Friends, It’s Going To Take A Community Effort To Pull the Little Engine Around This Bend

Just as this lovely country of ours spans from sea to shining sea, this plucky website, the Little Political Blog That Could, now stretches from computer crash to computer crash. Miraculously, we keep recovering and going forward, until the next time. This entire year has been a continuous eye opener. After each crash the queries come, “Why does it keep breaking? Why can’t you fix it?” The reason is that the technical side of this business has not been handled properly since square one, i.e., last January. I would blame myself for not asking the right questions to begin with, but that’s because I didn’t know what questions to ask. This is a field I have been thrust into, not trained for.

Let me briefly share our history with you, so we know how we come to be here in this place at this time. We used to be affiliated with another site, Daily Sound and Fury. That site came into being January 2017, this site went online March, 2018. I took over ownership of PolitiZoom in the fall of 2019. Daily Sound and Fury was sold January 2021.

Now, at the time when the two sites were under the same management, we had an arrangement to trade out technical support as consideration for original content and a portion of ad revenues. All worked well with that arrangement. I had no complaint. Then, as frequently happens in Paradise, a serpent entered the garden, two in this instance, and bought Daily Sound and Fury almost nine months ago.

The new owners didn’t believe that PZ had any value to them and so it was not possible to continue any kind of a business relationship. At that time, last January, I turned over the technical end of the business to a brilliant young physics student in Texas, Vic. Vic had previously owned a Word Press site and so she felt she could handle the website along with her tutoring job, studies, etc. She could not. We both negotiated in good faith and it turned out that the site was simply more work than she thought it would be. And certainly it was more work than I thought it would be.

We are also losing another bright young college kid, Ben, this month for exactly the same reason. It turned out to be more work than he anticipated.

In between these worthies — and they gave it their all — we have had the occasional trouble shooter in the Middle East rescue the site.

The net effect of this effort has been that I’m getting yet another advanced degree in the School Of Hard Knocks. I’ve learned a great deal between each crash and I’m now able to see more of an overview of what I’m actually dealing with. I won’t say I have The Big Picture in focus, but I’ve certainly got enough puzzle pieces to where I can see some shape and color forming with some of them.

I come to the community now, not to ask for your money — although God knows we can use that, too — but to ask for your expertise. There are things that need to be done and I have to hire them done. I was way too naive before and I was dealing with other people who also were well intentioned and naive — and I dealt with a shyster or two. One of the Middle East trouble shooters thought he could string me along forever with his b.s. But I cut bait with him and found somebody much better.

I have hit the end of my rope, personally. We had a triple crash of the site in early July, as you may recall and then traffic was slow in returning. I finally figured out that Flipboard, which is a news aggregator that publishes our stories, was offline and then it took me another ten, twelve days to solve that issue. We lost a lot of traffic in July. July was the Month From Hell.

I was hopeful that August would be a better month and it started out fine. Views were up — until the 18th when we had another crash.

I went to an ER with chest pains last night. I literally have hit the end of my personal road here. I cannot deal with all this stress and I cannot play overseer to technical aspects of this site, in addition to writing and running the business.

I love to write, as you well know, and I love business. I spent my entire life in corporate America running other peoples’ businesses and I’ve been thrilled to run my own. The fly in the ointment, nay the Kraken in the ointment, is the technical stuff. I need to hire it done.

Or, another possibility I have considered, is we take PZ off the internet and it would exist only on Patreon. I resist doing that, because I want people to be able to access the site for free, at least until they can afford a subscription, and because I believe in the worth of this site. We have grown from grassroots. We can grow a lot more. So I want to stay on the internet, but I cannot take the stress of being jammed into a job role that I am incompetent to hold, which is technical advisor. Although I will say that the silver lining in all of this awfulness has been that I am getting more and more of an idea every day about what it takes to keep one of these sites up and alive. I am learning from my mistakes and they have been legion, unfortunately.

Now down to brass tacks:

1. Does anybody here have any ability to interact with Facebook? We have not been able to post stories to Facebook and we need somebody to increase our social media presence. See, the good news about this site is once people discover us, they subscribe to the newsletter and they stick around. That’s how it is with good sites on the internet. I personally have come across any number of good sites in the past few years and thought, “How long has this been around and why haven’t I seen it?” And then I subscribe to a site. That’s how people react to PZ as well. That’s how we’ve grown from an acorn into a hearty sapling.
2. Is anybody here a Word Press Developer or do you know somebody who is a Word Press Developer? We have monthly updates that need to be done. Somebody needs to know the difference between image optimization (which we did recently) and MYSQL optimization, which is supposedly going on as we speak. I am going to be talking to a guy on Thursday. Maybe that will solve this problem. Or maybe I’ll have to keep looking. The problem has been that a LOT of people use the title “Word Press Developer” and it means a lot of things to different people. Again, I attend classes regularly in the School Of Hard Knocks, so I know.
3. Can anybody expand and grow into the job? I could post all kinds of desirable qualifications for the perfect person and what that person could/would do down the road as the site grows, but I prefer to have those conversations privately and one on one. This could be a nice little sinecure for the right person. Get the site rolling well, and then kick back. Believe me, I’ve been trying to get us there for eight months.
4. Can anybody here go into the site and help me make some cosmetic adjustments? There are pictures I want to put up, categories I want to create and I can’t do it myself. And I never get a chance to hire the cosmetic stuff done because I’m always dealing with crisis.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread and I freely admit that I foolishly rushed in to handling the technical support of this site, but again, I did so in good faith and I was listening to people who were also acting in good faith. And we know what building material the road to Hell is paved with.

Additionally, I was between a rock and a hard place when the site separation took place. The new DSF owners didn’t know the value of original content or how PZ stories raised their search engine ranking. The “deal” they offered me was that I could post on DSF for free, with a hot link back to PZ — if you can believe that. I imagine that the next conversation would have been how much they were going to charge me for tech support. I’ll never know because I didn’t stick around. The handwriting went up on the wall in neon very early on. So I had no choice but to figure out how to go it on my own, and tout suite.

Now I have a guy in Pakistan working on the site as we speak and I’m talking to another one in Utah on Thursday. We may be through the worst of it, but I hesitate to tell myself that because I have done so so many times in the past and then boom, another crash and another freak out.

Bottom line, my writing is the most important thing to me. This technical *%#($^@ has detracted from me doing the one thing that I want to do. The stress is ruining my health. I have large swollen ankles right now, because stress causes edema, at least for me at this stage in my life. I am going in for another iron infusion tomorrow. Anybody here remember he Carnaby Street look, back in the 60’s? The white lipstick? That’s that I look like now.

I want to smell the roses. I want to put tomato plants out on my balcony. I want to go adopt a pootie. I even have yuge ambitions of going to the Grand Canyon and Lake Tahoe in the not too distant future. If I can just keep the Little Political Blog That Could chugging down the tracks I’ll have everything I want and then some. At least that’s how it’s played out so far.

I never thought when I started blogging back in 2016 that in a few years I would own my own site and that all kinds of fascinating experiences and people would come into my life. As I said the night it happened, “You haven’t lived until you’ve had Mike Lindell diss you to Roger Stone on You Tube.”

The wealth of this website is in the people who gather here. Take a moment and share in the comments below if you can help the site. I’m just looking for people with technical knowledge and skills so that I can put together a bullet proof plan of support so that I can enjoy life and write. And if you didn’t get a chance to contribute last time, and if you want to contribute money, that’s wonderful. Right now it’s going out as fast as it’s coming in. You can contribute via PayPal at [email protected].

You are the wind beneath our wings, the spray cresting off our keel, and the cosmic rays filling our solar sails. Together we can do anything and go everywhere.

Kick in your ideas below. I hope that the Great Group Mind Of the Zoomers can find an answer. Thank you.

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