- Community
- Joep set up wiki.seasteading.org, so we now have a wiki!
- Blog uptake picked up considerably, as did website traffic:
- Biggest blog was Marginal Revolution, which gave a nice boost to website traffic – Friday 4/25 was our best day so far (9500 pages, 2500 visits).
- Also an article in Reason appeared today: Homesteading on the High Seas: Floating Burning Man, “jurisdictional arbitrage,” and other adventures in anarchism
- Most amusing to me was a Swedish post titled “OMFG!!! BioShock IRL!!!”, really crappy machine translation.
- Current monthly run-rate is about 50K visits/mo. And we’ve had 50 user registrations in our first 2 weeks, which is excellent.
- First donations! €100 (Joep), $50 (private).
- Talked to Floating Islands International about possible collaboration.
- Administrative
- We have a board meeting this week, and will be finalizing 2007 strategy so we can get some job/volunteer reqs and projects posted.
- We’re on track to apply for nonprofit status in a couple weeks.
- Wayne toured some potential office/workshop/dock space in Redwood City, there’s also a conference center on the water there we might snag for our first conference in the fall.
- Research – natch
- Engineering – Wayne wrote up a Base Seastead design to serve as a strawman for discussion. We talked to a helpful offshore structure engineer and got a lot of useful info about how to set up our research program.
NEW BLOG POST
To me, the most amusing thing about that awful Swedish translation is the repeated occurrence of the word “duck”. Perhaps the translation software is making a statement about the organisms it considers best suited to the project…
On an entirely unrelated note, here’s some constructive (I hope) criticism of the web interface here. I’m a bit frustrated that my browser’s built-in spell-check doesn’t function in this text field. Or its built-in right-click menu. And that hitting “enter” always scrolls the whole browser window so the input point is at the very bottom of the screen. And that the “plain text editor” alternative is an uncomfortably narrow text area in a very different part of the screen. And that after hitting “Preview” from the plain text editor, my comment gets converted back to “rich text” form, but incorrectly (so hitting “Preview” again, or presumably “Post”, totally mangles the formatting). I don’t know exactly what fancy Web 2.0 technology you’re using to run this thing, but I recommend downgrading to Web 1.9.