on privacy matters.

If I didn’t believe that the ethical standards of this profession were sound and the privacy protections employed for potential donors adequate, I would find work in another field. By and large, when it comes to prospect research you can be comfortable that you are in good hands. Which is where the controversy at the ACLU, and the media attention lavished on it, comes in… (more…)

I finally got around to putting a picture up on my about page. I shall now brace myself for the swarm of groupies that will no doubt follow.

Apple is jumping into the cell phone market with partner Motorola. According to an article in Forbes magazine, the “iPhone” is rumored to feature music playing ability and will probably be marketed as an accessory to the popular Apple iPod.

(Props: Mike Davidson, who tends to go on a bit about his predictive prowess )

One of the reasons I’ve avoided using the XHTML 1.0 Strict DOCTYPE is that it doesn’t include the target attribute, which I use occasionally to open outside sites in a new window. It’s possible to do the same thing with JavaScript, but JavaScript may be turned off by your visitors for any number of reasons. What to do?

XHTML modularization to the rescue! Accessify.com has instructions on how to put together your own custom XHTML 1.1 Strict DOCTYPE, pulling in the XHTML module that allows you to use target and still validate. Slick!

NOTE: There are good reasons to just stick with the transitional DOCTYPE for now, mostly having to do with the way JavaScript operates in an XML environment vs. an HTML environment and with the known difficulties of properly serving strict XHTML using the application/xhtml+xml MIME type. Mark Pilgrim has written an excellent article for XML.com covering both issues. He’s also written a compelling weblog entry detailing a scenario in which the combination of strict XHTML, intolerant parsers, and invalid trackbacks and comments could cause a web site meltdown.

I’m looking forward to the day when such issues are resolved, so that this technology can get out of limbo and onto the web. Don Park has a good idea of how to do this with his “biased liberal” approach to XML parsing. I don’t expect such common sense to take hold any time soon, however, and from Don’s follow-up posts it sure doesn’t look promising. My guess is that either users will have to scream for this feature — or Microsoft will have to implement it first — before we see it catch on elsewhere.