What Do You Want?
No, this isn’t a post about what makes you outraged and the “one thing that will save America”.
This is a post asking what you want out of this site?
Consider it a limited open thread to the general topic of GeorgiaPol.com:
1) Are there technical features you would like (keeping in mind this is and will remain a shoe string operation)?
2) What content would you like to see?
3) What should be avoided?
These are very broad and general questions on purpose. This is a site in progress. For it to be relevant it always will be. But now that we at least have the lights on, we can start at least considering the tweaks both on the platform side and the content side that get us closer to whatever it is that we’re going to be.
Also while this should be a separate post, give a shout out to the IT team. The site looks great and the glitches have been minor and quite controllable. This doesn’t happen by accident, and is something that is well beyond my skill set. The quality of this effort needs to be recognized.
About Author
Charlie
Founder of GeorgiaPol.com; Now weekly columnist Very interested in Georgia and Georginas. Interest in politics is waning daily.
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1. Not qualified to answer
2. More coverage of the General Assembly; maybe some interviews with some Senators and Reps working under the Gold Dome
3. Teetotalism
Any attempts at #3 will be temporary, not pushed upon others, and only under strict doctors orders.
I’d like to see this as a place to keep up with things happening in Georgia. I’d also like to see you use this as a platform to enable and encourage discussion between people who have different opinions – who are on different “sides” of issues.
I would like to see a mix of “factual” articles that try to lay out details in as neutral a fashion as possible and also biased articles that present one side of things. I really like the concept of not trying to eliminate bias – but rather having the biases known (worn on the sleeve I think you said 🙂 ). I would like to see all sides represented as much as possible.
If you are considering adding things to the site – I would like to see tools that better enable discussions.
THANKS for what you are doing. Keep it up.
I’d like to see collapsing comment threads. This allows me to skip past discussions that I have already read or find uninteresting. Often on sites like this, a limited number of users can effectively kill discussion on an article by holding an extensive conversation that is interesting only to themselves.
P.S. The IT team for this site is extremely talented to have launched this site with so little fuss,
1> Looks great so far, kudos to the tech geeks!
2> Maybe a little variation in content. Add a regular sports feature which can engender as much or more debate as politics and many times is directly related. Maybe a thread a week just to give readers/posters a break from serious policy debate. Otherwise the model works, no need to break it.
3> Boredom. I doubt that will happen as the front pagers come from so many backgrounds, topics should remain fresh.
Ultimately as with all sites dependent upon volunteers as writers / posters, keep it light, fun, entertaining while also offering thought provoking content that may contribute to a better Georgia.
Thanks for posting the suggestion box.
I hope to start at least a bit of request #2 tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.
The “recent comments” thing on the left side of the page is an improvement from the old site, but I would still like to see the “NEW” tags return on comments within the posts themselves.
Other than that, don’t never change.
^^what he (she?) said
He. 🙂
+1
1. More coverage of the goings on under the dome. Not scared to ask the questions. More investigations.
2. Maybe some sort of intergration with FB with the site. This would possibly boost comments. Where people going to the georgia pol fb site would see the discussion and vice versa.
Charlie, in answer to your queries:
1) In addition to (or instead of) the ‘Recent Comments’ area how about ‘Unread Comments’? I click on the one of the recent comments and it still shows as recent unless I exit the site and come back in. If I remember correctly, in the past, the unread comments would go away after I clicked on the post to read them. Disregard this if I am not doing something correctly.
2) I like the content areas currently covered.
3) In politics, I can think of nothing that should be avoided.
Thanks for asking. Calypso
1) I don’t understand computers.
2) A regular blog by a marginally attractive Georgia ex-pat. I’m available.
3) Ed.
Most people tend to avoid Ed.
1. A cupholder
2. More comedy. It’ll keep us from getting too serious/angry all the time.
3. Pepsi and the Noid. Always avoid the Noid.
I wish more people in politics were of the right age to get the Noid reference.
Gen X always gets squeezed out.
1) You’re welcome. 🙂
I don’t know if y’all have the ability to bold (using strong tags) or italicize (using em tags).
What say we find out?
1. More moderation of comments and participants. Have to say I was on the verge of leaving ‘that other site’ primarily because a known few were just getting to be too much. Insulting responses, blatant exaggerations, grammar Nazi type behavior…none of it should belong in a serious site. Not to be a prude, humor definitely is needed in the realm of politics, but some limits have to be put down.
2. Kindof small potatoes, but could you make more of an effort to identify the district and party affiliation of representatives that you mention. Some of these people are no all that familiar to me and this is a pretty big state after all.
Thanks for asking and good luck!
i’d like a diet soda that’s just as tasty as a regular soda without the funny aftertaste…and i’d like this blog to be at the forefront of making 2016 the year of tone loc’s big comeback…
I think one wild thing (Ed) around here is enough.
I really liked the cleanness of Peach Pundit. The pictures in the background are nice, but it makes it harder to quickly scan the page to see what you want.
Great job so far.
Please add time-stamps to front-page posts. I get confused. If you could break up some of the lengthy posts to an interior page, that would be good too.
I don’t know if this has been addressed because I haven’t checked out everything but I hope using Reply will place the post so that it’s clearly a reply to a previous post and not appear somewhere else.
I like the idea of identifying reps by party and district. I’d like full disclosure and history of all front-page posters too but I don’t expect that.
No scheduled sports posts needed, although I appreciate casual mention of anyone’s team. I don’t get political news from sports sites either.
Keep moderation tough enough to eliminate thread-jacking. After that, anything goes.
Almost forgot. Thanks for the Edit function.
I access this blog along with a host of others using Feedly and would love for the full articles (as they are on PP and other sites) to show on the RSS feed instead of just a preview.
I have set the feed to push the whole article.
Thanks, that was easy!
I just signed up to chime in with my perspective as a reader of Georgiapol via an RSS reader, Feedly, in my case. Before I get into that, I got an error message after sign up. I was brought to my profile page and this was plastered across the top: Warning: array_pop() expects parameter 1 to be array, null given in /home/wp_v77f4d/georgiapol.com/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/custom-post-types/nova.php on line 390 – I suppose it could be me. I have a WordPress blog of my own and it may be conflicting somehow. I’m not that tech savvy.
In regard to visiting this site via an RSS reader, it’s coming through nicely. I am getting time stamps, so it must be Feedly that adds them (as xdog mentions it above). I don’t know if it’s possible, or desired, but I would prefer it if I could read the entire post within Feedly and not just get a summary. The old site allowed for that. I understand wanting to get click throughs to here, so you can take this suggestion for what it’s worth.
I second Demonbeck’s request for more comedy. Morning links is a great place for this – and thanks for keeping that feature. One of my favorites. We can be serious about the issues, but when we fail to laugh, we lose.
Bon blogging!
I have set the feed to push the whole article.
I like the site. Looks clean and the format is easy to navigate.
I also would be a fan of interviews with legislators from both parties, especially during session to get their opinions on various pieces of legislation, changes that can come in the future, election/campaign updates.
1) the site looks great on the computer, the mobile site could be a little neater for those of us that can’t be glued to a computer
2) I would love to see an objective, shall I say it again, objective analysis of mixing religion with politics, the good, the bad, historical examples, present day battles etc…
3) I like poking the hornet’s nest, so as long as gapol pokes a hornets nest with every article, no matter whose side they are poking, I am golden
Keep up the good work guys.
The mobile site should be more readable now.
Find Grayson.
Derrick or Daughters? Or the town? http://www.cityofgrayson.org/
a serious comment (not that i’m not serious about the tone loc thing, but still) early on the other site was usually not afraid to throw a rumor up on the front page if it seemed to have come from a relatively reliable source,(sometimes it panned out, sometimes it didn’t-it’s an odd comparison but perez hilton was saying that bruce jenner was transitioning, and was dismissed for it, like a year before caitlyn jenner came into existence ) nor did they worry about if they were boring people with the minutiae of some of the more inside baseball stuff , like delegate fights and and campaign hires and fires…i always enjoyed stuff like that…
Could the top ten posts ranked by most recent comments be in the list on the left as opposed to the individual comments and the commenter’s ID?
And just for grins another plug for some means of highlighting the unread comments within each thread.
Oh, and I currently have a post awaiting moderation. Could we get a clue as to why? I didn’t say a *#?X!ing thing off color or offensive.
We were having some issues with follow on comments still needing moderation. Don’t take it personally and I think it has since been fixed.
Re: New Unread Comments
While we would like to reinstate this option the developer of the original plugin has not supported it since 2008 or so. I had made some changes to it when WordPress changed it’s schemas in 2010 or so, and that worked for awhile. I will do what I can to redevelop this functionality…
Gracias.
That would be amazing. Thank you.
Can we make it so the threads with the newest posts rise to the front page? This would work well with threads that could be collapsed.
Appreciate all the feedback. IT (led by “TheDeepDark”) has been following all week. I had to get some work done mid-week but have read through all of them. We should be aiming for most, at least in spirit.
Two of the things I want badly are the old “recent comments” buttons, but those were a plug in someone made for WordPress that he quit supporting about….08 I think I was told. It was one of the reasons for site crashes at the last place. We haven’t found a suitable similar replacement as of yet.
I also would like something that tells me which comments I’ve read and which I haven’t when I return to a thread. See above, the answer is similar.
There’s a few comments about ordering the top posts based on recent comments. That I’ll take up with the editorial team and then with IT. Consider it pending. Or something.
And yes, I do want to have some content that varies away from #gapol. I’ll try to explain my ideas for that on a post tomorrow morning, and would appreciate specific feedback on that on that post.
Is the site running exceedingly slow today (2-17-16) or is my computer getting ready to be FUBAR?
Fixed it.
Thank you TDD! Much appreciated.
Yep. Damn plug-in “update” added a “feature” of slowing everything to a crawl.
With ‘features’ like that, who needs viruses?
So, some of you might have noticed that we spiffied up the comment section. Let us know if this works for you, or if it sucks.
I dig the new look and functionality.
I cant seem to post using Chrome. It does appear to be plugin related since I tried disabling all plugins and still have the same issue. The POST COMMENT button doesn’t appear. And when I try to reply to a comment by hitting the reply button or liking or disliking a comment, nothing happens. Essentially, none of the new functionalities work in Chrome. Might just be me and my computer but wanted to let you know just in case.
I can’t post with Firefox or Chrome. Only IE. Of course, you probably thought I wouldn’t figure that out. Hah!
Okay, so until I get the Chrome/Firefox issue resolved we go back to normal.
Aside from the Chrome issues:
I’m not a fan of the thumbs up/ down thing. I would rather people express their support or disapproval of a comment by posting their own reply comment.
Also don’t like having to expand long comments (although I get why Mgmt might want that).
But other than that, it looked great. 🙂
“Normal” except we lost the edit feature.