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Submitted by acohill on Fri, 01/02/2009 - 10:06.

Here is a slideshow

Steve Cisler: A community networking pioneer

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 05/15/2008 - 16:40.

Steve Cisler passed away today from complications due to cancer. Steve was an early pioneer in the U.S. community networking movement, and helped many of us in the early nineties as local community network projects were starting up. Steve was at Apple Computer then, and he was able to provide important and often critical funding and equipment for local projects. One of Steve's contributions was to provide an Apple Web server to the Blacksburg library near the start of the Blacksburg Electronic Village. That server provided Web sites for local community groups for several years, at a time when it was more difficult and expensive to purchase Web hosting commercially.

Steve also helped organize and manage some of the earliest conferences on community networking. Many of us stood on Steve's shoulders.

Richard Lowenberg has set up a Blogger site for notes about Steve. Please post all comments there.

http://communitynetworking2008.blogspot.com/

Some Steve's writing is here.

The Wired Road

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 12/12/2007 - 17:18.

Down in southwest Virginia, in the heart of bluegrass country, right along the route of The Crooked Road, The Wired Road is under construction. The Wired Road is an integrated fiber and wireless, open, multi-service network that intends to bring high performance broadband services to Carroll and Grayson counties and the city of Galax.

The effort is led by the Blue Ridge Crossroads Economic Development Authority (BRCEDA) and funded in part with the assistance of the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development. A highly energized management team of elected and appointed officials, business people, and community leaders have taken the project from a one page vision statement to putting the first customer on the network in ten months, with the long term goal of taking fiber to most homes and businesses in the 20,000 home region over the next four to five years.

Disclaimer: The Wired Road planning and implementation is being managed by Design Nine. Call us if you want this kind of network for your region.

New approach to comments

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 08/06/2007 - 08:26.

For regular (and new) readers, we've updated the site and are going to try a new approach to comments. Spammers have been a chronic problem, but we are now using "captcha" validation of comments. We hope this will allow our readers to comment on articles and keep spammers at bay.

Registration is no longer required to post a comment or to ask a question, but you will have to correctly identify one of those squiggly strings of characters before hitting the submit button on your comment.

Best regards,
Andrew

A new look for the site

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 07/11/2007 - 11:02.

As you can see, we have updated the site. Please drop me a note (info -at- designnine.com) if you have any problems.

Thanks,
Andrew

Page display problems

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 03/19/2007 - 15:20.

I have heard from a couple of people that IE 7 does not display the pages correctly, so I have switched to a different theme. If you are having problems, please drop me a note and let me know what browser you are using.

Thanks,
Andrew

cohill -at- designnine.com

Site facelift

Submitted by admin on Sun, 01/21/2007 - 21:35.

We've made some changes to the site to improve readability, and will continue tweaking the look and feel over the next week or so. Drop me a note if you have any problems.

Thanks,
Andrew

Merry Christmas!

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/25/2006 - 11:51.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers. I am deeply appreciative that I have so many people visiting this site, and I hope that my writing has been helpful. I have been blogging since early 2002, and each year, traffic has steadily increased. The number of visitors to the site on a daily basis has gone up by 50% or more every year since I started writing, and this year new records were set, with many days logging more than 1000 visitors per day.

It is an exciting time for communities, which are poised to begin finally reaping the dividends of technology, and I expect that 2007 will see many towns, cities, and regions taking control of their economic destiny with broadband investments.

Thanks again for your continued support.

Andrew Cohill

Posting comments to this site

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 03/02/2006 - 11:44.

For some time, anyone has been able to post comments without the need to register as a user. Comments did not appear immediately so that I could review comments for spam. That has worked reasonably well for about a year, but the spambot attacks have become a severe problem. Spammers use scripts that roam the Internet, looking for sites that allow comments, and when they find one, they run scripts that know how to post a comment in a form.

Spam has been increasing slowly but steadily on this site, but over the past few weeks, it has become relentless. Just over one night in the last week, more than 400 spam messages were posted, and those have to be deleted. Even with good site management tools, it takes too much time.

So I am going to try something new. There is now a user login block on the right hand side of the page. You can create a user account, and once you get an email from the site with your userid and password, you can post comments freely (the email typically arrives within a minute or two).

We will see if this works. One advantage is that I will be able to let my readers post and see their comments immediately. As always, we will never, ever resell or redistribute your email address. We may occasionally send a note to you about site administration or other issues.

Thanks for your patience.

Andrew

PCNA Conference 2006: Cohill keynote

Submitted by acohill on Fri, 02/24/2006 - 16:56.

Here is my presentation from the morning keynote. Thanks for your interest. You can find more handouts and documents in the Library.