Uppity Wisconsin

We have a lot of exciting plans for Uppity Wisconsin over the summer.  One thing I am trying to build is a way for all of our readers to help crowdsource progressive news about Wisconsin. You can help out with the first experimental phase of that.  I know a lot of our readers scour the web every day, and you all find interesting stuff about Wisconsin on the web.  So here's the deal.  If you have a Reddit account, I'd really appreciate it if you would put items into my Wisconsin Progressive Subreddit. If you don't have a Reddit account and want to help out, go get a Reddit account already. 

We take the feed of those articles and pop it up into the side block on the site called "Wisconsin Progressive" which appears throughout the site.  More importantly, this gives our writers a chance to see what you are finding interesting, and to blog about it. Help create our news and help to build a list of articles that you've found interesting and helpful (but please ---- only news from Wisconsin or related to Wisconsin).  For the time being this subreddit is wide open for submissions - we'll see how it goes. Let me know if you have any questions - just leave a comment.

A number of changes will be slowly rolling in to the site over the next month or so:

1. If you subscribe to the site via email you'll notice that your nightly newsletter will be very different by the end of the week.  We're taking out the Feedburner email and changing over to delivering via Mailchimp. This should give you a much nicer email that will look better on cell phones and other mobile devices. == update ---- the switchover happened today, and you will be getting the new improved email starting on Friday morning.
2. If you are subscribing to our main RSS feed through the Feedburner url, that will be disappearing within the next few weeks, and will be served directly off of our site.  If you're subscribed to http://www.uppitywis.org/rss.xml as your feed you'll be fine.
3. We're working toward upgrading the entire site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 - though that'll take a while.  This will give us more flexibility in building the site, and a bunch of new features should come out of it.  We're hoping to include some more legislative information automatically by the end of the year, for example.

Some of you may be wondering where the heck we were this morning.  Personally, I was sitting in our data center saying a lot of bad words.  With the heavy batch of thunderstorms that ran through the area overnight, power went out in Eau Claire, so power went out in the data center.  Normally this isn't a problem, but at some point just before 8 PM the emergency power in the data center also failed, taking down all of my company's servers (along with a lot of other servers, and some of the Internet connections in Wisconsin. ) 

Recently Amazon had a similar power failure in their East Coast data center, which unfortunately also took down a few of our services, but those were all redundant to some of the services in Eau Claire, so mostly did not affect anything directly.  So altogether it's been a bad week for power. 

In any case, it's been an exciting day, and one of our servers completely died in the power surge, so we're still busily shuffling data around, but all of my clients have been back for quite a while now - Uppity Wisconsin was unfortunately the last of the servers to come back for various reasons.  We had to bring up the servers that pay the rent first. 

The Uppity Wisconsin BlogTalkRadio show returns tomorrow after a long hiatus.  For quite a while Blue Cheddar and I did a daily radio show about the "troubles" in Madison until we both wised up and decided we needed to start doing other things.   The return of the BlogTalkRadio show will be much more low-key, and will not be on a regular schedule, at least for the time being.

We will be doing, among other things, interviews with prospective candidates in the recall election.  The Tuesday March 13 show will feature an interview with Doug La Follette, prospective candidate for Governor.   Joining me on the interview will be Emily Mills of Dane 101, who will do the interview with La Follette with me, and will also talk to me about recent political goings-on in the state. 

Join us tomorrow morning at 9 AM - we will not be taking calls on this episode, but probably will in the future.   We will be at http://blogtalkradio.com/uppitywis where you can listen to the show, and join the chat room. Take it easy on me, I'm pretty rusty at this, so expect the normal technical flubs and issues.   It'll get better, trust me.