Wampum

all nominations posted to a dedicated thread by category with url required.

Agreed. No more everything on one comment, posted in any given thread. We might accept whole ballots/nominations via email, as long as they have URLs.

One reason I'm partial to the Drupal platform is that it allows push-button polls, controlled for one-time voting by registered users. And the results of the polls can be suppressed until winners are announced (as they'll need to be combined with email ballots.) Would save an awful lot of hand counting, and we could enable comments, so people could still say lots of nice things about the nominees.

If we wanted to keep Wampum as the front page, Eric could move upgrade this site to Drupal (as you know, he's been threatening to move us to Word Press for over a year due to growing problems with MT.) Now he's become a Drupal afficienado, and at least it's something with which I'm familiar (as DG08 is a Drupal site.) You being the Luddite among us :-D, we've hesitated on any move from MT, but this might be the right time.

I dont know anything about Drupal but trust in any decision that you and eric make concerning it.

one of the two sites is in bangor, the other in portland.

the bangor machine has hosted wampum for ever.
the portland machine has hosted all our political clients and so on, and is where all email goes to and comes from.

i've made the bangor apache server use mod_perl, which should cut down on the /. effect when wampum (MT is implmented in perl) is hit by ... a lot of concurrent users. now both apache server use mod_perl.

at this point the primary difference between the two execution environments is that the mysql version on the bangor/wampum machine is 4.1.12, and on the portland/koufax|draftgore machine it is 5.1.12, and the php version on the bangor/wampum machine is 5.1.2, and on the portland/koufax|draftgore machine it is 5.2.0

they have equivalent bandwidth and are physically identical, however the bangor machine still suffers from being, from a dns point of view, inelegantly named "ip6599130112.link2usa.com", and also not useful as an email source or sink.

its really about cms. MT on perl and php? WP on php? Drupal on php? ...

The version of Drupal I've used for koufax.wabanaki.net is 5.0 beta 2, which is bleeding edge. I've found one annoying bug, and the tinymce editor, which is an improvement over the native editor we use, say, right here at wampum for comments, isn't 5.0 ready. The releases of Drupal that have all the bells-and-whistles are 4.6 and 4.7, and I've used 4.7 for the meet.draftgore2008.org site, intending to populate that with all the bells-and-whistles. The 5.0 version has a nicer installer, has module-call-home (auto-upgrade nannywear), a better admin interface, and a nicer default theme, so there are compelling reasons to use it, where the need for non-core bells-and-whistles is proximal to zero.

try it. you've both got accounts. create polls, try to vote on them twice, post a story and then comment on it.

drupal has a shared-writer model called "books", which is nice.

questions on the toe of the foot of the angel dancing on the head of a pin, or the equivalent.

A Best Canadian(progressive of course) or Best North American Blog.There are many awesome Cnd blogs worthy of being known in the US.Could help give Americans a slightly different perspective.Check any Canadian blog one will find many many US blogs in the blog roll.While in the US Cnd's blog have little recognition.This is due to lack of knowledge of whats out there,not because of the quality of Cnd blog.Anyway I hope you will consider my suggest...

I'll second the request for some geographic categories - though obviously as a non-US blogger, I have some self-interest here.

I've been thinking of a best non-US English-language blog. Would that suffice?

i am going to restrict access to the koufax to firefox, and a few other human-used browsers.

this will cut down on the index bots, the spam bots, and enforce _my_ sense of taste.

i can allow google's search engine, by address or "name" (of the pseudo-browser), but who really cares if random search engine users "find" a koufax for "humorous blog"? these aren't our readers, and they aren't bloggers, or blog readers.

MBW said"I've been thinking of a best non-US English-language blog. Would that suffice?
...........................
That would be good category.But I still think a Cnd category makes sense
we are neighbors,many of the same issues touch us like no other two countries on the planet.we share so much,popular culture,media...
The progressive community of both countries are just such natural allies.

Yes, Dirk, but every category adds a significant amount of work (introduction post, taking nominations, compiling nominations, tallying semi-finalist voting, compiling finalists, tallying finalist voting, writing up final post.) I like you Canadians (since my tribe is a Jay Treaty tribe and half my relatives are at Odanak, I sort of consider myself part Canadian), but not that much. ;-)

Best Literary Blog, for those less political, mostly writerly.

В Интернете появилось два очень интересных видео, о новых способах умножения. Смотреть
[url=http://www.blogz.ru/2006/11/21/novyjj_sposob_bystrogo_umnozhenija.html]тут[/url] и [url=http://www.blogz.ru/2006/12/06/eshhjo_odin_sposob_bystrogo_umnozhenija.html]тут[/url] (второй вариант).

[i've no idea what this is. it was in "junk", but it doesn't appear to be blog spam? any ideas? ebw]

MBW said"Yes, Dirk, but every category adds a significant amount of work (introduction post, taking nominations, compiling nominations, tallying semi-finalist voting, compiling finalists, tallying finalist voting, writing up final post.)
..............................
Well that settles it Cnd it is(insert smile)

I just sent a paypal payment, I wish it could be more. I also made an appeal for my readers to come and donate, but as you know, I am so new and can't see it making a real dent.

One thing, I've made a couple of comments here that just went poof. I know you approve comments so I assumed it went through but when I came back later, nothing. I hope this isn't a problem with your servers that you weren't aware of, because you'll have alot of irate nominators (is that a word?) and voters if their comments get lost especially if you go with the poll tax idea and they pay for nothing!

EBW, I'll bet it's russian blog spam. It was probably in cyrillic letters but since I don't have them on my computer it's coming up with gibberish symbols instead. I'm guessing russian because I think that's what the .ru on the end of the URL is.

Thanks, Donna, for the contribution and the push.

As far as missing commentes, I think that's an artifact of MT's attempt to regulate spam. Sunrunner noticed it as well a while back, and we found her missing comments in MT's "junk" bin, as they had embedded URLs. Since we're asking people to use full URLs, I think it's clear we need a better solution, hence the move to Drupal for the Koufaxes (either all of Wampum, or a separate Koufax site.)

I do embed urls, if that means using html tags for them, since some are very long and tend to get broken.

The move to drupal should fix that problem and a darned good thing since people will need to give urls to the sites they are nominating and alot will try to embed them.

Why single out Canada? There is a big wide world out there, something like 200 countries. Perhaps just "Best non-US blog" category in order to highlight blogs that otherwise would not be able to compete against the local (i.e., U.S. fanbase) onslaught of votes.