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Changes in the local blogosphere

There has been a flurry of activity in the Orange County political blogosphere this month. Changes that interest me as much as who is wining the presidential primaries. (Go Obama!)

First, the big news is the disappearance of the Squeeze the Pulp forum. In its place appears to be a site that could have a community, but it isn'y very clear how. The new site is based on software called DokuWiki. It looks like a bunch of semi-static pages can be created and edited by a group of people. So people will write rants and others will edit them. For what, grammar? The two-way communication of a forum has been lost.

Part of me is sad that all the STP writing is gone. Mainly because it would help people remember the slander and hateful crap. Why would we want to remember that? To inform the context of our local political history. For example, the dirty tactics some supported there. It could also encourage more long-term responsibility. Politicos won't forget, trust me. But the new resident to Carrboro may like to know how that candidate got elected or defeated. I think the blog of record will be Orange Politics.

So what's the big deal with the new platform?

We have finally arrived at OrangePolitics, version 3! You may be wondering how the site is changing, and I hope to explain that here. The biggest change is to the entire framework of publishing - on the new site every registered user has her own blog! This comes with a few other changes, for example every new piece of content does not necessarily appear on the front page. There are several ways to dig in and find the stuff you want, including: the Latest content page, which shows everything that has been published; Keywords (at right), which allow users to label and organize posts any way you like; and the Watchlist, where you can keep up with the bloggers you are most interested in.The front page of the site also shows the 10 most recent comments (as before), as well as 5 recently popular posts (based on your ratings), and 3 random entries from the archives. All of these are available in the left sidebar. Right now, the people designated as "editors" have the ability to decide what goes on the front page.

Issues

A running list of known problems with the current (beta) version of OrangePolitics 3.0:

  • Previous users are not having to opt-in to the terms of service.

Problems specifically with entries imported from the old site:

  • Some comments have the wrong timestamp. (Which ones?)
  • All content was "created" on the day it was imported.

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