Stephen Cobb's Personal Blog

Gridline Communications - Consumer Broadband

Gridline Communications - Consumer Broadband: "Gridline Communications, a Broadband communications company, has one simple goal. To utilize our broadband transport networks, deployed for Smart Grid services, to provide communities and their businesses and residents with reliable, cost effective, broadband access to communications, online services, and information."

Electricity lines used in new broadband pilot

Electricity lines used in new broadband pilot: "US firm Gridline Communications has joined forces with Electricity Northwest, which controls the grid in the Shap area, to bring broadband to the 1,000 or so residents in the village."

Millions of Americans Lack Access to Broadband's Economic Benefits

"America may have invented the Internet, but more than 100 million American lack access to broadband and its accompanying economic benefits, according to a new report from the Federal Communications Commission.

Some 26 million Americans in largely rural areas across the nation lack high-speed connections to the Internet, the FCCs Broadband Progress Report to Congress found, cutting them off from broadband-based jobs and other economic opportunities."

Millions of Americans Lack Access to Broadband's Economic Benefits: As reported in AOL Wallet Pop.

Sen. Sanders: Satellite Should NotBe De Facto Cable Competition

"Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wants the FCC to disallow satellite service from qualifying as effective competition to cable service in his home state."

Sen. Sanders: Satellite Should NotBe De Facto Cable Competition - 2011-05-25 01:48:41 | Broadcasting & Cable

Great Blog to Follow: Cassandra Heyne's Rural TeleCommentary

A wealth of detail on current discussions in rural telecomm regulation, policy, etc., from someone who 'gets' the value of rural broadband:

"Yet, people do live in these areas, and they deserve quality and affordable broadband. I have long argued that these are the people who need broadband the most, because broadband has the potential to transform their lives in ways that it cannot in urban areas simply by opening up the entire world of education, health care, finance, business and culture to individuals who would normally have to drive 300 miles to reach the nearest 'city' to conduct business or even purchase everyday goods and services." -- Cassandra Heyne

Give Back a Bit: Fixing the "Read More" problem in Blogger posts

I just found a problem in Blogger with the Read More jump feature, then I fixed it thanks to some helpful souls out there on the internets. You can see the thing I'm talking about if you view this post on the home page of the blog. The first part of the post appears on the home page of the blog but the rest of the post is not visible until you click the link that says "Click here to read the rest of the story..."

This was just not working on this blog before I fixed it today. The link, referred to as a jump and often denoted by More or Read more, did not appear, so there was no easy way to get from the home page to the rest of the story (you couldn't even see that the rest of the story existed).

Apparently this problem exists with some Blogger templates and not others. Using Google I found a solution and it is listed below the jump on this story. I wanted to thank the person who wrote the fix but his blog seems to have disappeared, so I am repeating the fix and thanking "swathipradeep," whom I assume is Swathi Pradeep, for coming up with this code and sharing it.

If you are having this problem with your Blogger blog then here is how you fix it (instructions created by Swathi Pradeep):

1. Back up your template code by downloading it: Go to the Design tab and select Edit HTML, then click Download Full Template. Save to your hard drive. This allows you to get back to the original template if something goes wrong.

2. After backing up your template, click the Expand Widget Templates check box (or tick the tick box if you're a Brit). Now scan your HTML for the following snippet (I used the Ctrl-F shortcut for Find):

<data:post.body/>

Once you've located that code, paste the following snippet directly below it:

<b:if cond='data:post.hasJumpLink'> 
<div class='jump-link'> 
<a expr:href='data:post.url + "#more"'><data:post.jumpText/></a> 
</div> 
</b:if >

As I have said before and will probably be saying again: I feel like I don't give back enough when it comes to the zillions of tech tips like these that I need/find/use to do my work/play. So I'm going to try to do better. I came up with GeeBaB as an acronym for Give Back a Bit and I will endeavor to geebab more useful tech learnings in the future.

Ironically, I ran into a problem trying to present the above tip because of Blogger's rather primitive display of code text. How did I get around the problem? I read about a dozen web pages offering solutions and decided the best one was these boxes to display code, as described in this post at BlogKori, Thanks!

Satellite Internet Whitepaper Downloaded Hundreds of Times Already

The launch of the RuMBA whitepaper addressing satellite Internet's suitability for rural broadband access has been going very well with hundreds of people downloading it already. Here are some of the places on the web that the paper has been hightlighted:

You can download the whitepaper here.

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