The State of the Weblog Address

Alright, fellow militants, I've made some decisions the past few days about a few things that need to be done. First off, though, don't worry: the site isn't going away. In the past, the idea of dropping this blog altogether or handing it over to someone else has occurred to me, but I could never bring myself to do it.

Frankly, there are too many of you coming here every day, reading the RSS feed, or otherwise participating for me to just dump it and forget it. Now, a friend from Facebook named Dan Cancade has convinced me to create some Facebook connections for this site, which I've done (note the button on the left).

That's just the beginning, however. I had planned to do that along with several other changes as well. I created the MiliLib Twitter account as the first step towards that goal, but got side-tracked with paying work and had to wait to do the rest.

I'm still not sure when exactly those new changes will be done, but it will be sooner rather than later. Before the end of the year for sure, probably in the next couple/three weeks.

The site will change in design to make it much more conducive to your reading. I'll be moving it from Blogger, so if you come to blogspot.militantlibertarian.com, you'll need to update your link to just MilitantLibertarian.org, which has always pointed here. If you subscribe to the RSS, it should be through Feedburner.com. In that case, you won't need to change anything as that will follow the site to its new location.

I'll be moving it to private (paid) hosting, upgrading the blog software to WordPress, and trasferring everything here to there (maybe not the entire blog archive, but a large chunk of it anyway).

The posts themselves will change somewhat in size. The usual re-posts that I do here will become blurbs linking to the originals rather than the entire thing at once. This avoids copyright issues, but more importantly will allow for an increase in postings without flooding the works.

That increase in postings will come from volunteers who want to contribute. Those of you who're interested in that can email me and ask to be a part of it, or wait until you see the new setup and ask then.

A lot of navigation, design, and so forth will change to make this site much better than it is.

Two things that I consider the foundation of this site will not change:
1 - Open discourse without barriers: all comment areas will be available to anyone, without requiring a login, so those who wish to do so may post anonymously. Hateful comments or comments that otherwise are counter-productive (calling for direct physical attacks against individuals, generally race-based hatred, etc.) will be deleted and comments with a few too many curse words may be subject to editing to remove them. I don't mind swearing, but if the only words you know are swear words, maybe you should take an English class before you come here. Basically, comment rules will not change from what they are now.

2 - Subjects will be roughly the same. Obviously, bringing in other people to contribute with their writing or information-finding skills means that the subject matter will broaden. That's fine with me. I plan to section the site a little bit to better organize that sort of thing. I anticipate no more than half a dozen of us posting information here. I will act as Editor and work to keep everything civilized, of course, but that's about it. I will, as I have been, be open to anyone emailing me (or otherwise contacting me) to post something for them.

Overall, I think the changes will make something great. The other possibilities that changing to better software also means easier interactivity. The Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking integration will do a lot to keep us all connected and talking. It will also lighten the load on me, allowing for a degree of automation for a lot of things I have to do by hand right now.

Currently, I've created both a Facebook account for this site (and my persona here, for lack of a better term) and a group page there. Unless Facebook gets real jittery about things or closes things down, I won't be changing MilitantLibertarian to include any sort of community forums and will rely on Facebook to do that instead.

Hopefully, this will answer a few questions and get some interest going. The liberty movement has a lot of forums and areas to discuss and organize, but they're almost all geared at one or two focused things (limited gov't, the Fed, the wars, gun rights, etc.) and rarely are looking at all aspects of liberty and freedom.

That's what I aim to facilitate, with your help.

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Got comments? Email me, dammit!
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