Month: January 2008

Cape businesses oppose casinos

The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce has come out against casino gambling. Sarah Shemkus reports in the Cape Cod Times that chamber officials are worried that a casino in Middleborough would leave Cape businesses scrambling for employees. Here’s a juicy tidbit:

“The 20,000 new jobs, as advocated by the governor is, in fact, not 20,000 new jobs but the replacement of 20,000 jobs that are currently located in other areas that would lose jobs,” said William Zammer, vice-chairman of the chamber’s board and the owner of Coonamessett Inn in Falmouth and two other restaurants on the Cape.

Does Gov. Deval Patrick really want to sacrifice the Cape’s vacation economy in favor of gambling?

Celebrating Bhutto’s death (really)

Well, this is rather interesting. The Boston Globe runs an op-ed piece today arguing that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is a good thing. “Despite the prevailing opinion, Benazir’s death may offer new hope for democratic values: rights, the rule of law, and law enforcement,” writes Imaduddin Ahmed.

The same piece also appears in the International Herald Tribune, which, like the Globe, is owned by the New York Times Co.

Ahmed appears to be progressive (see this, for example), and the points he makes about Bhutto’s dark side are not novel. But it’s hard to see how Bhutto’s assassination stands for anything other than the denial of rights, the rule of terrorists and a failure of law enforcement.

Maybe it would be a good thing if Bhutto had departed from the Pakistani political scene (or maybe not — I claim zero expertise). But not like this.

Seeking Web design advice

Later this year I’m going to take on a significant Web-design project for a nonprofit organization. I’m not promising anything spectacular — just something that will be reasonably well-organized and up-to-date.

For my own modest sites (like this), I use SeaMonkey, a free, open-source descendant of the soon-to-be-late Netscape. I like the price, obviously, and the results are fine for my limited purposes. There are two things about it that I don’t like, though:

  1. When I make revisions, the underlying HTML code doesn’t clean itself up. To the contrary, it gets gloppier, to the point where sometimes I have to look at the source code and fix things by hand. I don’t want to do this, and I’m not good at it. It would be a major pain with a larger site.
  2. SeaMonkey is bare-bones, and provides no help in the way of templates or automated features to improve the appearance or performance of the site.

I briefly considered Apple’s iWeb before concluding that it was too limited even for me. I gave the open-source KompoZer a whirl and decided it was buggier than SeaMonkey (and less well supported).

Next up: RapidWeaver, Freeway Express and, of course, the big one, Adobe’s Dreamweaver, which strikes me as way more than I need, but which would certainly amount to a comprehensive solution.

So if there are any residents of Media Nation with good advice for an OS X Web-design program, I’d love to hear from you.