Blogs

Knight News Challenge

September 14, 2008 by Steve Hanson

I've given this some thought for the last few days.  I think that for purposes of the Knight News Challenge, and its rules and emphases, we should position a request for money here to be for a more limited area than I would consider for the whole project.  In particular, they like requests that serve a community or area - that wouldn't preclude doing a national proposal - for example, they've awarded money in the past for national proposals that cover a set of geographic areas - but the more I think about this, the more I think that the request should concentrate on Wisconsin, and emphasize the notion of supporting rural citizen journalism.  

Off the top of my head, I think that the proposal should cover some number of areas - we need to position this as a unique project and I think the general concepts should include:

Whew!

September 3, 2008 by Steve Hanson

The Democratic Convention is over, and I'm home.  Have been for a few days, but life has been busy, trying to get things done like mow my lawn, fix the gajillion little things that go wrong when you're gone for a week, and getting back in touch with my business clients.  

It's been a slice.  I really enjoyed working with all the other RootsWire bloggers, and all of the general craziness that pulling together this site and my own blogging from the convention involved.  

But now it's time to look to the future and where we can go with RootsWire in the long run. We plan to start out with sites in Wisconsin, and then grow out through the rest of the country, starting with the blogs that have contributed to the Convention coverage.  We'll keep the 2008 Democratic Convention content as an archive - toward the weekend we'll stop aggregating new content into it, but we'll let people have a chance to get their licks in on the Republican convention as well.  

Let us know if you have any suggestions or ideas!

Server Problems

August 27, 2008 by Steve Hanson

You may have noted that we've disappeared twice in the last 24 hours (once at 2:30 in the morning - man I hate getting paged like that).  We're having some fairly significant spikes in traffic, and there's some evidence that we might be having a small denial of service attack - maybe it's an angry Republican??

 

Anyway, doing the best I can with this, since I'm playing system administrator from the convention floor.

Ah okay - I finally realized it's partly an internal server problem, which I just fixed.  I hope things will be a little smoother now.

It's been a little hectic!

August 25, 2008 by Steve Hanson

Most of us are finally here in Denver, and still trying to get over jet/driving/partying lag.  I'm sitting on the convention floor at the moment with what little of the Wisconsin delegation has shown up at this point - have to admit that so far it's a little less than riveting.  

Anyway, the news is pouring in to the site.  Take a look at the blogs, and the features, as well as the Zannel box on the site, which will be showing you pictures and videos from many different blogs.

Down to the Wire

August 20, 2008 by Steve Hanson

Man oh Man, what a month it's been.  This week I've been working like crazy on Rootswire (and look for a bunch of thoroughly untested changes overnight - nothing like making major changes to a web site right before leaving on a 1000 mile road trip), working on several client's web sites, posting to my own blogs, and trying to pack up all this equipment and stuff to go to Denver.  So basically, I'm doing a lousy job at everything, including finding time to sleep.  Did I mention doing interviews with people (some of which I've had to beg off on) sending out press releases, and trying to keep our lawn mowed?  OH - and pitching some stories to a major newspaper in England (more on that later).  

So if you see me in Denver and I look like I've been partying too hard- don't I wish.  It's just the lack of sleep. 

On top of everything else, traffic on this site has been going up at an alarming rate for the last few days.  Let's hope that those database optimizations I did last week do the trick, huh???