December 06, 2003
Missing Right Column/Formatting difficulties

I noticed that the right column appears to have disappeared on the main page here. I don't know why -- though I've been having similar issues at another blog on this site.

If you're not seeing the right column (with recent links and archives and stuff), you can click here to see this entry by itself, but with that stuff on the right side. I'll try to fix the main index page later today.

Posted by Lance Brown at 04:41 AM
July 30, 2003
Links to all the Free View entries

I've been trying to figure out a way to display a list of all the entries at the site on a page using MovableType, and I finally stumbled upon it when repairing the way the home page was displaying. The page has existed all along, I just hadn't caught on to that fact.

It's really good news that I found it -- it makes for a good flyover view of the site. And now that I found that page, I can work with it to make category and date-based pages that have the list of links like this one. Some of my entries are pretty long, and often there's not a lot of rhyme or reason to any given grouping of them. All the archive pages now display a big long page of entry after entry, making it less likely that readers will find the entries that best suit them, particularly as the site grows over the years.

Now you can get from one end of the site to the other all on one page:

The All Entries Page

That's probably not the lasting title for the page...I've got to come up with something better. I'm sorting through the options...mostly I'm just glad to have found it. Also, it's all the entries, but not quite all the pages. There are still a few pages from the old setup that I haven't converted into blog entries yet, plus there are entries from the two other blogs on the site that aren't on that page. I should be able to make an integrated page (with all the entries in all three blogs) soon.

I've added a link to this page under "Archives" in the right column of the site.

Posted by Lance Brown at 12:00 AM
July 01, 2003
Over 50,000 (pageviews) Served

The various non-profit and political websites I run served up over 50,000 pages in June -- 55,646 to be exact. 19,059 of those pages were served up from this web site right here, while 10,048 were served at StopCarnivore.org, and 12,749 at PNAC.info. FutureSolutions.org led the bottom tier with 4,204 pages, while my barely-existing NoMoreDrugWar.com site had a pitiful 375 pageviews.

Freedom2008.com had 7,059 visits in June, which isn't quite glee-making, but which is an all-time high for the site, and just a hair under 10 times the number of visits a year ago. If I can keep that trend up, the site will have about 600 million visits in June of 2008. That would be nice. ;-)

I don't know if I can keep the traffic increasing tenfold each year, but I am quite confident I can do so this coming year. I fully expect that there will be at least 70,000 visits here in June 2004, which is a pretty darn good start. 700,000 a month in 2005 doesn't seem out of reach either. That would be glee-making...but I'm not willing to predict that one quite yet.

Most of the visits seem to be through search engines -- I am all over Google like a cheap suit, as well as most of the other search sites. You wouldn't believe some of the search terms this site comes up on. I'll post a list some time when I have time to make one up. It seems like people must get drawn in by the title of the site, because people click-through from a lot of searches where this site would not look like a proper result.

Some surprising findings from my stats review:

--E-Actions for Freedom and The Little Brown Reader have been a significant draw -- about 1,200 of this month's pageviews were at those two places. They are only a week and 4 days old respectively, so that's a promising amount of activity. I've posted around 50 entries at the two sites, and I think a lot of traffic is coming in from the various blog collating sites.

--While all but one of my other sites had less than 2 pageviews per visit, Freedom2008.com had almost 3 pageviews per visit on average, which indicates that people are looking around a bit when they get here.

--StopCarnivore.org's results were surprising simply because I haven't done any updating or promoting of that site in quite a while. The interest level there hasn't really flagged much over time, after the initial big rush faded down. That site is easily the overall most-visited of all the non-profit sites I've had.

--My three poetry pages over at FutureSolutions.org had almost 1000 pageviews, which isn't very remarkable, but which strikes me as weird and funny. It's strange to think that thousands of people have read my poems over the years. Strange but true.

--Sadly, there are still not too many non-search sites linking to here, but I think that the coming year will see a serious uptick in such links. One upside to that is that most of my traffic is coming from non-libertarian sources. I'm not really worried about winning over Libertarians -- we already agree, and I plan to win their support largely by my ability to appeal to non-libertarians. If I can hoe that row, I think Libertarians will be happy to support me, and I don't think that getting their attention will be very difficult.

One thing's for sure -- no other 2008 presidential candidate served up almost 20,000 campaign site pages to the voters last month. :-)

The totals above don't include PeoplesForum.com, the web community I run. There, membership went up almost 10% last month, and we had an unprecedented 2.5 million pageviews. If you assume every one of our 7914 members is an active poster -- the reality is probably more like a few thousand of them -- that comes out to a stunning 316 pageviews per member. It's probably actually around five or six hundred pageviews per member. It's good stuff, any way you slice it -- more than twice the traffic of the month before. One of our competitors has been having major server difficulties, and PF (as it's called) has become the refuge for hundreds of new wayward souls.

I'm becoming more convinced that PeoplesForum.com is going to triumph in the web community business simply by being one of the only places that doesn't collapse. I couldn't count all the major web forum places that have come and gone in the time since PF opened on all my fingers and toes. Someday I'm going to write an entry here about "governing" PeoplesForum.com, and what I've learned there. My policies there are very libertarian, in contrast with every other mainstream forum place, and by and large I think people love that fact.

Anyway, there's my web presence update. I think it's looking pretty good at this stage in the game.

I think I'm going to write an entry clarifying some of the things I said yesterday in my "Essential Hurdle for Libertarians" piece. I agree with the things I said, I just feel like I left some things unsaid. That entry kind of wrote itself -- it was actually supposed to be about something entirely different -- the sad state of the Democratic Party and the 2004 candidates. But it took on a life of its own, and I feel like it left some questions unanswered or something. It was listed in Rational Review News Digest today, which means lots of libertarians are probably going to be scrutinizing it -- believe it or not, significant Libertarians were passing around and scrutinizing something I wrote as long as two years ago. And I've learned that if I leave questions unanswered, they will be answered for me, in my absence. One of the primary goals of this site, and a cornerstone of my campaign, is to provide the most open, thorough, and forthright view of who I am and what I'm about that I can. So I'll probably be revising and extending my remarks from the other night, if I can borrow a phrase from our esteemed Congress.

Posted by Lance Brown at 06:04 AM
June 23, 2003
Mixed Bag Update

A random collection of updates and notes:

I talked with George Bryant, the father of the "Homeschooling standoff in Waltham" family, about what people can do to help their cause. He says that people have been swamping the offices of the Department of Social Services and the Superintendent of Schools, and that it does appear to have had some effect. The DSS have said (and written) to him that they do not plan to seek removal of the children. Apparently, the DSS only got involved in this at the behest of the school district, after they filed a complaint. George says that the best thing to do now would probably be to contact the Mayor of Waltham, who has some authority over the School Board, and who could potentially be persuaded to pressure them to stand down, and leave the Bryants alone.

Another interesting thing George told me is that the court refused to give them a jury trial in the dispute over their children, claiming that in Juvenile Court jury trials are only held for serious and violent crimes, and that there was no precedent for having a jury trial in a trial such as theirs. Which is weird, because the 6th and 7th Amendments appear to say that both the accused in criminal trials, and the participants in "Suits at common law" have the right to trial by jury.

I've posted a "Help the Bryants" action item over at E-Actions for Freedom, with the contact info for the Mayor and the local paper there.

Late addition: Here's a recent article about the national firestorm that has erupted over this case.

---

Also, I added a significant update to the story about Stan Pike and his battle with his local Historical Preservation Commission. The situation has been resolved, and I posted a couple news articles about it. I also posted my response to a comment about the story that was posted at my "Contact Me" page. And by strange coincidence, I recently met someone who just moved into Stan's neighborhood, and I added a note about that too. The fully updated post is here.

---

I'm announcing tonight to the LPCampusActivist e-mail list that I am offering free weblogs to any libertarian campus activist out there, hosted at CampusLP.org. With the base blog software set up there, adding new blogs amounts to just a few clicks and a couple other steps. I'm considering upgarding the free site hosting software that's installed there -- the current software is freeware, and it's pretty weak. There's a really robust program called HomeFree, which costs $299 (discounted because I have a friend with a coupon). I want to see if there's much demand for something like that, and if any campus groups would be willing to kick in for some of the cost, before I go ahead with it. With the old setup, only a large handful of clubs took me up on the offer, but there were also a lot less clubs on the list back then. I've been mulling over the HomeFree upgrade for a long time now, but 300 bucks is a significant outlay.

The free blogs are a go either way, though. And hopefully we can put together a good group blog for the front page, which I've tentatively named Campus Freedom Patrol.

---

This came up on the LPCampusActivist list, and I think it's funny. It came as a comment on a discussion about whether there's a difference between Democrats and Republicans. I haven't had a chance to research it, so I'll just include it as it was posted:

To paraphrase a great quote from former US Senator Malcolm Wallop, Republican from WY: 'if the Democrats introduced a bill to burn down the Congress, Whitehouse and Supreme Court all in one day, the Republicans would introduce a compromise bill to do it over the course of three days'

---

If you follow my site PNAC.info, you probably noticed a long stoppage of new entries there. Well, it's been over for a while, in part thanks to David Lynch (not the director, as far as I know), who kept poking me with e-mails begging me to get back on the ball with it. I had gotten away from it during my mother's long visit, and then got swept into a mass influx of new members at PeoplesForum.com before I was able to get back to it. David was very persistent in his urgings for new content there, and it's to his credit that he was. New articles have been flowing at PNAC.info for a while now, and I've got a big pile of other ones waiting in the wings.

If I can take a moment to pat myself on the back, I think the editorial selection and commentary on PNAC.info has made it into a very credible resource on neoconservativism and the Project for the New American Century, and the ramifications of their policy agenda. I read a LOT of articles that are relevant to that issue, and a great deal of them never make it onto that site because they are too overtly left-wing, or anti-Bush, or otherwise slanted or tainted. On the occasions that I've posted less-objective materials, I've generally been careful to note why I felt it worthwhile to include a slanted article. But the real measure is how many articles I've turned down -- I'd say at least 3 out of every 4, and maybe more like 7 out of every 8. And I think the result has been the formation of one of the most rational and mainstream-friendly (in content, if not in form) sources of information on this topic on the Internet. The response -- in site traffic, in offers to help, and in letters of support -- has been really great.

---

And I want to thank everyone who has been helping this site's rating on the Top 25 Libertarian Sites page. It's working -- the site is moving right on up the ratings, likely to reach #13 by tomorrow, and well on the way to being in the top 10, possibly as soon as next month. The climb from there to #1 is a much steeper one than what it's been so far, but I'm confident that we will arrive there eventually. It's likely we'll do so soon enough so that the site will spend a few years at that position, making countless good impressions on Libertarians everywhere before 2008. I'm sure there's already some folks who have had the "Huh? Who's this guy?" reaction that I'm trying to spread around. (It's the only reaction I can really hope for upon first impression at this point, I think. It's not a bad one.)

---

And lastly for now, I bought 15,000 text ad impressions at the EatonWeb portal, a major portal site for weblogs. It's not as wild as you might think -- it was $5.25. Just a test run. It has barely started, so it's too early to say if it's paying off or not.

Posted by Lance Brown at 11:56 PM
June 13, 2003
Review this site on Blogarama

There's a new blog directory in town, and it seems like a pretty good one. I've already received an interesting inquiry from someone who found the campaign site there, which I'll respond to soon. (I'm going to try to do a lot of catching up on questions that have been posted and sent in, in the coming week or so.)

Blogarama's setup provides two easy opportunities for you to help the campaign out a little (or a lot, depending on how popular their site ends up being).

One is super-easy: Their "What's Cool" listing is ranked based on what sites have generated the most click-throughs to their site, much like the Top 25 Libertarian Site rankings are -- but so far the competition at Blogarama isn't nearly as fierce. Just a couple days ago, the site was way down in the 2000's, with one click-through. Now, with 9 clicks, it's in the top 600. If each of you who get my e-mail updates clicked this link, it would propel me into the top 100 "Cool" blogs there, and from there it will only be a matter of time before The Free View is showing up on the first page of those listings.

Also, Blogarama allows people to post reviews of the listed weblogs, and this is where you could really give the site a boost. Post a short or long review of the site if you like, so when it's showing up in the "Cool" listings, people will know that it's not a fluke -- that Freedom2008.com really is cool. ;-)

There's a link to Blogarama in the new "Blog Places" list in the lower right column of the site, and a link to post a review in the right column near the Bloghop ratings icons, in case you want to take action on these items in the future.

In other updates, my presentation on the USA-PATRIOT Act for the local high school Government class went pretty well, all in all, and I should have the video of it ready to upload next week hopefully. I'll post comments and critique my performance then.

Posted by Lance Brown at 03:47 PM
June 09, 2003
Brief mention in The Dagley Dagley Daily

This campaign blog elicited a brief passing mention in an article about blogging at The Dagley Dagley Daily, an apparently new weblog started by a woman with the curious name of Janet Dagley Dagley. She appears to have some previous journalistic experience writing for AIRSPACE, the "only quarterly journal in the United States created by and for independents working in public and community radio." The blog article is a draft version of a final article which is supposed to appear in that publication later this month...it's questionable whether that article will provide a link to the site, as the blog entry does.

It hasn't brought much traffic, but it's nice to see that my efforts to make this a notable campaign blog have earned some dividends. (Though in checking the Google search results for "campaign blog" and "campaign weblog", I can see I have some work to do in that respect.)

BTW, I was correct about that weekend festival eating up most of my activist time and energy this weekend...and I have the NCLP monthly meeting to attend to tonight. We're showing Rabbit-Proof Fence, a highly acclaimed (and apparently very libertarian-themed) movie about Australian anti-Aborigine "racial purity" policies in the 1930's. I haven't seen it yet, but every review I've heard so far has ranged from "It's really good!" to "It's really great!" -- so I'm looking forward to it.

Also on this week's activism schedule -- I'm giving a presentation on the "USA-PATRIOT Act" for a local high school Government class. It's going to be the basis for their final exam, no less! And it will be videotaped for the local cable access TV station. I should be able to get the video from it onto the site at some point in the future.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, I actually work a full-time for-pay job, believe it or not. I know people joke about how we're supposed to have flying cars and all sorts of futuristic conveniences by now, but I'd be happy if they'd just figure out how to get an extra hundred hours or so into a week. ;-)

Posted by Lance Brown at 02:47 PM
June 06, 2003
Taking a short blog break, maybe

I might not get a chance to post much in the next couple days. I'm going to be running a table for the Nevada County Libertarian Party for much of tomorrow and Sunday, at the Music That Matters medical marijuana benefit.

On a more personal note, my peahen (I call her PeaMama) had five chicks yesterday. They are all doing well, and they're completely adorable. Yes, that's right -- I have peacocks. Maybe I'll post a couple pictures tomorrow. I've actually got a lot of photos and mini-movies from recently that I have been meaning to put together in a gallery, and I might be able to get to that this weekend -- but my activist/thinking energy will mostly be devoted to preparing to make the most of tabling this weekend.

While I'm revealing personal details: It was about 90 degrees in my office today -- the beginning of a few months of that sort of thing. When people say "sunny California", they aren't kidding.

Have a good weekend!

Posted by Lance Brown at 11:56 PM
June 02, 2003
Movin' and Improvin': Site Design Changes

I've done some work on the left column of the site, and it's a great improvement in terms of giving people more substantial information about me and the campaign. I've combined all my recent "about the campaign" posts in the upper left, and gave them a title, and I've added some new entries to the "Classic Lance" and "Useful Lance" sections.

The new entries in those sections are:

Useful Lance
My (many) e-zine and list subscriptions

and
The History of Drug Prohibition in the U. S.

Classic Lance
The USA-PATRIOT Axe

The Nader 2004 "threat", and those poor, pitiful Democrats

About my campaign goals (NOTE: I took this one out because it's redundant, what with the new "About the Campaign" section which includes this entry.)

Book Recommendation: Healing Our World

Taboos, skews, and contradictions

North Korea's Sensible Delusions

Lance on Regulation

I think I need to break up those entries into more functional categories soon. "Useful Lance" might be fine, but I'm stretching the boundaries of "Classic" in that particular section.

I also moved the donations link up a bit, and I'm about to put the Search box over there under the E-Mail Updates one.

The upper left action is the most interesting development, though. It's overdue, really, and I'm glad it's finally coming together. I had my blog reviewed in January, and the main flaw the reviewer found was that there wasn't any real information about me, and he didn't know if I was serious or not. I think that's fixed now.

The entries I've strung together are About Lance Brown, The Campaign "Elevator Pitch", The Longer Pitch: The Future of America is Freedom (formerly "About my campaign goals"), 10 Easy Ways to Help the Campaign, Join the On-The-Road Support Network, and Contact Lance.

What do you think? Do you think the titles work, and how does the "About The Campaign" section strike you overall? Do you see any glaring omissions? I know there's more to add to the picture -- this is just the beginning -- but I'm hoping this is enough of a picture to get people started. Let me know what you think.

I'm going to juggle the dates on those entries, so they're all bunched together in the archives and individual entry pages. None of them are really date-specific in content or creation anyway, except the On-The-Road one and the 10 Easy Ways one, and I'm going to bring the rest up to their date, probably gathering them all on June 1st. Hopefully I'm not breaking blog protocol too badly. I know -- I'll add a "first posted on:" thing at the end of the ones I move. That'll work. :-)

Posted by Lance Brown at 12:03 AM
May 19, 2003
Vacation time's over

My mom went back home today, and I should be able to get more work done on the computer now. I hadn't seen my mom in quite awhile, so her long visit (18 days) kept me quite occupied. I've got a lot of catching up to do now in terms of my usual day-to-day work. On the other hand, Mom was a great help with helping me tame my bachelor pad, and my swirling dervish of an office. I'm a learning junkie workaholic, with a fairly constant flow of new and different ideas -- all of which adds up to lots of paperwork, lots of notes and plans, and significant amounts of accumulation of the detritus associated with a multi-tasking oriented lifestyle (i.e., a mess). There's nothing quite like a mom for motivating the dispersion of detritus. ;-)

I don't mean to make it sound like the cleaning and all that was the main reason I enjoyed seeing my mom. My mother is my favorite person, and I love her dearly. It was great to spend a lot of time with her, and to share my life in California with her. (She's never seen me here -- had never been to California in fact.)

We went to Yosemite National Park yesterday, and I have a bunch of photos and mini-videos from there I want to post, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow. I drove about 18 hours since yesterday morning, and I've slept about 16 or 17 hours since Thursday. It's Nappy Time for me.

Things should start picking up around here soon.

Posted by Lance Brown at 11:40 PM
May 13, 2003
New friend: Dane Carlson and Libertyfilter.org

I'm overdue in giving props to Dane Carlson, creator of the new libertarian community blog Libertyfilter.org. He noticed my list of e-zine and list subscriptions, and gave it a mention, as well as adding me to his blogroll.

Dane appears to be a weblog guru -- his site CarlsonCarlson.com says "We can help you build a weblog that'll make you rich, famous, and beautiful." The home page is unlike any I've ever seen, though. It's a sole page, with no links to click in, and no contact information or credits. Pretty weird. I'm not objecting, though -- Dane seems pretty cool, even with his weird home page. ;-)

I'm blogrolling Libertyfilter, and joining it too. It's got lots of promise. I just heard that Dane was inspired to start the site by George Bush's May 1st proclamation honoring "Loyalty Day", which, unbelievably, is a holiday in the U.S. -- the home of the Declaration of Independence, and the Revolutionary War that sprung from it.

Remember, you're either with us or you're against us -- by which I mean you're either down with Loyalty Day, or you're down with Libertyfilter. For the time being, you're still free to choose. Pledge allegiance to the Homeland, or pledge allegiance to liberty.

Sounds more like a no-brainer than a choice to me, but I'll let you decide for yourself.

(More on Loyalty Day coming soon.)

Posted by Lance Brown at 03:28 AM
March 28, 2003
First message to the notifications list

Hi, this is Lance Brown, candidate for president in 2008.

This is the first message I'm sending out to those who have signed up for the e-mail notifications list. I've been divided about how to deal with the two lists-- the old e-mail list from before I set up the blog, and the folks who have signed on for the blog notifications.

Also, MovableType (my blog software) doesn't appear to have a way to set it so notifications go out with each post. It's an extra step that I have to do afterward, if I want to. So for a while I was divided on how to choose what to send out, or if I should just send one for each post.

What I've decided is that I'm going to send out notifications for every message, at least for starters. And I'm going to continue to have two lists -- one list that I mail to monthly, with an overall summary, and one that gets updates every time I post a new message.

If you're receiving this, you're on the latter list, and you'll be getting notifications like this (though generally much more interesting) regularly . I'm assuming there will be unsubscribe instructions in this e-mail. I've never sent one of these, so I'm not sure.

If you want to subscribe to the monthly summary e-mail list, send a message with "subscribe" in the subject line to freeview-request@freedom2008.com .

Thanks for signing on! Sorry it's taken me so long to get this process going. I hope you'll stay along for the ride. Please let me know if you have any comments about the type or frequency of these messages. I aim to please. :-)

Posted by Lance Brown at 09:12 PM
March 27, 2003
Finally! Top 25 Libertarian site!

Long-time readers (if I have any) know that I've been vying for placement on the Top 25 Libertarian Sites list over at WhatTheHeck.com for a while now, and all-but begging folks to click and help me out. Well, it's been five months, but we finally made it-- entering at #25 today.

It's been a little silly of me to be so concerned and excited about this, but I feel like it confers (or at least symbolizes) a certain amount of legitimacy for the campaign. I don't even know how much traffic that page gets, and I don't expect it to generate a massive flood of visits or anything, but assuming all goes well it will be a steady source of well-targeted visitors for years to come. And that adds up.

I'm looking forward to seeing the site claw its way to the top as time goes on. It will be a long climb -- I currently have 459 clicks, and #1 site Liberty For All has 4223. But it's not like I can't dream big about grand and far-away goals. You wouldn't be reading this right now if I didn't possess that ability. ;-)

Posted by Lance Brown at 11:38 PM
March 23, 2003
Site design change

I just made some changes to the page design here. I think I like it about a million times better. The cluttered collage of pictures of me is gone, as is the grainy "Lance M. Brown for President Year 2008" graphic. Also gone is the inspecific tagline, "If you are disillusioned by politics today, and concerned about the future of the United States, then you have come to the right place."

Slimmed, trimmed, and clean.

All that has been replaced by a photo of me speaking at the Million Marijuana March in San Francisco a few years ago. Much more flattering and evocative than its predecessor, I think. And word-wise, all the above stuff has been sorta replaced by a description line under the blog title: "Opinions, news, interesting links, and campaign information from 2008 presidential candidate Lance M. Brown."

I made a couple other little tweaks, too, but they're minor in comparison. The tux pic from the old collage is down in the left column over "Classic Lance" (for now), and I moved the Top 25 Libertarian Sites image up to the top of the right column. Partly because I'm jonesing to get on their list (I'm only 15 clicks away from showing up as #25), and partly because it helped to visually balance the new image on the top left.

P.S. - Help my Top 25 Libertarian Sites rating by clicking here. Every day. ;-)

(Thanks!)

Posted by Lance Brown at 03:54 AM
March 06, 2003
Thoughts on news vs. thoughts

There's a lot I want to post about...my desktop is filling up with web pages waiting in the bullpen. I just like to post something thoughful with them when I can, and thought takes time. I could bust out headlines, excerpts and URLs by the dozens if I wanted to -- a ridiculous amount of news and links pass by me in any given day -- but I haven't generally thought of this blog as serving a newsfeed-type service, as much as a political window into my mind, or something like that. Maybe I should mix it up more-- pop out a few quick commentless worthy news items a day, and one substantive post. I think I'd lean on those quickies too much though, and let myself off the hook on posting something thoughtful more often-- and that's not cool. Hmm...

Maybe I could have two blogs here -- the newsfeed one and this one. That's something to think about. I do often have the impulse to pass on news items, but hold off because I want to make sure I make it clear what I think of the story -- and why -- in order to avoid misinterpretation.

If anyone has thoughts or suggestions, let me know.

Posted by Lance Brown at 11:17 PM
February 03, 2003
More Archives

I'm converting some more old pre-blog blog posts into archived posts here, so if you're just tuning in and are seeing posts that seem to be from out of nowhere, that's why. I'll leave them up here for a little while and then backdate them to when they were written.

Posted by Lance Brown at 04:46 AM
January 14, 2003

I haven't been posting that much in the past couple days, mostly because of intervening events. My car broke down on Sunday, and dealing with that has taken up a couple hours a day since. Plus I had the Nevada County Libertarian Party monthly meeting yesterday, which takes up a lot of my time, especially when we're videotaping it (because I've got to pick up the equipment for that and bring it back the next day). It doesn't take that much to eat up my precious free time each day, and most of the stuff I've been wanting to post here isn't quick and easy.

Posted by Lance Brown at 11:30 PM
December 30, 2002
sick days

Sorry I haven't been posting here much in the past couple days. I'm sick, to put it mildly. I haven't been doing much of anything in the past few days, except sleeping, watching movies, and trying to eat. I think I'll be back in action tomorrow if I get a good night's rest.

I've had this article I've been wanting to post, but my brain's been illin' from this flu or whatever it is, and I couldn't think of clever stuff to say about it. I'm just going to post it basic-style and get it out of the way.

Posted by Lance Brown at 12:21 AM
December 10, 2002
Excuse the mess

Sorry about the funky display. I'm doing some work. It'll be fixed soon.

Posted by Lance Brown at 08:59 PM
November 23, 2002
Big Ups from VoxPolitics

I posted a comment yesterday on an article by James Crabtree of VoxPolitics, and he was kind enough or impressed enough to give me a mention up on page 1. Thanks James! You won yourself a link in the blogroll.

Posted by Lance Brown at 12:14 AM
November 22, 2002
Mega-archives

I've finally got all the old "Views" articles converted to archived blog entries. Take a look at the Archives section - it goes back years now. There's mad gaps, and the things there are cobbled together from all sorts of different origins. I've tried out different ways of building and updating the site/campaign over the years, and have definitely lapsed from time to time, due more than anything to the fact that I didn't have a good system that allowed me to get in the habit of making regular updates about different things. Obviously, I can't lean on that excuse anymore...so I'll probably lean on various problems in my personal life, and my inherent wordiness, if I get irregular from here on out. ;-)

I've mentioned before that my propensity to go on and on when I get going often keeps me from making consistent updates. Right now, I have about three posts I want to write, but I know each one will probably eat up an hour or more. Tonight I opted for working the old stuff into the archives, because I'm thinking about submitting this site for review at various blog/diary review sites, and I want it to be pretty and smooth. Then I'll add some of my pending articles, and start wowing the blog world. Or something like that.

Anyway, about the "new" old articles that are now in archives:

There are three articles that came from my very first website/column (at Angelfire), called "So Here's What I Think". That'd be "Leave Everyone Alone", "On Gay marriage", and "How to Make Prisons Work". Then there are various pieced-together "articles" from my time at Salon TableTalk in 96/97. There's a stand-alone article I wrote called "Boston Public: The Case Against Schools" from 2000. There's also the old "The Free View" e-mail updates, which ran for a while in 2000 and 2001. There's my extended answers to The World's Smallest Political Quiz. There's probably some other stuff too... dig in!

Posted by Lance Brown at 10:47 PM
October 31, 2002
Comments, please -- or name suggestion

I'd love to read any comments that any of you have. You can post a comment on any message here by clicking the "Comments" link at the bottom of the post.

Also, I'm entertaining suggestions for a new name for this blog. I added "weblog of a presidential candidate" into the title because I think it makes for a much more interesting link in the listings at Weblogs.com, Blo.gs, and organica.us. However, at Weblogs.com, you can't even read the whole title because it runs past the width of their display table. So it's "The Free View - weblog of a presidenti" -- which almost gets the point across if you think on it enough, but it's certainly not as clear or grabbing. I've also read general recommendations that it's better to keep your blog's name short. I've thought of just chopping off "The Free View", but "Weblog of a presidential candidate" by itself seems to me to be bland, or generic, and self-aggrandizing. (I'm not sure why I find it less self-aggrandizing with the three extra words, but I do.) I originally had that second part listed as the description, and not in the title at all, but I think the extra weight it brings to the title listing on those blog sites is worth adding it on.

So basically, I can't think of a way to make the name shorter without compromising its strength or uniqueness. If anyone has a suggestion I'm interested in hearing it. Or maybe the name is fine as it is. I'd like to hear that too, if it's true.

Posted by Lance Brown at 01:23 PM