Am considering doing some writing for them too as I am alarmed by what the FDA and FTC do to the providers of natural health solutions.

The guys who started this site, Bob and Robyn Held, developed, tried and have had amazing success with a natural solution to Diabetes. Predictably, the FTC came after them. Now they are going to court.

I helped them on a press release the other day, free of charge, as prior to the court date, the bastards — who are recruited from the pharmaceutical industry of course — sent out a press release naming him and his products, calling them “phony”, etc. Using the media to pronounce the guy guilty before it can even get into a courtroom.

While I’m not against oversight and while I know some people get silly on natural stuff, there is something wrong wrong wrong here. And it is more about drug patents and enormous profits than it is about protecting citizens.

You really have to wonder, how did we get this far from American concepts of freedom and justice, without noticing it? And worse, without doing anything about it?

He’s also a good human rights supporter and a donor to humanitarian causes.

On Dec 13, ACLU has a big awards ceremony where they are presenting him with an award for his human rights work.

Bonnie Abaunza, who works closely with me on TheCommunity.com, is the head of his philanthropic division and his foundation. She called me tonight desperately needing a nice “tribute ad” for the booklet for the award.

I put this together for her. Got the concept, did the mock up in Photoshop, got it approved by her, licensed the images, did the final and got it off to the mag in about three hours. They liked it and bumped it up to a full page ad.

Kind of proud of myself.

Seriously. It’s a job we’re the developers on.

I had to change a few things about the name because we’re not ready to have you log on yet. But I will say two things. The programmers are having a ball on it so far. And we’re pushing the envelope on WordPress, which makes it a really fun job.

Okay so I called Whole Foods and said I need a turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, green beans and cranberry. Friends brought pies and I opened a $100 bottle of wine.

But I brought out the good china and crystal for it. That counts for something. Anyway, as it turned out, it was a fabulous meals. And none of my friends seemed to have a prerequisite that I stand over a cutting board chopping celery to make it happen.

But I’m having a really unfortunate realization on Facebook. I’m realizing that I don’t like my friends that much.

Well no, I like my real friends. One in particular — Marshall — probably keeps me on Facebook all by himself, as he posts things that are honestly really interesting. And Doug posts real tips on social media.

But I have “friends of friends” — lots of them — who ended up on my friends list because either I or they figured that because we have 48 mutual friends we must be friends by definition. Or people who read me on the Huffington Post or found me on thecommunity.com or here, and decide to add me to the list of people they like to track. Some people I “friend” because I really like or admire something they do.

Nothing wrong with any of these. And for a freelance anything, networking is always good.

And then — someone talks politics.

I have removed six people from my friends just because it was getting just too uncomfortable reading about their political views. Particularly when they are diametrically opposed to mine.

I was completely shocked to find that someone who I had known somewhat for many years posted an anti-Semitic video. And I don’t mean a video that criticizes Israel. I mean one that refers to the “Synagogues of Satan”. Really? You? Never would have guessed that.

The problem with this is that when you post something like this, all you as the poster see are the congratulatory messages of the friends who agree with you. You don’t see the people you are alienating. Or the people who quietly slip over and “defriend” you when you’re not looking just because they don’t want to keep having to read things that make their blood boil on their Facebook page.

I have clients and potential clients on Facebook. I have people who I contract or could contract for services. I use designers, for example. I almost never know anything about their politics when I hire them, nor do I care. I care about the quality of their design work. But when they’ve become “Facebook friends”, it changes everything. Now I know where they went last weekend, who they had over for dinner — and how they feel about conservatives/liberals.

Unfortunately, when I’ve “defriended” someone, it also means that next time I need the kinds of services that they offer, I likely won’t call them — because now, instead of focusing on their design work, I have to fight the disbelief that anyone with an IQ would support the kinds of political candidates they support. (They would probably, by the way, feel the same about me).

We probably all would have worked together just fine until Facebook changed the whole equation on our relationships.

So what do you do? Refrain from talking religion or politics, as if this were a dinner party that you don’t want to upset? Or have at it, share what you feel, and risk losing potential clients, colleagues and business associates?

Over the last week or so I have been playing around with a color combination I liked. Put it up on the site and surveyed a few friends. Enough of them didn’t like it that I was taking it down. Thought I’d take a new approach.

I uploaded a bunch of new php files to the site and activated them.

The whole site went blank. After many attempts to fix, it just sat there staring at me accusatorily, blank.

The worst part is, I know how to not do this. But I was working late at night and must have forgotten to do something.

OK it happens. You can do something stupid. You don’t panic, you don’t cry. Because you always have backups and you just restore the backups. Right?

Unless it’s your own site. Yes, I do backups. But I had gotten lazy about backing up my database. On this site, without the database, the content of the entire site was pretty much gone.

Fortunately it’s not a deep site. It’s pretty much my portfolio and a bit of a blog. So I just started recreating. Someone was going to be looking at the site in the morning, so I resigned myself to a late night.

Just as a cruel joke, at about 3 in the morning and my espresso machine decided that now was a good time to start sounding like a jet liner, and plunked exactly one sixteenth of an inch of coffee in the bottom of my cup. But even that, I survived.

On my way to bed, it occurred to me — I have backups of all of my clients’ sites. I have backups of their databases. I even periodically go in and do fresh backups of them. I treat them like they are my little chickens. I assume they’re going to make a mistake along the way and I try to watch their backs on it.

So why not for my own site??

I guess I’m no one’s little chicken.

It’s almost a joke among other web developers I talk to, that we never have time to put in on our own web sites. I know some really good developers who have some pretty bad web sites, with unfinished pages and broken links. You hear the words “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” alot.

I know, I know — it’s my marketing tool, my communication channel to potential customers, etc. It’s not even that I don’t know that. Maybe it’s just that the cobbler, when he’s been making shoes all day, when he finally puts his tools away and walks away from his tool bench, the last thing he wants to do is make shoes.

Whatever the reason, I ended up with a new look for the site that I like much better. It’s not completely done, it probably also has some unfinished pages and broken links, because hey, I am still a web developer. I don’t want to completely break tradition.