Uppity Wisconsin

Registration for the 2010 Netroots Wisconsin conference is now open.  Netroots Wisconsin is a regional conference of Netroots Nation.  This is a joint effort, and we're lookng for help in several different areas:

• Your early registration will help to fund the conference (and you can register on-line with a credit card or Paypal -- early registration is $25 for an individual, $20 for a student).
• Volunteers - please indicate when you register that you're willing to help out with planning, or working at the conference in some capacity.
• Ideas - we're looking for session ideas.  If there are any issues you'd like to discuss, speakers you'd like to see, or sessions you would like to lead, please put them up on the Netroots Wisconsin web site.  So far the session ideas have been a little slow in coming, so we'd really like some help there.

Conference details and registration information are on the web site.

We're making a move into the late 20th century.  Our site is now more easily accessible on mobile phones, as there is a mobile version of the site that should come up automatically if you browse from a mobile device.   Well, at least if I got this right.  This is a first pass, but you'll find that the news on the site is now a lot more easily browsable.  This will probably change later.  Let us know what you think (and this is all primarily prompted by the arrival of a new Droid Incredible at the farm - and I'm in love).

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.

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.