Hello Fellow EPers!. There are some changes to The Economic Populist. Author accounts to write posts must be requested and are by approval. Discussion and participation on the site is not changed. The Economic Populist has become more journalistic, with professional essays and articles. We need to limit the registration to discussion initially to make sure authors write to the quality standards of the site.
This change is also for security. While we like to think the best of people, well, some, not so much. Allowing anyone to write after registering for an account is a security issue as well as people weren't familiarizing themselves with the site rules and guidelines first.
Don't worry and be happy. If you wish to write, first, read the user guide, the FAQ and then email the site administrator requesting an author account, or write a comment requesting one.
Other structural changes are coming. Your comments also go out via a comment RSS feed and are read. Most EPers never write posts and instead participate in the discussion, and that makes the site, articles, posts, information so much better! There are over 1200 registered users on The Economic Populist.
If there are any suggestions, feature requests, especially to improve discussion threads ease of use, please let us know!
--Your Friendly Neighborhood EP Admin
Suggestions to Improve discussion and comments
If you're not aware, there is a Comment RSS feed, for those who want to see whatever the latest comment is on the site.
I'm looking for suggestions to improve the comment, discussion of the site as well, so any whines, bitches, suggestions, let me know.
Author/posting privileges
I've tried to go back through all of the user accounts and past writers/contributors to the site, give them an Author account.
Still, I might have missed some people, so if you don't see it and want an Author account, don't forget to let me know. It's a huge list of people on EP, so odds on I missed some.
Also, again, before writing, make sure one knows how to format their posts for professional level publication, isn't committing copyright violations, citing their posts and the worse formatting sacrilege, know how to format a URL.
There are buttloads of tools on EP to help with this, and if worse comes to worse, you can email for help.
There are a few people who had their authoring privileges removed. Those people were not following the rules, not making sure their post was original, unique to them and backed up by statistical facts, references, theory, citations or anything based in reality.
Remember, opinions are everywhere, data is buried.
Woe to the Rating Thumbs
Ah, using Drupal as a site base, making modifications which in turn brings out a slew of lurking code bugs.
I'm afraid the thumbs are dead for now. Can people let me know if this new voting widget on comments is viewable and useable?
There were MAJOR code bugs with the thumbs that appears with site permission changes so surprise, surprise, there were also major code bugs with the promote/demote to the front page arrows next to the article.
So now I think I have squished the bug there and am using that piece of code to rate comments.
You probably don't care about any of this, but I just want to know if it's all working for you and you can rate comments.
All of this going into a database and I want to create a "featured comment du jour" section later, so we can highlight some of the juiciest comments and insights more.
The important thing is what happens behind the scenes....I might be able to bring back the thumbs later, but more what's important for now is how the code works and isn't full of BUGS.
Jesus. Drupal has a lot of code contributed by 3rd parties who of course are labor arbitraged for their efforts....
so, very often when adding features, instead one ends up debugging software instead.
Google news, just a reminder
Folks, just a reminder we are a news source. There were some technical problems that were fixed last night and we're still working on keeping out of news aggregators posts which are not news.
That said, while this is a layperson's economic blog, make sure your posts are well formatted, cited and accurate, with loads of data.
While we want to add our voice to give the regular folk slant on the economy and issues surrounding it, we sure do not want to add to the noise out there.
Clarity, not confusion.
for all of you facebook users, EP has an update
The Economic Populist Facebook page is now a direct link:
http://www.facebook.com/EconomicPopulist
There were also problems with the Facebook app used to pull in post alerts onto the Economic Populist Wall.
This was fixed last night and all posts should have an update summary on The Economic Populist page and wall.
This should make it easier to share Economic Populist posts while staying on Facebook to share and discuss. (although please come over here!)
kicking and screaming
They'll have to drag me kicking and screaming ...
I suppose Twitter is next ...
We're on twitter already
and I plan on putting the comments as a separate twitter feed. More and more people are online via cell phones so I'm looking to scale the site and make it more useable.
That said, I hear ya. Facebook drives me nuts. I have to rip to shreds ALL of my security to even log on, because I have security they always assume it's some hacker. They want to track every stupid thing you click and do and finally, something I can do in half an hour on this site or write up in code, I have to dig around and figure out the "Facebook way". Like just giving the posts a summary view for people who use and like Facebook took forever and then I ran into a host of "apps" who wanted to charge service fees for such a basic thing.
Ugh.
I'm also in the process of adding the ability to subscribe via a news letter, or digest posts to one's email. Some people like that better.
changes to comment forms on site or "Where's the Comment Form"?
Folks, we're getting the "digg effect"....alot, as in 4000 hits in a matter of minutes.
So, I had to move the comment form to open in a "new page" in order to further optimize and compress site pages for faster server load times, so the site can handle more traffic like this.
So, you have to look for the link at the bottom of the post that says add new comment and click on that.
Please still comment and I'll see what else I can figure out here.
EP is a news source and when people like a story on this site, we get the traffic, so I'm working on how to handle it, yet continue to make this site more "user input", discussion than it currently is (and not crash the site!).
Mobile viewing of the site, Opera, Opera mini
Folks, let me know if you have any trouble with viewing and commenting on the site. I've tested the site with Opera and Opera Mini, Symbian S60, Android 2.2 and I could login, write comments and pass the CAPTCHA, play all of the videos, view and scale the images.
For my testing, Opera mini was by far the best mobile browser.
That said, I'd like to know if anyone has any problems with participating on the site via a mobile phone, tablet and so on.
More and more people are reading articles on the go and I want to make sure the site is user friendly in the mobile space!
changed the site today, let me know if you're having problems
Hi Folks,
I've been working on some modifications to the server site today. Our site is as slow as a dog, so I'm looking to improve performance and some things.
There was a lot of server reconfigurations today, which hopefully I've fixed anything that affects the site, but I can miss stuff in test, so please anyone having problems, hit the email button and let me know. (contact).