Category Archives: Blogs and blog administration

Both Virginia Commonwealth University and I have fallen down on our pledges to promote the Virginia-focused public policy work of the university’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA). Since last I highlighted one of CURA’s studies on Bacon’s Rebellion, the center has published five more without any notice on this blog. Hopefully, we have rectified the breakdown in communications, and I will provide access to future studies on a timely basis.

To make partial amends, I would like to alert Virginia’s policy wonk community to those five studies published over the past year or so.

Evaluation of the Virginia Enterprise Zone Program  (December 2016)

Analysis of the impacts of the program on employment and real-estate values, the features of the program that work well, and determination of how enterprise-zone performance can be enhanced. (Prepared for the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development.)

The Impact of Heritage Tourism on the Virginia Economy (February 2017) ‌ 

Estimates the quantitative impact of heritage tourism on the state’s economy, and provides a qualitative picture of the role of heritage tourism in community development in Southwest Virginia, Northern Virginia, and on the Eastern Shore. (Prepared for Preservation Virginia.)

Downtown Hopewell Space Feasibility Study (August 2017)

Studied the community demand for potential uses of a 14,000-square-foot building, located in downtown Hopewell. The study looked at successful kitchen incubators and makerspace facilities in other states, conducting a business survey, and presenting a cash flow analysis of five scenarios for potential uses of the space. (Prepared for Hopewell Downtown Partnership.)

Understanding the Jobs-Affordable Housing Balance in the Richmond Region (July 2017)

This report maps and describes the geographic relationship of affordable housing and low-wage jobs in the Richmond region through two different spatial models: a Thiessen polygon-based approach and a gravity-based approach. The report also examines housing value and crime data in neighborhoods around six different affordable housing developments to identify any impacts the developments had on topics of concern to neighbors of affordable housing. (Prepared with the support of the Community Foundation.)

Second Annual MetroView Development Tracker (July 2017)

MetroView Development Tracker provides a snapshot of land use, property value, development footprint, and jobs-housing balance as of 2014-2015 for 15 counties, 6 independent cities, and one town comprising the greater Richmond metropolitan area. Detailed land use profiles for the RRPDC and Crater PDC boundaries and for individual county/city are also included in the report.

Moon as energy conservation device. During the solar eclipse Monday, local temperatures dropped five to six degrees and electric consumption reported by Bristol Virginia Utilities, which serves Bristol, Va., fell five megawatts — or about 7.6%. So reports the Bristol Herald-Courier.

Dominion launches coal ash study. Dominion Energy has hired AECOM, a multinational engineering firm, to conduct an independent assessment of how to dispose of the ash in the utility’s coal ash ponds. Dominion is evaluating whether to close and cap the coal ash in place, recycle it, or transport it to a lined landfill, reports the Chesterfield Observer. Dominion is required to submit a report to state government by Dec. 1.

VCU Engineering joins the online parade. Thanks to a $25 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering will launch an online program in conjunction with VCU’s Medicines for All Institute. The purpose of the Institute is to  reduce costs of manufacturing pharmaceutical products and increase global access to medications. Read more at Richmond BizSense.

Artificial hip

Part man, part machine — that’ll be me in about six or seven hours. I’ll be checking into Saint Mary’s hospital to get a new ceramic-titanium hip to replace the flawed model that my DNA bequeathed me.

I’ll be out of action for a few days, and I expect my blogging productivity will be diminished for some time after that. Pain meds and clear thinking do not go hand in hand. But with luck I’ll come back stronger than ever. Personal issues have severely distracted my blogging over the past few months, and I hope this will be the last of them. There’s so much woolly headed thinking to dispel!

This is the view this morning from our beach cottage in Emerald Isle, N.C. The weather is beautiful. I’m guessing that my blogging will be spotty this week, but I will check in sporadically.

For a couple of years now, two to three dozen readers of Bacon’s Rebellion have been contributing faithfully to the upkeep of the blog through small monthly contributions. I want to thank them for their loyal support and report to them what I’ve been doing with the money.

Twitter fail. In concert with a push to build a Twitter following, which I hoped would drive more traffic to the blog, I spent several hundred dollars on a variety of Twitter-related promotions. I succeeded in increasing the number of Twitter followers, but I could see no impact upon the number of click-throughs to the blog or the number of blog readers. It was a worthwhile experiment, but it did not yield meaningful results, so I pulled the plug on the campaign.

Improved user experience. Since then, I have resolved to use the contributions to improve the reader experience.

First, I want to protect against the disruption of another Denial of Service attack like the one that knocked the blog offline a year or so ago, and I want to guard against the threat of a ransomware attack. Accordingly, I have subscribed to a service that regularly backs up the blog content. If another attack occurs, I should be able to recover more quickly than I did last time.

Secondly, I have subscribed to a service that purports to speed up the loading of Bacon’s Rebellion pages to your browser. This, too, I regard as an experiment. Let me know if you notice a difference.

Party time! Finally, let me toss out an idea.

A top goal since the inception of the blog has been to maintain a civil dialogue between readers across the political spectrum. Given the polarized state of the nation, never has that goal been more important. I’ve always felt that it’s harder to be rude to someone you know in person. Accordingly, I have been thinking of hosting a get-together in Richmond for Bacon’s Rebellion readers and contributors who would like to meet one another, promote civil dialogue, and/or provide input to the Big Bacon himself on how to improve the blog.

Naturally, alcohol and bacon-themed foodstuffs will be involved.

If you would like to participate, please respond publicly in a comment or privately by emailing me at jabacon[at]baconsrebellion.com. If there is sufficient interest, I will organize an event.

I’ve been working on a four-part series about Virginia higher-education policy since the enactment of the 2005 Restructuring Act. In juggling and updating different pieces in WordPress, I accidentally hit the “Publish” button for one of them. I have taken the piece offline, but email subscribers will get a copy in their in-boxes.

While the article, Part II in the series, is close to complete, it is subject to revision as I work on Parts III and IV, and also in need of final fact-checking. Please ignore it until I can publish at the proper time in proper sequence.

I am pleased to announce that Partners 4 Affordable Excellence @ EDU has begun sponsoring Bacon’s Rebellion effective January 1 this year. Under terms of the agreement, Bacon’s Rebellion will provide in-depth coverage of higher education issues in Virginia, with a particular emphasis on the cost of attendance of Virginia’s public colleges and universities.

Partners 4 Affordable Excellence @ EDU, a not-for-profit organization, was founded in 2014 in response to soaring tuition, fees and other costs associated with attending U.S. institutions of higher education. The philosophical viewpoint of the group and Bacon’s Rebellion are closely aligned. Readers will find the following statement from the group’s “About Us” page to hit familiar themes:

The public insists that new answers be found to preserve and protect the core American belief that anyone can succeed with talent and hard work. Yet, many public university leaders maintain that tuition increases are inevitable and irreplaceable. Rankings, they contend, count more than affordable excellence.

The chances of “fixing” the system from inside seem increasingly unlikely. Progress seems incremental at best, particularly at “flagship” public research universities who set the pace for cost and the standards for excellence.

Concerned by the rising cost of higher education, a group of “philanthropists, edupreneurs, and researchers” created Partners for Affordable Excellence @EDU with a mission to enhance academic excellence in higher ed while maintaining affordable tuition. Partners has helped draft legislation to make more transparent how colleges spend the tuition & fees they receive and how efficiently they operate. Additionally, the organization is developing an online training tool to instruct newly appointed board members on the fundamentals of college and university governance.

The Partners board of directors includes three Virginians, at least two of whom are readily familiar to readers of Bacon’s Rebellion: Gilbert T. Bland, past chairman of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and former member of the boards of Old Dominion University and the James Madison University Foundation; Helen E. Dragas, former rector of the University of Virginia; and James V. Koch, former president of Old Dominion University.

The terms of the sponsorship, as with all Bacon’s Rebellion sponsorships, ensure the editorial independence and integrity of the blog.

Good news! We think we have restored the Bacon’s Rebellion blog to full functionality. Things should be working more smoothly now. However, we’re still suffering after-effects of the Denial of Service attack and our efforts (far more complicated than we anticipated) to migrate the blog to a faster, more secure platform.

What’s in it for you?

Subscriptions. Bacon’s Rebellion offers three ways for you to stay in touch: (1) Subscribe to our RSS feed; (2) subscribe to our email notification; and (3) NEW!! subscribe to our Twitter feed. Pick the options that work best for you.

We may have lost some email subscriptions in the migration from one platform to another, however. If you do not receive your email updates, please let me know, and I’ll try to get it straightened out.

Comment registrations. Readers have been bedeviled by difficulties when signing in to make comments. We think we’ve fixed that problem, but readers may have to reset their passwords one more time. If you have any trouble, contact me at jabacon[at]baconsrebellion.com, and I’ll generate a new password for you.

Thanks, JP. Thanks again to JP Barringer with (Barrel Strength) Design for helping me through this laborious process. He spent way more time on this project than he ever bargained for. I never could have done it alone.

My apologies to the Department of Environmental Quality, the Dominion Pipeline Monitoring Coalition, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and most of all readers: Late yesterday or early this morning I accidentally published a rough draft of an article about environmental regulation of natural gas pipelines in Virginia. That draft was incomplete. I still had reporting to do, and I had not fact checked it. I have removed the draft from the blog in order to continue working on it.

— JAB

We’re back!

It’s been a remarkably long and arduous process to restore the Bacon’s Rebellion blog after it was knocked out by a denial-of-service attack a month ago. For two weeks, it was literally impossible to access the files, and I continued publishing the blog only by jury-rigging a new, bare-bones website. Then, in the two weeks following, it turned out to be far more complicated than expected to migrate a decade’s worth of posts, images and comments from Hostmonster, whose responsiveness in this crisis situation was execrable, to Godaddy, which may or may not prove to be any better. We’ll see.

I can safely say that the task was way beyond my capabilities — it turns out that Godaddy’s WordPress blog publishing software has a different file structure than Hostmonster’s — and I never could have done it without the help of reader JP Barringer. A partner in the web design firm (Barrel Strength) Design, JP repeatedly worked into the wee hours of the night. I have become accustomed to arising early in the morning and reading his email updates time-stamped as late as 2:00 a.m.

We are close to regaining full functionality. For reasons unknown, the widgets in the side columns were not restored when JP published the blog early this morning. We will work to restore those over the next hour or two. Meanwhile, JP has added some features that should make the website faster and more secure.

If something isn’t working right– if you’re not receiving your email updates, having difficulty making comments, whatever — let me know at jabacon[at]baconsrebellion.com (substituting “@” for “[at]”). I’ll get on it as soon as I can.

— JAB