Archive for 2011

Due to GoDaddy’s recent support of the anti-Internet, anti-free-speech, pro-entertainment-industry-greed legislation called SOPA (PIPA in the Senate), and their abrupt but lackluster and unconvincing reversal, WebCommons today started transferring its domains to other registrars.

For starters, today, WebCommons.biz (this site) and MetroIssues.com (Louisville History & Issues) were transferred to gandi.net, a French registrar that is being recommended by many in the Internet community for its hard anti-SOPA stance and its quality of service.  It also doesn’t hurt that they’re offering $8 transfers with free whois privacy and a 1-year SSL certificate.  It especially doesn’t hurt that the U.S.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has its domain registered there — to me, this is a great vote of confidence!

If you have domains registered at GoDaddy, will you join me in transferring away and sending a message to GoDaddy and all other past and present supporters of SOPA that this sick, unAmerican legislation needs to be destroyed, buried and the earth salted where it lays?  At the last link above, the EFF makes registrar recommendations.

UPDATE: By some holiday miracle (well, the flip of a switch), Louisville History & Issues is now back online.  But if SOPA is passed, it and many other websites you know and love could be doomed.  Stop SOPA now!

The Stop Online Piracy Act has just claimed its first victim, our own public discourse site Louisville History & Issues.

Here’s an excerpt from the takedown info at the site:

…under SOPA, the copyright owner in question could have this site SHUT DOWN … get this… BEFORE this site’s owner has a chance to respond to an infringement notice, creating undue burdens which could lead to the site staying down permanently. Therefore, anyone who has a problem with this site could effectively shut it down, which is an obvious tampering with FREE SPEECH on the World Wide Web.

Even if you don’t like this site, think about all the sites you love, or even like. They can go BYE-BYE if this BAD LAW passes. Bye-bye YouTube. Bye-bye Facebook. Bye-bye any local sites that you love. And bye-bye to the Web as we know it today.

Sadly, this BAD LAW boils down to GREED in the American entertainment industry. In order to go after piracy, which is certainly a bad thing, they want to trample over your free speech rights and threaten the existence of the web itself. They want to turn the web into content streams UNDER THEIR FULL CONTROL. They want to DESTROY independent websites.
DON’T. LET. THEM.

What action can you take to avoid this BAD LAW going into effect? Simple. Contact your members of Congress (House / Senate) and tell them to KILL SOPA and any other legislation like it, then BURY IT AND SALT THE EARTH (it’s *that* bad, really). Tell them SOPA tramples on free speech, destroys the web as we know it, and therefore it’s UN-AMERICAN.

Of course, this takedown isn’t really happening.  It’s merely a warning of what could happen.  After 24 hours (3:40 PM ET Thursday), the site will be back up.

But still, do you want this to actually happen to any of the websites you care about?  If the answer is no, please take action.  As soon as you can.  This bad legislation must be destroyed before it gets any legs.

I thought I’d just drop a few lines as to what’s going on technically with this blog.

Well, as I alluded to in the last post, I would like to start blogging here on a regular basis. However, I realized recently that this site had become very stale and not exactly the best showcase for my technical skills. So, I’m revamping.

I’m adding plugins aplenty, configuring them just so, and making all kinds of tweaks to the theme. Perhaps I’ll even write posts later on to talk about all the specifics of what I did (and am still doing).

But for now, please realize that though this site is up, it’s somewhat under construction, and some pages might look funny at certain times as I try out new ideas.

How do you like the changes so far? Do you have any favorite WordPress plugins to recommend? Or do you have any changes to the theme to recommend?

I’m pretty darn open-minded right now. I want this site to shine!

Thanks for reading!

First, check out our new presence on Google+.  Not much going on there yet, but everything has to start somewhere.  Also note our presence on Facebook and Twitter.

Anyway, I wanted to update those following WebCommons’ activities about some stuff going on lately.

• We’re continuing to get the word out about our quick survey at MetroIssues.com.  Please encourage your friends, family and colleagues from around the United States to check it out.  More info about what we’re doing is here.
• We’re gearing up to do more regular posts here.  When the company was a web development practice, we didn’t have as much wherewithal to post, but now that we’re transitioning into a media “empire” (ha), we will become more likely to post, and post more frequently.  We have lots of ideas for posts.  Do you have any ideas for posts?  Please leave a comment.
• We’re making technical updates to this site, to improve performance and aesthetics, and display ads (I know, yuck, but this is a biz, kiddos).  At least we’re lazy loading the ads so that pages load as speedily as possible.  A few more changes are coming as well.  Do you have any ideas for improving the looks and performance of this blog/site?  Please leave a comment.
• Speaking of advertising, WebCommons now has its own little ad server, and so we’re exploring possibilities for displaying local ads on Louisville History & Issues.  Any advice for how to bring in local advertisers?  Please leave a comment.

Thanks as always for visiting our little media hub!

New Metro Issues USA main site

The excitement is building!

Our flagship website for open, constructive public discourse, Louisville History & Issues, is only the beginning of websites for local issues discussion.

Recently, WebCommons :: Media (luckily!) acquired the domain MetroIssues.com, and within weeks of migrating LouHI (our shorthand name) to the new domain, we are now announcing a new Metro Issues USA main site (see image to the right).

On this new site, by filling out a simple survey, you can suggest your (or your favorite) metropolitan area to be the next American locale to be served by a Metro Issues USA discussion space.  You may use this form more than once to suggest as many metro areas as you like, although we do ask that you only suggest metro areas that are the highest priority to you.

In this blog, we will return from time to time to let you know which metro areas are getting the most suggestions.  Of course, the number of suggestions plays only a part of our decision for expansion, but we think it will be fun for everyone to see what suggesters are suggesting.

Note: We reserve the right to discard any suggestions that appear rigged to skew the results.

Thank you very much in advance for your participation!

On edit: I updated the Metro Issues USA site image, as it recently got a minor redesign.

The new WebCommons :: Media logo, in full

Well, I finally did the logo change and cleaned out the web programming services content, leaving pretty much a clean slate to cover our media development endeavors.

Look for more content to come about what WebCommons :: Media is up to.