leftlibertarian.org

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.

If you’re a contributor who needs help creating a leftlibertarian.org-specific feed for your blog, I wrote a help article you may find useful.

An administrative note: I have asked several times in different venues that bloggers who wish to be syndicated here provide a left-libertarian-only feed to this blog.  leftlibertarian.org is getting more and more attention on the internet, and our goal is to remain the most topical resource for left libertarianism out there.  As a result, I will be dropping blogs without further notice if they consistently feed off-topic posts to this site.  I realize many of these blogs were never asked to participate, so this shouldn’t be taken as a censure of any sort.  Rather, now that we’ve gained a certain level of popularity, it’s time to get our act together and really focus on providing the content people come here to read.

Please contact me at admin at left libertarian period org if you need help constructing an appropriate feed.

I know leftlibertarian.org contributors and A.L.L. members visit a wide variety of sites that would be of interest to their comrades.  That’s why I encourage you to sign up for an account at del.icio.us so you can track and share your bookmarks online!  If you tag your bookmarks with for:libertarianleft the link will show up on the sidebar.  In order to make the linkroll work we need everybody to contribute.  Reply in the comments if you need help getting started.

If you subscribe to leftlibertarian.org via the feed, please change the URL you’re using. Here are the currently available feeds for leftlibertarian.org:

• leftlibertarian.org Posts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/leftlibertarian_posts
• A.L.L. Linkroll (on the sidebar): http://feeds.feedburner.com/libertarianleft
• Combined content feed (linkroll + posts): http://feeds.feedburner.com/leftlibertarian_all

In other news, if you are a contributor please consider putting together a feed of leftlibertarian.org-only content. We want the site to be as topical as possible for people interested in this school of libertarian thought. Don’t get me wrong: I love reading about movie reviews and what you ate for lunch! But I can check your blog for that. The purpose of this site is to aggregate left libertarian content, so let’s focus on that!

Many of you write pretty strictly on left libertarian issues, so this announcement does not apply to you. For the rest of you, most blogging packages allow you to assign labels or categories or tags to your posts, and usually you can create a feed for that one label/category/tag. There are also other ways for us to get the same effect. If you need help assembling the proper feed I would be more than happy to help you out.

If you have any questions or need assistance - or if you have suggestions for new contributors - please contact me at admin at leftlibertarian period org for help.

Until late last week, I had been manually triggering the process of checking syndicated feeds to update this blog.  I’ve been trying to create a cron job that will automatically check and update feeds, but I’ve run into some wierd problems.  In my attempts to fix this, I’ve added a little blurb at the bottom of this site that will output the date/time of the last update.  If it’s been more than 20 minutes since the last update, something’s up.  But I just wanted you to be aware that I know something’s up, and we’re working on it.

• Creating relevant feeds for aggregation: Some contributors have asked about creating feeds that only include left libertarian content. Many blogging platforms have category or tag specific feeds available. For example, if you want to create an RSS feed for a certain category in WordPress, you can create a URL like this:

  http://example.com/?feed=rss2&cat=4

  Where “4″ is the Category ID number of the category you will put all left libertarian content in. I believe that the new version of Blogger has similar capabilities, but I’m unaware of them.

  If you’ve been blogging for a while and have relevant content spread out over many categories and don’t feel like going back and adding your new category to them all, I suggest you use a great service called FeedBlendr, which can take a bunch of category feeds and make one out of them, which you can then submit to me.

• Atom Bug Squashed: Many heartfelt thanks to Charles Johnson, whose lightning fast response to the problems we were experiencing with his awesome WordPress plugin (which runs this whole site) has corrected the problem with articles travelling back in time to the mainframe era. You should not need a VAX workstation to read syndicated articles any longer.