leftlibertarian.org

Many left libertarians are using the link exchange to share information with each other quickly and easily. This link exchange drives the list of links on the sidebar. To help more people get involved, I just wrote a short introduction to the way it works. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

From time to time I get contacted by a contributor to check into why their posts suddenly cease showing up at leftlibertarian.org. It seems to happen to certain contributors more than others but is otherwise pretty random. I now believe it has to do with invalid characters in the feeds.

leftlibertarian.org requires an RSS or Atom feed consisting of well-formed, valid XML. To check your feed, enter the URL at feedvalidator.org. If your feeds are not valid, there’s going to be little I can do for you, but let me know so we can try and figure out a solution. Usually removing the wierd character that inadvertently appeared in the text solves the problem, and you can use feedvalidator.org to diagnose it yourself! So check there before you check with me.

In other news, I updated to FeedWordPress V0.99. Many thanks to Charles Johnson for a great piece of software!

You may have noticed that feeds were not being updated in a timely fashion.  This should now be fixed.

In the past few days I’ve been able to correct a number of problems with the site.  I’ve also added or updated some of the informational content on the site. Here’s a summary of changes made:

• If you’re seeing this message, the DNS issues we had over the past week have been resolved.  Let me know if you continue to reach the old error page.
• I’ve also turned on page caching (not sure why that wasn’t on before) and upped the memory, which should deliver maximum performance to visitors. Please let me know if you see any errors or experience excessive page load times.
• There was also an issue with Atom feeds not being fully syndicated (such Wally’s and James’s) which has been addressed. So finally we should be back and better than ever.
• We now also feature a contact form to facilitate feedback on technical or content-related issues.  Please use that form or email me at the old address if you continue to experience problems with the site.

Speaking of which, if anybody out there has experience custom tuning PHP applications like WordPress, I’d appreciate having a conversation with you. I’m learning a lot on my own, but I’d love to get another brain on the problem. Though I’m loathe to quote Donald Rumsfeld, I don’t know what I don’t know.

Thanks for your patience! leftlibertarian.org is now hosted on my very own virtual private server, where we have the resources to grow our readership and expand our offerings! We were down a little longer than expected, but everything should be back to normal now.

If you experience any problems or have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me at my “jeremy6d” gmail address. I’m running into some issues with email right now so the gmail address is the best way to reach me. Also, if you have any experience setting up mail servers on linux boxes, I’d appreciate any help you could give me. Thanks again, and enjoy the site!

UPDATE: The site was, in fact, not up for most people when this was written, but those issues have finally been addressed.  Please review this post for the final update on maintenance downtime and performance issues.

Beginning now, leftlibertarian.org is going down for the weekend to facilitate the move to a new server.  We should be up by Monday.

Looks like Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing featured Shawn Wilbur’s article announcing the scanned archives of Lucifer, the Lightbearer.  That’s some serious blogospheric attention for left libertarians!  Boing boing is a web magazine that is well suited to our views - big Robert Anton Wilson fans and in favor of liberty with an emphasis lately on DRM and online privacy issues.

leftlibertarian.org is moving to new, better hosting! Unfortunately, the move will require some downtime and could quite possibly drop some posts temporarily. Fortunately, this will lead to better stability (I have a VPS now) and will allow for the kind of growth that leftlibertarian.org has experienced since it started.

More information about the move at my blog.

We had a brief service outage today that might have been the result of LL.org’s host (Dreamhost) doing some maintenance.  Would have been nice if they’d let me know.  Anyway, we should be all back up now.

This is a good time to mention that in the reasonably near future (1 -3 months), LL.org will be moving to new hosting.  If you have any suggestions please let me know in the comments.

Also, if you have any ideas of expanded services we can offer here (a wiki, forum, personal blog space for members, a podcast), speak up.

• Happy Memorial Day! Check out left libertarian perspectives on this holiday here and here.
• Many of you have responded to my pleas for topical feeds, which I really appreciate. I look forward to leftlibertarian.org becoming a more full fledged community in the future, and your help has only reinforced that hope.
• In cleaning up the syndication feeds, we’ve discovered some glitches where new feeds weren’t overwriting the old feeds. Please keep an eye on your blog posts and those published on leftlibertarian.org, and let me know if anything’s wrong.