Syndication

Both the Illinois Republican Party and the Illinois Senate Republicans unveiled new websites this week.  Both are visually appealing, well-designed and give the user the impresssion that the Illinois GOP is using technology effectively - especially in comparision to the old Illinois GOP website. 

Both sites use YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, which are all effective Web 2.0 social networking tools.  The Senate GOP site even appears to have been built using Drupal, the same very powerful software we use here, and looks to feature some type of forums.

But both websites lack a key feature that is so fundamental to modern online communications that the omission makes me wonder if anyone in either organization has been paying any attention to news and politics on the internet for the past several years.  I was astonished when I noticed it, but neither site has an RSS feed, which means that I cannot subscribe to their content as I do for the News-Gazette or Barack Obama, IlliniPundit.com or any Blogger website.

It's such a fundamental error that I really don't know what else to say about it, really.  In this day and age, how in the world can you even roll out a news/politics website without a feed?

(Hat tip: Capitol Fax Blog)

I've added a block on the right to "subcribe by email."  If you enter your email address, you'll get a once-daily email, usually by 7 AM,  with all of the IP.com front-page posts from the previous 24 hours.  Having this will reduce the number of eyeballs that actually see the site every day, but will allow our readers another way to consume their IP.com content, and empowering our users is  most important to me.

If you're worried about privacy, the email addresses are collected by Feedburner, not by me personally.  That's one less thing for me to do, and that makes me happy.  And since I won't have the email list, you don't have to worry about me using it to send out a solicitation for United Way.

I've been meaning to do a major "state of the site" update for a few weeks, but keep putting it off.  In a nutshell, we've been publishing on Drupal for more than six months now, and the hiccups seems to be behind us.  We have (hopefully) gotten past most of the major hiccups, and I'm learning more every day.

Some of the mind-boggling stats from this very small corner of the blogosphere, which has grown way beyond anything I'd imagined when I started blogging in January 2005.

• Over 1.5 million total visitors
• 165 registered users, of whom 48 have written at least one blog post
• Over 3,200 blog entries total, including old posts imported from WordPress
• Over 52,000 comments, including old comments imported from WordPress
• We're serving somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 visitors per day
• 150 RSS subscribers
• We use around 100 GB of bandwidth per month
• Most of the statistics above are growing between five and ten percent per month

While this blog has my screen name on it, none of this would be possible without you and without the atmosphere of discussion which we've cultivated on here, together.  Thank you for your trust, advice and participation.

In the short term, I've got a few things I'm working on, and I hope you'll make some suggestions as well.

• Node moderation:  Allowing readers to vote on blog entries, promoting them onto the front page, or pushing them off of the front page, giving the community of users more control over the type of content they want to see featured most prominently.  (This feature was one of my primary reasons for jumping from WordPress to Drupal.)  I think it's ready for implementation now, and if I get time on Sunday, I'll roll it out for testing.
• Multiple themes:  I know that I've been hinting about this for a while, but I've gotten enough complaints to know that allowing you to choose how IP.com looks is very important to you.  First will be a dark-navy-background theme similar to the old IP.com look.  After that, I hope to have a half-dozen or so choices for users.
• Aliases repaired:  this past weekend's crash of the URL-alias table has led to some weirdness in blog entries that were posted from January to May of 2007.  I need to fix those links.
• Events:  stealing an idea from the Champaign County Democrats blog, I'd like to have a shared events calendar to which users can subscribe
• News aggregation:  I'd like to have a page that features the latest news headlines from a variety of local and Illinois news sources, so that users can browse them all in one place.
• Flickr:  I'd like to have a page that pulls photos from Flickr that are tagged as being of local interest
• YouTube:  same for local videos from YouTube

But that's enough about my plans!  What do you want?  How can we make this place more relevant and useful for you?

Due to a number of glitches, I've changed my preferred RSS feedreader from Bloglines to Google Reader, and I'm pretty happy with it.

I've got some ideas for some things to do with RSS and feeds on IlliniPundit.com, and I'll begin rolling them out shortly.  (I've also got a number of other new "features" of this site that I've yet to explain, and I need to do that as well.  Yes, they're features rather than bugs.)

In the meantime, our feed is still here, ably hosted by the good folks at Feedburner. 

If you read more than a handful of websites regularly, subscribing via RSS is by far the easiest way to do it.  Heck, even the News-Gazette has feeds now, and you can easily subscribe with a browser using the latest versions of Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Some obtuse commenters have been very concerned about the amount of traffic IP.com has been generating lately, even going so far as to say that our criticism of State Rep. Naomi Jakobsson and other Democrats for thier pension votes has somehow hurt our credibility and cost us readers - all because we don't swallow the standard Democrat talking points.

I do like to post periodic traffic updates, even though I'm certain they're completely uninteresting to anyone but me - but the growth of our readership over past eleven months just astonishes me.  And I know we're small potatoes compared to Capitol Fax, Archpundit and Peoria Pundit, but we're not competing with those gentlemen, but (hopefully) complementing them.

For the record, we've been slowly but steadily increasing our traffic almost every week.  Yesterday we rolled over 275,000 total visits (since we opened in January).  Last week was our best week ever, with over 4,300 unique visitors and 17,000 total vists.  I can still remember in January when I'd look at the counter and be able to tell when Matthew had visited - because he was one of about a dozen regular readers.

In addition, we've been "feeding" between 40 and 70 subscribers daily, who have been hitting the site sometimes 1,000 times in a day - much more regularly than standard visitors.  That's the little button you see on the right that says, "XX reader

So, our traffic is way, way beyond what I had ever thought it would be, and I thank you for that.  We wouldn't be growing without the buzz created by word-of-mouth and emailed posts and the active participation of our community.

Sometime after Thanksgiving, we're going to roll out a more active and comprehensive advertising sales policy and strategy.  I'd like to get this site to the point where it will pay for itself, but that's probably asking too much.  One thing is certain:  developing a very locally-focused political website isn't a path to untold riches.

Thank you for reading and commenting and emailing and subscribing.  And I'd like to invite each of you to conside starting a site of your own.  The more independent, citizen journalists we have in our state and community, the more informed our political discourse will be.  But even if you don't start off on your own - thank you very much for stopping by IP.com.  We'll keep working to get better, and always welcome your suggestions.

The number of people who are reading IlliniPundit.com via our Feedburner feed had been holding steady in the forties for several weeks.  But over the last four days, the number of subscribers has dramatically increased to 84.  I'm glad to see that increase, but I'm scratching my head to determine an underlying reason.  If you've subscribed to the feed recently and want to share your thoughts, I'd appreciate it.

(And if, for some reason, you still aren't using RSS to read your favorite blogs and news sites, you can sign up with Bloglines or My Yahoo or even Google to have content delivered to you in one place instead of your having to seek it out.) 

I've been playing with it over the weekend, and so far, unlike most Google tools, I don't really like it. 

If you read more than a handful of blogs and or "news" sites, you should be using an RSS feedreader.  I used to use Thunderbird and have switched to Bloglines, but try out Google's new reader, and see how quickly your web efficiency improves.

(And don't forget to grab the feed for IlliniPundit.com right here.)

Via Online News Squared:

Notably, 83 percent of survey respondents who were identified by clickstream data as RSS users were unaware that they were using RSS technology. This can be explained by sites such as MyYahoo!, where users can customize content without knowing anything about the RSS feeds that make that customizing possible.

We're now regularly getting several hundred visits per day just through our RSS feed. If you read more than a handful of blogs and news sites, it really is much more convenient to read them via RSS.  I used to use Mozilla Thunderbird (a stand-alone email application), but recently switched to web-based Bloglines, which allows you read feeds within your regular web browser.

If you want to learn more, here's a nice introduction, or post your questions in the comments, and I'll be happy to help.

If you're interested in working for Feedburner, read this.  Sounds like a great opportunity.

Sorry about the downtime this morning.  I was trying to fix my Feedburner feed, and broke everything quite badly at about 1 AM, when I decided it was probably best to go to bed instead of kicking the dog anymore.

I think everything is fixed now, including the feed.  Please let me know if anyone is having any problems, and sorry for the inconvenience. 

My Feedburner feed appears to be broken, and I think it's related to my move to a new hosting service over the weekend.  I'm working on fixing it, but I'm completely stumped so far.

UPDATE:  I think it's working now, and you shouldn't have to change any of your settings.  If anyone is having problems with it, please let me know.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  It had to do with my Permalink structure, actually, which is strange.  I ended up re-installing the Feedburner plugin, deleteing and re-adding the blog to Feedburner, and resynching.  I lost all my old stats, but at least it's working.  And we were up to several hundred views per day just via Feedburner, which is quite a leap from when we first started publishing through Feedburner.  We'll see what the stats look like after a few days of settling in. 

Thanks, I'm sure, to Kate Clements and the News-Gazette, we had another record-breaking day of traffic yesterday, even without a 100-comment thread/flamewar.  The MSM isn't dead yet, and it's nice of them to throw some scraps to us little folk down here in the "New Media."

It's undoubtedly a bad time to have a light day posting, but them's the breaks.

Hopefully, some of the new readers will stick around.  There'll be some interesting stuff later this week, and perhaps even later today.

(Meanwhile, if you use the RSS feed to subscribe, new posts will be delivered to you, and you won't have to check back here using your browser.) 

Champaign County Clerk Mark Shelden has written another very informative post on his blog (and they've finally gotten an RSS feed!), this time covering why some voter registrations are rejected.

Using methods like those I have listed above, we have been able to prevent thousands of registrations from being rejected by going the extra mile to obtain or confirm information that should have been provided in the original registration application.

Nevertheless, despite our best efforts, last fall, 717 registrations were rejected for a variety of reasons.

194 rejections were rejected because the registrations were for addresses out of Champaign County. Those registrations are forwarded to the correct county.

57 were rejected because the person did not sign the registration form. This is mandated by state law.

149 were because the person did not check the box on the form indicating that the voter is a U.S. Citizen. This is required under the Help America Vote Act. HAVA specifically required that registration forms contain the citizenship question and that forms returned without that information must be rejected.

230 were rejected because the applicant failed to provide a valid ID number with the registration. This is mandated by state and federal law.

33 were rejected because the registrants submitted a change of address but were not previously registered.

The remainder were rejected for assorted other reasons such as failure to provide a birth date or failure to provide an address, or for providing a non-residential address.

Of the 717 registrants that were rejected, 281 re-registered with a new registration form.

Whenever we reject a registrant's application, we mail them a card informing them that their registration has been rejected. They are told the specific reason for the rejection and what they must do in order to correct the problem and to be registered.

It's a long article, but interesting, and you should go check it out.

The News-Gazette should learn a lesson from the Daily Illini, the free student-run newspaper at the University of Illinois.

The DI is now making it's content available online through Java or an RSS feed, which means you can subscribe, and their content will be delivered directly to your feed aggregator (I use Mozilla Thunderbird, which is freeware.).

The News-Gazette should fire whoever's in charge of their circa-1994 website and hire the people who design and manage DailyIllini.com.

My feed was acting flaky this morning, but now I've fixed it. If it causes you any problems, please email me.

As you can see, there are some dramatic changes here at IlliniPundit.com. We are now proudly publishing with WordPress, a free open-source site design program that all the cool bloggers are using.

First, it must seem like we've got a new layout every couple of months - which is true. This is our third mayor design in the seven full months that IlliniPundit has been online. But this is also a much more stable, powerful platform that I expect we'll be using (with minor tweaks) for some time.

Second, why now? Because this little blog has reached a special milestone - 100,000 hits - a number that, to me, is staggering. When I started, I never imagined that anyone would bother reading. Now, the community grows and grows, and that is both very rewarding and very humbling. Obviously, 100k would have never happened without you, and I thank you for your readership and loyalty, but mostly for your engagement and participation. The experience that I've had interacting with readers and commenters has been the most unexpected pleasant surprise. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: your collective intelligence, expertise and activism are astonishing, and I thank you for sharing that with me.

Also, a friend of a friend of a friend whispered to me that the University of Illinois wasn't pleased that we were using a trademarked image of Chief Illiniwek in our old logo, and felt that we were misrepresenting this site as being affiliated with the University. Again, the increased exposure that we're now getting is creating situations I never expected. Needless to say, as soon as I realized that the image was trademarked (which I should have realized much sooner), I began working on plans for this re-design, which is hopefully trademark-infringement free.

Third, how will it impact you? Hopefully, the new design will be more pleasant to use. The layout is generally the same, but there are some things I'd like to point out.

• Anonymous Comments: Anonymous comments are still welcomed. However, I've heard that "comment spam" can be a problem with non-Blogger blogs, so if it becomes a problem, we may have to modify that policy. That said, I'd love for you to register a fake username so that we don't have a glut of people commenting as "Anonymous." If you pick out a fake name we'll be able keep track of who's saying what.
• RSS Feed: The feed address hasn't changed (we're still using FeedBurner) and it should be working fine. If it's not, let me know. And if haven't tried browsing with RSS, you should.
• Categories: Each post can have one or more categories assigned to it, and you can browse by category, over on the right-hand side. I'll gradually be assigning categories to all the old posts, so that feature will grow in utility as that progresses.
• Search: There is now an IlliniPundit-only search function down by the links to the Archives, below the Blogroll.
• Search by Author: There is now the ability to view all posts by author, also down by the Archives.
• Themes & Plug-Ins: This theme is a modified version of "Steam." It's modified a little whithin the PHP/CSS structure, and a little with WordPress Plug-Ins. WordPress is pretty flexible, so if can think of a tool or feature that you'd like IlliniPundit.com to have, please let me know. It's pretty likely that there's a way to make it happen.

I'm excited about the changes, and I've enjoyed learning a little about PHP and CSS. I'm sure I'll be tweaking it daily for a while, as I learn more.

If you have any thoughts, comments, suggestions or ideas, please share them, either in the comments here or by email anytime.

Thank you for your patience and your participation.

State Senator Steve Rauschenberger, who is announcing his candidacy for Governor next week, already has RSS feeds up on his campaign website. His campaign website is excellent - the RSS feeds are a necessary feature, and he also now has a blog.

You can subscribe here.