Uppity Wisconsin

You'll note that we're working on a new look for the site.  Things will still be in flux for the next day or so.  I decided it was time for a change.  Let us know what you think!

We're looking toward making some serious changes to Uppity Wisconsin, and we'd like to know more from our readers about what you'd like to see.  Changes to the site have been on the back burner for quite a while, and it's time to start moving them to the front burner.  Some of the ideas that are currently kicking around in my head:

You may have noticed that the site has been bouncing up and down like a yoyo for some of the day.  I thought if I was going to cause havoc that New Years Day was as good a time as any.  The site has moved to a different server which it now more or less has to itself.  This will let us do some specific performance tuning and make more changes and improvements.  On the other hand, things may be a little unstable for a few days while we fix things up, though things look pretty stable right now.

A quick update on some changes on the site:

• Twitter posting should now be working properly again, so most of the posts on the site will be showing up on the cruiskeen twitter account automatically.  This was messed up for a while due to the fact that the code used the old Twitter authentication,which Twitter turned off - this now goes through the new OAuth authentication and is working again.
• You should now be able to log in to the site with your Twitter account - this is experimental, it may go away again if it's deemed problematic
• You'll note that you can now "like" pages on Facebook.  This is also experimental, and we're fooling around with how it is formatted, where it appears, etc.  Look for more social networking integration int he future. At the moment I'm a little concerned that the Facebook features slow the site down a little and make it dependent on Facebook being live - which it wasn't for a while yesterday.

If you have any strong feelings about any of these features (Or others you'd like to see) leave a comment.

Yes, I know you're all dying to know --

This site is a labor of love for the people who write for it and do the tech support.  Those of you who read it can help out.  Yes, this is going to be one of those Public TV/Radio begging-for-support things, so please bear with me.  It's Fundraising Friday.

Over the 4 years we've been here, most of the financial support for the site has come out of my own pocket.  I'm not complaining about that, but what with the economic downturn and all, my pockets have been pretty empty lately.  And there are a lot of projects to work on and fund.  Some of you have been just great about this, writing for the blog, giving financial support, giving moral support, and I want you all to know how much this is appreciated.

However

Keeping  a progressive infrastructure going needs more volunteers, and it needs money.  So, in no particular order, these are things you can do to help out the progressive world in Wisconsin, and Uppity Wisconsin in particular:

• Write.  I'm serious, this is the most important thing you can do.  Pitch in.  Sign up for a blogger account (just click on the Register To Blog button on the top of the site) and tell us a little about yourself, and we'll be happy to give you a blogging account (at least until you prove that you shouldn't have one).  The more people who write here, the more eyeballs come to the site, and the more we get linked to, read, etc.  Bloggers come and go, some write a lot, some very rarely.  But if you have something to say about Wisconsin politics from the progressive viewpoint (and I'm pretty flexible about that) please write.

We've always had an open policy here on account creation.  Unfortunately, this has been badly abused the last few weeks because some knucklehead put us up on a site of easy places to use to build links to your own site.  Since then we're getting incredible numbers of requests for accounts, just about all of which are clearly bogus and are intended to be used to put spam links on the site. Because of this, we're changing the account registration policy - read below the fold for details.

After a couple of months of sub-par performance for the Uppity Wisconsin site, we've just moved to a new server - so the site has moved from Dallas, TX to a suburb of Detroit in the last half hour or so. We're on a much bigger, happier server now, so I hope we're going to be seeing considerably better site performance and reliability. We're still busy tuning the new server, which just came on line this morning, so expect that there may be a couple of little fits and starts over the next couple of days.

As an extra treat, just to see how far we can push things, you may again post (moderated) comments on the site without logging in.  I make no promises that it will stay that way.

By next week we expect everything to be smooth sailing.  We hope.

We've been considering the possibility of allowing people to log in on Uppity Wisconsin using identification from other sites.  This could include using your Facebook credentials, an OpenID identifier, or perhaps your MySpace credentials.  We're not sure if this will be used by people who use this site, so we're asking - would you be more likely to use an account on Uppity Wisconsin if you could use your Facebook, MySpace, or OpenID logins  on the site? Fill out the poll.  Let us know.  We'll likely implement the top vote-getter on the poll.

Please let us know about this or any other improvements you'd like to see on the site.  We're listening.