original version of Laughing Squid logo designed by Matt Dong in 2000

This week Laughing Squid celebrated its 14th anniversary. I started the company on November 16th, 1995 in San Francisco.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been around that long. Big thanks to our family, friends, customers and readers for supporting us all of these years.

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photo by criollo

Laughing Squid is now the proud sponsor of the back of Frank Chu’s infamous sign that he diligently carries all around San Francisco. Frank has had a long history with Laughing Squid and has even spoken on stage at some of our previous events.

Earlier today I put out a call for photos of the sign, since I had not actually seen it yet. criollo was the first to get the shot.

If you have a photo of Frank Chu and the back of his sign with the Laughing Squid logo, please add it to the Flickr group.

Special thanks to Kevin Mathieu for the tip and Signographics for making the sign.

For more on Frank Chu, check out the excellent mini documentary “Lunch Inside The 12 Galaxies” by James Dirschberger (Eighty Four Films).

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Laughing Squid is headed to Dallas next week and while there we are having a two part Drinkup on Friday, October 23rd. We’ll be starting out at CoHabitat, an awesome CoWorking space in Uptown Dallas, from 5-7pm, followed by a drinks up the street at The Ginger Man from 7pm on. See the Facebook event listing for more info.

Special thanks to Blake Burris helping set this up and offering to host us at CoHabitat.

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I’m visiting San Antonio and Austin this week and planning a Drinkup in each city.

On Thursday, October 8th, Laughing Squid is co-hosting a Drinkup with Rackspace at Flying Saucer in San Antonio. Rob La Gesse of Rackspace is my partner in crime on the San Antonio Drinkup. See the Facebook event listing for more info.

photo by Scott Beale

On Saturday, October 10th, Laughing Squid is hosting a Drinkup at the new Ginger Man in Austin. See the Facebook event listing for more info.

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Magma and Laughing Squid are hosting a Drinkup tomorrow night, Wednesday 9/30 at Hi Dive in San Francisco. Magma is a new site for exploring and tracking online video created by the guys behind Rocketboom and Know Your Meme. They recently relocated to San Francisco, so let’s help give them a warm welcome to the city.

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photos by Mad Dog

Mad Dog created a homemade Laughing Squid t-shirt which he is wearing in these photos of him painting a sign for Burning Man 2009.

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photo by Scott Beale

Laughing Squid and StickerGiant are having a Drinkup on Friday, September 11th in Boulder. See the Facebook event listing for more info.

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Over the years various computer and electronic detritus has been accumulating at the Laughing Squid headquarters, so it’s time to get rid of bunch of it. I’ll be periodically updating this blog post to list items for sale.

Interested in any of this stuff? Contact us.

Please Note:

All payments are via PayPal.

Shipping is not included and is via FedEx (Ground or Home Delivery) in the US only.

All sales are final. We do not have a return policy.

Here’s the current list as of August 26, 2009:

Ricoh GR Digital II – $350

- product info
- includes extra battery
- includes original box and accessories

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For some unknown reason laughingsquid.com has been banned from Digg. I guess that would explain why I haven’t seen any traffic from Digg in a long time. I’m not sure which of Digg’s Terms of Use that we are allegedly in violation of. I don’t submit my own stories to Digg, so any abuse would not have come from our end.

Also, just to be clear, it’s not my account that was banned, but the source url laughingsquid.com. The error message says that it was reported by users, so maybe it’s being falsely reported as an abusive domain in order to get it banned.

Thanks to Mark for the heads-up on the Digg ban, I had no idea. Mark discovered that Digg was banning us when he tried to make a Digg submission for our post about the Muni Streetcar/SUV accident in San Francisco.

Maybe one of our friends at Digg could provide us with some specifics on this. I’m curious to know how long this ban has been in place.

I guess what is ironic is that we know that this post will not make it on Digg.

UPDATE 1: Sauce_ points out that the last time a Laughing Squid post has been successfully submitted to Digg was in May, so it appears that that ban has been in place for a few months. We have been a legitimate source on Digg since 2006 and over 30 of our posts have been promoted to their front page, but the last time one of our stories went popular was back in March of this year, which itself is quite odd.

UPDATE 2: Simon Phipps came up with a creative way to submit the story about laughingsquid.com’s Digg ban to Digg.

UPDATE 3: For the record I should add that I’m friends with many people that work for Digg, including Kevin and Jay, and I’ve been using Digg since the early days. They have an awesome team over there and I assume that they wouldn’t block us on purpose.

It could just be some kind of glitch in their system, but if it’s happening to me, then chances are other legitimate websites and blogs might also be banned, so I felt it was important to draw attention to the issue. Also aside from finding out what caused the ban, I would love to know why it has been in effect for 3 months.

UPDATE 4: Kevin Rose has removed the block.

We’re still trying to find out the original reason our domain was blocked.

UPDATE 5: Now that the ban has been lifted, Mark was able to make his orginal submission to Digg, which is what alerted him to the fact that Digg had banned us.

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Ellie Rountree recently interviewed me about Laughing Squid for Rocketboom Tech outside the The Butler & the Chef Bistro in San Francisco’s South Park.

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For years I’ve been trying to find the perfect way to do a link blog. I come across so much good stuff on a daily basis that I want to share with our readers. Much of it wouldn’t need to be it’s own blog post, plus I wouldn’t have the time to write posts on all of them anyway.

My current solution is to Tumblr our link blog:

http://links.laughingsquid.com

The links from the link blog then show up on the right-hand sidebar of this blog via an RSS widget.

The shared links are also cross posted to FriendFeed.

All of our links, both from this main blog and our link blog are posted to our @laughing_squid Twitter account.

So that’s how I currently have it set up, of course this could all change again in a couple of months as I refine the process.

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We have just migrated The Squid List into our new cloud hosting environment and it now has its very own domain name: squidlist.com

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photo by Scott Beale

On May 12th 1999 our very first server, the now retired squid1, went online at Rackspace. We’ve been leasing Linux servers in their data centers ever since. We started off using the now defunct Cobalt RaQ servers, evolving over time to our current line-up of Dell PowerEdge servers running Parallels Plesk. A couple of weeks ago we launched our new cloud hosting services on Rackspace’s cloud infrastructure.

Rackspace has been an amazing partner over the last decade and a critical component to the success of our web hosting operations. We look forward to the next 10 years working with them as we both move further into the cloud.

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illustration by Doctor Popular

This Saturday, May 9th Laughing Squid, Combots and the Robotics Society of America are hosting a Super Secret Robot Party in San Francisco as a fundraiser for RoboGames 2009, which takes place June 12-14 in San Francisco

For more info, follow @robogames on Twitter.

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We have just launched our new cloud hosting service, for more info check out our new cloud hosting site http://laughingsquid.us.

With cloud hosting, data is stored on clusters of servers, instead of a single stand-alone server. This provides increased reliability, reducing the risk of downtime by removing a single point of failure. It also allows for better scaling of resources when there is high traffic or load spikes.

Here are some of the advantages cloud hosting offers over our standard web hosting services.

Laughing Squid has partnered with Rackspace, whose servers and data center we have been using for 10 years, to offer our new cloud hosting service on The Rackspace Cloud.

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Laughing Squid has had some form of an all black website over 13 years, so it’s finally time for a change. We’ve just launched a new design for the blog with a much cleaner look, that loads faster.

I’ll be tweaking and modifying the theme over time, this is just a new starting point.

If you are reading this via RSS, head on over to the blog and check it out.

We are now using the wonderful Thesis WordPress theme developed by Chris Pearson (version 1.5 should be out any day). It’s one of the best WordPress themes I’ve ever used and is going to allow us to have much more design flexibility and added features.

Of course white is not new to Laughing Squid, we’ve been using it on The Squid List the last few years and it’s also part of the design of my personal website and our new cloud hosting website.

As I rolled out the new theme, I asked people on Twitter what they thought and as expected the reactions ranged from loving it hating it and everything in between.

Now it’s your turn, let us know what you think in the comments.

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photo by Rick Abruzzo

Recently you may have noticed quite a few posts on this blog by that Burstein! guy.

Who is this you ask?

Michael D. Burstein (a.k.a. Burstein) is an old friend of mine who is a prankster, artist and social justice research junky that graduated from U.C. Berkeley School of Law in 2006 and has since worked in Bosnia, Cambodia and San Francisco on human rights law and policy. He started off as a guest blogger is now doing daily posts for us as a contributing writer. I still maintain full editorial control of everything that gets posted to the blog, but at this point I just don’t have the time to write about the volume of stuff that I feel should be featured. This is where Burstein comes in and he’s doing a bang up job.

Mike is currently between gigs while writing for us and is looking for full-time work related legal or policy advocacy and research. If you have any job leads for him, let us know.

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The March 2009 issue of Web Host Industry Review (WHIR) features an interview with me by the magazine’s editor Liam Eagle. It’s the most comprehensive interview I’ve ever done about our web hosting services. Liam did the interview by phone and there are a few areas were the transcription wasn’t quite right, but overall it came out really well.

“An Interview With Scott Beale of Laughing Squid”

In the article I talk about how we started out offering web hosting, our relationship with Rackpace (we are one of their oldest customers), our use of the Plesk control panel, how web hosts can take advantage of use social media like Twitter and our recent foray into cloud hosting.

In the same issue of WHIR, Wayne Epperson interviewed me for his article on “Hosts Explore Social Networks” on how web hosts are starting to use social networking.

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We’ve recently created a Laughing Squid Blidget through Widgetbox to distribute the content of our blog, Twitter updates and Flickr photos. A Blidget is a widget that is optimized for blog content. Here’s our Laughing Squid Blidget which you can embed on your own website or blog.

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I’m always coming across great stuff that I just don’t have time to blog about. For a while I’ve been using Google Reader’s shared items as our link blog, but it’s really not my ideal solution. Recently I started using the cool new posting service Posterous as our link blog “Laughing Squid Links” which can now be found at:

lslinks.laughingsquid.com.

The Posterous Bookmarklet makes it super easy to share things on the fly. Everything I add to the link blog is simultaneously posted to our Laughing Squid Links Twitter account (@laughing_squid), Facebook and Friendfeed. I also have it set up so that posts are mirrored on our Tumblr account. Of course Posterous generates and RSS feed which you can subscribe to as well.

Also it turns out that Posterous are our internet neighbors. They are hosted on The Rackspace Cloud which we are starting to use as well.

Special thanks to Posterous co-founder Garry Tan who has been super receptive to my feedback and has even pushed through a few features that I’ve requested. You’re going to be hearing a lot more from these guys, Posterous keeps getting better every day.

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