Uppity Wisconsin

You may have been noticing that the site has been more than a little squirrely for the last 12 hours or so.  We're having more than a little trouble with one of our advertisers' ad servers.  So for the nonce, no ads.  We're working on it.

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.

You may have noticed a string of spam on the site - that's what I get for, you know, sleeping.  At the moment I'm too busy running around in Madison to figure out if this is some outgrowth of the Conficker worm, or just a slug of people trying to take over the site.

In any case, for the time being new accounts on the site are going to have to be approved by me - which in this case means that nobody will be able to make a new account and blog the same day.  Or perhaps the same week. I hate that, since I've always wanted this site to be open to differing viewpoints and to be an easy resource to use - but still, we've been sending out a lot of tripe on our RSS feed since last night, and it's time for it to stop - as to what the policy will be in the long run, I'm not sure, But at least until I get back to Downsville, you're going to have to convince me that you're an earnest soul to blog on the site.

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.

You may have noticed that we've been down for the count for a while today - we had some performance issues on our web server, which we had previously thought was resolved earlier in the day.

Further study of the ongoing problem indicates that we're being deluged with comment spam from machines all around the internet.  This is at times fairly overwhelming, and is spinning the wheels of our web server very hard as it tries to filter and reject the comments.  Since this is apparently from a large set of "owned" machines all over the Internet, we can't easily block this traffic. The attacks seem to be coming in waves every few hours.

For at least the time being, we are turning off the ability to make anonymous comments on the site, so you will not be able to comment without first logging in.  This should help to reduce the load on the server, and perhaps allow us to stay up. At the moment it's about all we can do to help with the problem.

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.

The ScreamYou may have noticed that Uppitywis was out of commision most of last night and into this morning.  We're in the process of re-thinking our web hosting arrangement because our current arrangement is going to disappear in January.  We're investigating several different hosting paradigms for Uppity Wisconsin and the other web sites my company supports.  As part of that we moved Uppity Wisconsin yesterday to a smaller server arrangement, along with several other web sites, and the resources required really swamped the new server (we thought this might happen) so as of this morning we're back on our parent company's own web server, at least for the time being.

So - it's possible you'll see some occasional outages over the next few weeks as we try to move to a new hosting solution that we can actually afford for the site, and that will handle the load.  We're working on it, but we don't have much money to work with and this site is actually fairly popular, and the economic downturn is having some effect on our ability to find low-cost hosting.

We're working on a few different infrastructure projects here at Uppity Wisconsin - 

The first of these is to make email subscriptions possible.  Over the next few days those of you who have accounts on the site will start seeing links at the bottom of articles allowing you to subscribe to an individual article, a type of article, a particular author, or a set of topics.  You can manage all of these from your "My account" page on the site.

If you don't have an account - so sign up already!!

Okay -

The election is over.  Life is good.   Mostly.  Unless you look at your 401(k) statement. Or are gay.  Or poor. Or unemployed. Or a veteran. 

Hmm - maybe not so good after all.  

I've been running and supporting this site for about 2-1/2 years now - it's hard to believe it's been that long, but it has. Lots of people have contributed over that time, and the last I looked we had close to 15,000 readers per month, which I guess means something (though I'm not always sure what).

Anyway, I like to think that what we're all doing here is worthwhile in some way, and could be more so.  But there are some problems:

1.  We need to think about sustainability.  I don't think that "Steve pays for it" is a good sustainability model. I'd like to see something different happen - I really appreciate the fact that some of you have stepped up to the plate and contributed when I've asked - but it's been a pretty small number of contributions, and it's not financially viable, especially considering what my income has been for the past year.

2.  It's time to re-think what we're doing here. This was a high-tech site when it launched, but it has been pretty static for the last year or so, mostly due to lack of time and other resources.  I think it's time to make a leap forward, but I'm not sure what that should be . I have some ideas, but I'd like to know what our readers think.  Let me know what you think Uppity Wisconsin should do in the coming year - how should we change, what new features or ideas should be incorporated?  And how can we get more contributors?  

What keeps you from being a contributor, or commenting, or otherwise contributing? 

If you are writing here - what would you like to see change? 

Please leave your comments - we'd all like to know.

The November election in Wisconsin is quickly becoming a battleground that may determine the direction of the country for the next four years. 

Uppity Wisconsin is trying to help by raising funds for progressive candidates in Wisconsin and the US.  You can contribute to the Uppity Fund by clicking on the widget on the left part of the site, or by going to our fundraising page .  Currently we're raising money for Tara Johnson, Alison Page, Jeff Smith, the Progressive Patriots, Tammy Baldwin, Chris Danou, and Barack Obama. You may make a one-time contribution by credit card, or make a recurring monthly contribution.

Contributing this way is easy, fast, and secure.  We'd like to thank the good people at Act Blue for making this easy for everyone. Help us break the thermometer by contributing.

Please let us know if there are other Wisconsin candidates you would like us to include and we'll be happy to consider it.

As you may or may not know, Uppity Wisconsin is the credentialed state blog organization for the Democratic Convention.

We'll be bringing you coverage of the whole convention from a Wisconsin point of view.  I will be seated with the Wisconsin delegation on the convention floor (embedded, so to speak) and will be trying to give you coverage of the Wisconsin delegates and other Wisconsin-related issues.  

But you can help - please leave comments below on what you would like to hear about from the convention.  We want to serve the readers on this site, so it would be helpful if you could direct us.

Over the next few weeks we'll be talking to some of the delegates in preparation for the convention.

We're also building a reporting network of many of the other grassroots organizations covering the convention.  This is part of the RootsWire project, something that has been taking up a lot of time and effort over the last few months.  Come visit us and take a look .  We will not only be pulling together coverage of the convention, but are also starting to pull together blogs from around Wisconsin.

Some time over the weekend we'll be introducing a new feature on Uppity Wisconsin - Legislative Profiles. With some help from our great good friends at the Sunlight Foundation, we will have a profile for each of your federal legislators, with a lot of information about them, where their donations come from, and a lot more.

Well - that was less work than I'd thought. It's a little rough around the edges, but the Wisconsin Federal Legislature profiles are now on-line. Click on the legislators name in the block on your left, and learn about their contributors, earmarks, and funding in their districts. Let us know if this is helpful information.

Today has been a much more exciting day here at the conference.  Video and pictures (I hope) later. 

There are several recurring themes:

• Community Building - how do you succeed with this?
• Building a financially self-perpetuating model (dear to my heart)
• Collaboration between sites and how to promote that.

There is a remarkably large contingent of cheeseheads here.  We are in the process of working on a plan for all of the above.  More later after I believe it's actually under way - but there's a lot of exciting stuff going on.

John NicholsIn other Wisconsin news - John Nichols gave a really great talk this morning in regard to the direction that journalism is taking, and how the Cap Times is part of that (and how some of it has not worked).

For the next week I'm going to be on the road doing a bunch of interesting things. I'll be blogging on them occasionally.

• Wednesday and Thursday I will be at Journalism That Matters, discussing Citizen Journalism and Placeblogging with many other kindred spirits from around the US.
• Friday through Sunday I will be at the National Conference for Media Reform , doing still more of the same.
• Tuesday I'm giving a talk on Internet participation at the Wisconsin Nonprofits Association 2008 Summit.