meta viewpoint

You might have noticed the domain name change. Here's the rationale:

I've decided to stop writing about Michigan politics, because I moved away from MI and the subject honestly hasn't invigorated me in a while. I was trying to force writing about it when I should not have, and my writing quality and post frequency greatly suffered.

I guess I was first motivated to blog about Michigan politics when I was an intern, but didn't really have a creative outlet. So, I turned to blogging to have a voice in the political process that I wouldn't have otherwise. At my current job, people actually listen to me, so I simply don't have that overwhelming urge to blog about politics anymore.

Moving forward, I'm going to break the two cardinal rules of building blog popularity: 1) Find a niche, and 2) Post regularly. I was doing fairly well when I focused on building readership (10% of Michlib traffic according to BlogAds, 80+ RSS subscribers), but it wasn't worth the investment when I could have just posted elsewhere for 20x the readership.

Instead, I'm going to post whatever I want whenever I feel like it, and say to hell with site traffic. I figure the blog will be much more fun, and interesting to read, that way. You can find my rare posts about Michigan politics at Michigan Liberal and Blogging for Michigan Quick Hits, and some of my posts about national politics at The Seminal.

For those of you who have been following my political blogging from the beginning, thank you. Your support has meant everything to me, and I am indebted to you in more ways than I can possibly express.

To anyone still interested in reading: Stay tuned...

I'm planning on getting rid of the "MI News" aggregator and "MI Polls" section. If anyone objects terribly or wants a copy of the latter, please let me know. It's just too time-consuming to keep up with either.

I'm also going to get rid of the "Add Post" functionality. For now, this isn't a group blog.

I also removed the e-mail contact form, but I'll come up with another contact solution soon.

I've had my own blog for a year now, which is funny because it feels like it has been a lot longer than that. Online activism has completely changed my life -- it's given me a sense of purpose and I've met some truly wonderful people while doing it. This has come a long way from what I thought would just be another abandoned project.

So, I just wanted to thank you all for putting up with me this long :-P

I'm still on hiatus, but I promise that I'll start posting regularly as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I just wanted to make note of a few minor site changes:

• I'd been unhappy with the site design for a while, but I finally settled on this look. I tested it in Firefox and IE7, and I heard that it works in Safari too. Let me know if you have any problems with it.
• The blogroll in the lower right column has been updated. Let me know if you'd like to get on.
• I'm feeding my personal blog in the left column. Sometimes I'll link to political items that don't merit a full post.

I also did Sunday's Coffee Talk for Michigan Liberal, but there wasn't much new information.

A couple of "meta" issues:

1) You may have noticed the "add post" button at the top of the page.  Anyone can now submit content to be considered for CV's front page (it usually will be bumped to the front).  Although users have always been able to submit content, the process for doing that was never clear.  Also, anonymous users can now submit content to CV as well.

2) I'm still on hiatus until I can find employment.

I updated the CV section tracking Michigan polls.  There don't appear to be any patterns, partially because the polls aren't comparable to each other.

School's getting more intense and I need some more time to look for a job. So, I won't be doing any "big" posts until at least this weekend.

I'll be gone for a few days.  Sorry about the lack of posting frequency and substantive content recently.  Things will be back up to speed by Monday or Tuesday.

Also, mad props to AHFB from "Left Behind at the Fishbowl," who recently stopped by this site.  Easily one of the funniest Michigan-related blogs on the 'net.

I'm starting to get more e-mail spam, so I modified the contact page.  You can continue to contact me there.  Thanks!

Still working out some final stuff like the Feedburner issue, but other than that, updates are complete! Let me know if you're experiencing any problems with the site.

I'm in the process of upgrading CV to Drupal 5.0. All of the images have been removed, but I think its worth it for all of the new benefits.

Thanks for your patience.

It'll be a bit (at least a week) until my next update. I promise you won't be disappointed, though.

I feel kind of bad about adding advertisements to my blog. To compensate, I've enabled a way for registered users to turn off the ads.

Here's what you do:

1. Log in.
2. Click on "my account."
3. Click the "edit" tab under your username.
4. Under "block configuration," uncheck both boxes.
5. Click "Submit" near the bottom.

I know it looks complicated, but its pretty simple. No more bothersome ads!

I've decided to try Google AdSense for my blog. Have any of you gone through the process? Any advice or suggestions? My experience is that it seems to work O.K. so far. I don't mind promoting Firefox and Hurricane Katrina relief, so I don't feel like I'm "selling out" too much.

My goal isn't to make a profit with my blog -- everything that I earn is going to go toward maintaining my domain/hosting and expanding the services of the site. If I can supplement the website with ads without changing my behavior or what I post, then I don't see any reason not to. If I can do this without actively soliciting advertisers, even better.

So far, the BlogAds hive operated by Michigan Liberal seems to work pretty well. It seems like the best way to passively seek content-specific ads.

I think I've settled on this site design. The orange one didn't play nice with Internet Explorer, but this one screws with the "submit blog entry" feature (you have to scroll way down to use it) and the fonts on a couple different blocks of text. Ultimately, a good fraction of this site's viewers use Internet Explorer, so I'm sticking with the IE friendly design.