Friends, Bear With Us

As I was saying to a friend of mine the other day, taking over the technical aspects of this site was not just a baptism of fire, it was more like an initiation by supernova into a fraternity of fire eating, flame throwing demons — when you’re wearing a paper dress and one soaked in gasoline, no less.

This will be short: I have had unrealistic expectations about the technical people who have come to work here on the site. They all have had fragments of the picture, like a jigsaw puzzle on a card table but nobody knows what the site should actually look like and how it should work — except for you and I, who have been here when it was working fine.

So I am changing course here.

The latest crash was caused by an attempt to restore email notifications and get the newsletter going again. These seem like simple things, but please take my word for it, they are not. Long story short, somehow the email notifications got replicated and they crashed the site. They’ve been going out once an hour. We have spammed ourselves to death.

So I’m having that removed entirely and I’m going to hold off on asking for the newsletter to be restored for a week or so. What I am going to do with this new hire of mine is see if he can just get into the swing of things and keep the site up and functional without any bells and whistles. Then we will introduce new things slowly and carefully.

This has been an expensive year. I believe I mentioned how Google AdSense restricted our ads and gave no reason for it. At least when Gateway Pundit got demonitized by AdSense, they told them they were posting “dangerous and derogatory” content. We never got any explanation. I thought they were messing with us because we were a brand new site insofar as the “account” was concerned. Believe me, I sent many impassioned letters to AdSense saying, “You’ve been publishing our stories for years! It’s just the account which is new!” They didn’t listen. You remember the movie, The Incredible Shrinking Man? I felt like that guy. “Help, help, I’m over here. And my ads are restricted and I’m going broke, and here comes the spider! Argghhh!!!”  AdSense doesn’t tell you anything. The best case scenario is that you can go to a Community Chat Room and post your question and somebody with a similar experience will share with you what happened in their case.

So we lost loads of money — loads for us. Wealth and poverty are relative — before I found another ad provider and went there, kind of like Mike Lindell trying to replace Fox News. Except I didn’t dig my own grave and jump into it as he did.

And then along with AdSense there have been the technical hassles, for the reasons I’ve stated. People have come here with good intentions and a partial picture of what they’re doing and then it’s bull in the china shop time. I think, in my sublime innocence, that I’m asking for something simple and it never is. And I have finally figured that out.

So we have to go slowly but surely. One step forward, two steps back.

The emotional drain on me from this has been indescribable. I really don’t like to go into a poor me rant, and go to the wailing wall and rend my garments, but I’m going to tell you, sackcloth and ashes is it. It is mid-September and this has been going on since late December, 2020.

I accept that things are not going to happen the way I would like them to. I cannot find anybody — at least for the price I’m able to pay — who understands what is necessary on this site and who can implement all the variables and keep everything working. So my approach now is just to keep things stable and running and we can introduce a bell or a whistle slowly and in due course.

So for now, no email notifications. If you like the pop ups, they were working last I knew. Sign up for them. But no email notifications — unless you know a WordPress developer who can walk us through the field without stepping on any mines. And if I did, I would have hired him or her.

I don’t know when there will be a newsletter again. In my zeal to avoid another crash, I’m not even going to attempt that for at least a few weeks.

If anybody here in our community has any personal friendships or connections with people who know how to do these arcane functions on a WordPress site, please make the introduction.

The larger issue here for me is that I came here to write. I love to write, as well you know. And I’m fine with the business end of things. I worked in corporate America my entire life. I enjoy business. But I am not a computer techie and I don’t want to become one. It’s a job I want to hire done.

Let me throw an idea out there: Is there anybody here who knows about WordPress sites or who wants to learn? I could see my way clear to discuss a supervisor’s job with somebody here. If you wanted to learn WordPress well enough to supervise the techie and take the burden off of me, some kind of payment could be arranged. It wouldn’t be much but believe me, I’d rather pay somebody to get this headache away from me than spend money on a shrink, and that’s what I’m going to need if I can’t get this situation handled.

Another idea: we need the services of a graphic artist. Does anybody know someone who can draw a good cartoon for the front page? It would have our theme of the Little Political Blog That Could and the anthropomorphic locomotive is going down the tracks to Washington, D.C. You know the characters the engine/blog encounters.

And another thought, an important one: Anybody here know about social media? We need to get a much bigger footprint on that.

Lastly, I’m going to take advantage of the Creative Commons license that we, and a few other sites live under. Common Dreams and ProPublica are both licensed under Creative Commons, which means that we can reprint their articles in entirety with attribution. They have some terrific journalism at both places. So we’ll be interspersing some of their best along with the usual bill of fare around here.

We’ll get down the road and keep chugging along. But it’s not going to be with a quick fix it and it works forevermore kind of a brush stroke. No, we’re going to need to go slowly and surely with each step and make sure that one improvement doesn’t set off a chain reaction in some other part of the site.

And make no mistake, I’ve paid some very respectable hourly wages to people, believe me. It’s not that I’m cheap. It’s that we have reached a point here where all we can do is hang on. There’s no money left. The community has been generous, as always, or we wouldn’t have gotten this far. I’ve put all my personal money into this enterprise as well, and you guys know there wasn’t too much of that. Anybody who’s been reading me for a while knows I was sharing a house in SoCal and dealing with various surgeries and catastrophes for the past several years, a hip crippled by arthritis, a molar exploding in a geyser of pus, all sorts of lovely stuff. I was malpracticed and had to take early disability retirement about ten years ago, so my finances got thoroughly trashed.

But we’ll get by one way or the other. We offer a quality product here at PolitiZoom. When people find us they stick around. That’s how we’ve grown. And that will continue. But don’t expect the bells and the whistles to come back overnight. The big deal is that we’re still on the tracks and our wheels are still moving. We’ll get some speed back in due course. And then we’ll get all fancy and put on polish and streamers and colored lights and race through the night.

We thought we could, we thought we could, we thought we could. And we’re still here.

TOOT TOOT!!!

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