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Just like Blue News Tribune earlier, BH underwent an upgrade yesterday. As far as I know, service was uninterrupted during it, but some nice changes are better security, diary urls with title words in them (a bonus for Google indexing and searching), and - best of all - you can embed YouTube and other vids without having to hack away at the html that used to cause errors.
This is really more of an open thread comment, but I don't see an open thread.
Anyway, Blue News Tribune got upgraded to the new version of SoapBlox (I didn't ask, I was told), and so far the only difference I notice is the URLs. They pick up the name of the diary.
The New Yorker is the only dead-tree magazine, or newspaper, for that matter, that comes into my house. And it's been that way for years and years. In a long-term geek fantasy of mine, my marvelous, elegant and bold translation of the Georgics (not yet written, of course), is lionized there.
Instead, our trip to the best of Old Media was because we were hacked. Life is so weird.
Take this opportunity to acknowledge BH's trip to the big-time by sending our Soapblox fundraiser over the top. We are soooo close.
Note: the "questionnaires" quoted in the piece referred to Mike Caulfield's Policy Straw Poll series. For those of you new to us, they are definitely worth a read. And for those of you who were around, remember what a game getting to be first became? And how Team Hillary wouldn't submit to the format?
As many of you already know, on Wednesday, in the blink of an eye, Blue Hampshire came perilously close to losing its home, its software platform, and all two-plus years of its history. The hosting service we use, Soapblox, was hacked, and for a time our host was overwhelmed with the magnitude of the problem and announced he was closing up shop for good.
While all has been repaired for the moment, try to imagine what this would have meant. Blue Hampshire, along with perhaps a hundred or so other community-based Soapblox sites would have been back at square one, and would have had to scramble to reconstitute communities that are playing a vital role in reshaping our politics to include more citizen participation and activism. Swing State Project, Open Left, Calitics, Burnt Orange Report, even Jim C.'s new Blue News Tribune. The loss, while I'm sure a temporary one, would nonetheless have been incalculable.
Using the collective might of lefty blogworld, our plan is to take this crisis and turn it into an opportunity. When each of us started our little soapblox communities, we had no idea that in the space of a few years we were going to be sitting on a thriving network of state-based progressive political sites. Places where ideas and issues both filter up to the national blogs to receive widespread attention, and filter out to the political oxygen of the state, through mentions in the press, messaging that makes its way into campaigns, activism and legislation that finds its origin here, etc...
It's time to strengthen the infrastructure of the system that gave us that potential in the first place. Chris Bowers has an important post up explaining how money raised through his BlogPac will be wisely spent on beefing up the system security in the short-term and making the soapblox network more dynamic and powerful (and open-source, I gather) in the long-term.
I highly encourage you to give to this worthy goal by clicking here or on the ActBlue thermometer in the right margin. When you do, you will be taking part in the building of a new and exciting progressive architecture all over the country, and right here on Blue Hampshire. Elections come and go, but we stand, from a historical perspective, at the beginning of a new framework for everyday people to engage with their civics. And as Democrats, you know that the more people you can get engaged in the process, the more progressive ideas win in the court of public opinion, and the greater the chance we have of getting people to represent us who hold those same values.
