The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Geeking for the Masses

I've been working on techy stuff lately. I've converted two of my other sites into weblogs -- CampusLP.org and the Nevada County Bill of Rights Defense Committee. I intend to make both of them group blogs, where multiple authors can add entries. Both sites were growing stagnant and stale, and in both cases the multiple author thing can work to the site's advantage, and take some of the pressure off me in terms of making them robust sites. I'm probably going to go whole hog, and convert the rest of my remaining sites to blogs too. I find the weblog setup to be a really good way to make a well-organized and nice-looking site, and to manage it and keep it updated with new content.

I created a new Yahoo Group, in hopes of relieving some of the building pressure on the LPCampusActivist e-mail list. The list is supposed to be for activism news and tips and questions, with issue debating being strongly discouraged. But every now and then a debate on some subject comes up, and it spirals into a big debate-fest pretty quickly, radically increasing the volume of the list. Libertarians are often criticized (from within, mostly) for being a "debating society", focusing too much on talking political theory and ethics, and not enough on the nitty gritty of political action. We are generally very easy to draw into a long discussion about almost any topic relating to politics or philosophy, and that has been openly discouraged on this activist list.

So I started LPCampusIssues, a separate list intended to be the place where people can debate issues, without distracting the CampusActivist list. Hopefully it'll work. I think the list has too little nitty gritty as it is, and it seems like the debating thing has been a distraction.

I've also been checking out BlogShares, which is a fantasy stock market of weblogs. It's mostly just a diversion, but it's pretty interesting. The system is very complex and robust...very much like a real stock market. They give you 500 fake dollars for signing up, and they also give blog owners 1000 shares of their blog's stock, which has been much to my advantage. My 1000 shares of PNAC.info were worth like $270,000. :-) It might get me site traffic or recognition at some point, but mostly it's just a fun game to play around with.

And I tried digging in and cleaning up the format of the e-mail updates for this blog, but it was over my head and what I did kept producing errors, so I gave up for now. I'll try again soon on that.