website issues

Note: This page is periodically updated. To keep things current, we're editing the text without use of strikethroughs (like this) because it was just getting too difficult to read any more.

Q: What is trackback? How does it work?

A: We no longer have trackbacks enabled, thanks to the overexcited online poker spammers.

Q: How do I upload an image?

A: You have to be a cleared user to upload images to the site. However, anyone can link to images they have hosted elsewhere using image tags appropriate for the input format you're using. Images that are so large they break the page layout and images that violate copyright or decency will be removed without notice.

Q: What does "moderate comments" mean?

A: One of the advantages of dynamic interactive website is that the participants can collectively "moderate" the content posted. Here, it's a way for everyone to rate the comments others post, so that the better comments get props while the posts considered generally negative or troll-like will get filtered from default display. With traffic now reaching 1000 hits a day, it's generally easier to let the members decide what's good and what's not. This does not mean there are no moderators or admins who might step in and remove completely inappropriate posts. But it does mean that we can have a more hands-off approach and just let the users decide. Note: While all users can filter comments display, only registered users can actually rate comments. Trusted users have more voting weight. As time goes by, we may adjust these settings. Stay tuned.

Q: Do you have any rules about blogging on mediagirl.org?

A: New members must establish a track record before obtaining blogging privileges. Sorry that this is necessary, but some trolls have necessitated this policy. If you have any questions, please contact me via the feedback form.

As for policies once you are blogging on the site, well, obviously we want you to be tasteful, entertaining and honorable -- or, at the very least, funny :D -- but you also should conform to the terms of service. For more on blogging well, a good place to start is Rebecca's weblog handbook, which emphasizes:

• Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
• If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
• Publicly correct any misinformation.
• Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
• Disclose any conflict of interest.
• Note questionable and biased sources.

Rebecca elaborates on each of these points. She also has a book for sale. All can be found at the link above. Note: This FAQ page and our Terms of Service page are our own exceptions to the "public corrections" rule. We try to keep this page clean and simple, so it's easy to find questions and answers. That means that if we kept striking out old text to replace it with new -- as we advise for blog posts -- the page would get overly cluttered. However, we try to note any significant changes to this page to avoid undue confusion.

Q: How did you come to choose Drupal as the CMS for this site?

A: There are a lot of good CMS packages out there, and some not-so-good ones. We felt it was important to go with an Open Source system for this site. We like GNU/GPL and believe in the future of Open Source software. (It also appeals to our democratic [small d] values.) To make a long story short, we like Drupal because it is compact, powerful, stable, with clean code and a great developer community. It also helps that we can get occasional help from a friend when we get stuck.

Q: I posted a comment but I cannot see it. Why?

A: If you're a registered member: Unless you were trolling or flaming (which are causes for automatic deletion), your comment probably got caught by a spam filter. We're sorry about that, but it's a necessary measure or this site would be buried in spam in no time. Rest assured, we periodically review all comments, and if we come across a valid comment that is not spam, we'll release it. At that point, it will appear as posted.
If you're an unregistered visitor: Comments posted by unregistered visitors may go through comments moderation. This feature may be enabled or not, depending upon the status of the spam filter at the moment. Don't worry, we'll catch up to the backlog at some point.
If you're a trolling nimrod: You don't really need an answer to that question, do you?

Q: I have a question that's not here.

A: Please post your questions in a comment to this page. We will respond asap.

Thanks!

-- media girl

Our apologies to those who found the site unavailable the past several hours. I communicated with our sysadmin and now it seems all is well again.

If you're seeing this post, then you're seeing mediagirl.org as hosted on the new server. Welcome!

To those who tried to get online here last night, I apologize. Our hosting servers were having problems. All should be working okay now.

I found this in the in-box this morning.

Time for Blogads' annual blog reader survey. Yes, the third annual! Now open for business. (I apologize if you've gotten several of these -- some people say they haven't gotten prior versions.)

Right now we'll survey JUST readers of politically influential blogs... your readers. I'm sending this survey link out to 200 political blogad sellers, plus a few friends. (We'll survey other blogad niches in coming weeks.)

As in past years, Blogads will pay for the survey. Even though the results will be severely unscientific, the project helps us all better understand blogs and where we all fit in the infosphere. Stuff like this also helps with evangelism -- headlines notwithstanding, too many pundits, advertisers and journalists are still blind to the political bloggers' radical force.

If you want your readers to be represented, please point them to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=84511800967....

So we can break out your blog's data later, please ask your readers to list it as the referring blog for question #23.

For that last part, please, if you would, put media girl (2 words, lowercase).

That's it, that's all. We now return you to the regularly scheduled blogging.

To everyone over the past 8 months or so who tried to contact me via the feedback link, I apologize for not responding. I've been playing musical computers and hard drives over the past year, and somewhere along the line an email account feel out of the loop. All those feedbacks ended up on the server, but they were not being pulled down ... until today.

I replied to some of you personally before just giving up and deciding on this blog post. Of course, those who took the most offense at my non-responsiveness probably aren't reading mediagirl.org any more.

Anyway ... sorry about that.

I love my collection of blogrolls, but many of them are about to disappear any moment now. This is because I've chosen not to renew my premium Blogrolling account. (Too many hang-ups, and I'd rather do something within the site here.)

I'm not sure how I'll approach things yet, but I will post basic html lists in the short term ... until I find a better way.

It won't be right away, though. I've been pretty busy with work (which is why I haven't been blogging much). Much gratitude to Matsu, moiv, Bayprairie, Ralph, Ralph, Artemisia and Sour Duck for keeping things rockin'!

Blogiversary? Anniblogary? Blogday?

On November 12 of last year, I started this site. I had no idea what to expect. My blogger site was but an obscure little thing with like 5 readers. Before that, I'd never blogged about anything but personal trivia, which was utterly boring -- to me and everyone else.

For mediagirl.org, I chose Drupal for the site software because of its flexibility. I'd hoped to build this into a community site, but since then it's kind of morphed into more of a group site, where 2-3 dozen women have blog posting access. (Thank you Matsu, ferdette, gballsout, Morgaine, Sour Duck, Pseudo-Adrienne, The Heretik, truthinboots, laurentayloris and everyone else for helping make mediagirl.org a worthwhile stop!)

[Helping to make Our Word succeed has been a nice extension of this initial desire, and I urge anyone looking for robust open women's discussion to go there.]

Some (boring) factoids:

I'm delighted that the traffic has grown here. Statcounter says we're averaging around 900 a day, but to be honest, that fluctuates quite a bit. The server logs say another 10,000 pages are viewed by crawlers and bots. The Feedburner counter has remained under 10, but the server logs say 186 people (or 'bots) are subscribed to the direct feed. Sitemeter says that the average visit for the past week lasted 1:36, which tells me that most people are actually reading what they find, which is a good thing, even if they aren't sticking around to read everything else -- or anything else.

But I'm under no illusions that the site's modest success is because I'm especially insightful or entertaining. More people stumble here from Google or Yahoo than from bookmarks or blogrolls. (Recent searches include "trailer clips of women oil wrestling"; "no knickers girl photos" (hello, England!); "signs of men on the down low" -- but also: "pain in ovary"; "pregnancy ERA television"; "male insecurity".) The site has won no awards (and actually I find all the "vote for me" posts to be rather obnoxious and sad.) Sometimes we've benefitted from a kindly link from Daou and Digby and Pandagon and other bigger and better blogs. And I'm sure having to scrub the database of multiple URL aliases for every page hasn't helped things. Still, every day we get 80-150 return visitors.

Thanks everyone for dropping by!

Enough about boring numbers. They count only for advertisers, ego lists and blogwhores who are afraid to link to smaller sites lest they lose their PageRank.

Getting to the point:

I'd really really like to know what you all think. I feel like I'm flying blind here most of the time. Traffic aside, is anyone getting anything out of what I'm writing here?

What do you like or dislike about mediagirl.org?

What should I/wewe focus on in this coming year? Please share your suggestions, recommendations, complaints, rants. (No, this isn't an invitation for trolls.) Would you like to see more on politics. (As if that were possible!) Less? More feminist stuff? More whimsy? More sarcasm? More pictures? Less?

I'd love to hear from you. (Comments are open for the next 30 days or so.)

Anyone who's been paying attention to the political blogosphere knows that the question of a blog's sources of funding comes up repeatedly, and in several places. Is a blogger taking money from a corporation to blog? Is a blogger being backed by a PAC or 527 or political party? On what terms is a blogger selling advertising?

With any of these questions comes the follow-up question: What strings are attached to that funding?

I am a big believer in The Cluetrain Manifesto and the democratizing (small "d") forces that the internet empowers. So far, blogs and websites have been primarily disruptive forces to the status quo of the mainstream media and political partisans.

But this is beginning to change. Anyone communicating in any medium will eventually run into questions about propriety, integrity and ethics. I have no problem with people being paid to blog, even to advance a given agenda ... as long as they disclose it so the reader knows.

Today the question of who's paying whom to say what has gotten a bit of attention in a thread on Booman Tribune. With political campaigns revving into action, I imagine that these kinds of questions will only heat up in the coming months. Rather than get into the particulars of other sites, of which I know little, I thought I'd address the questions regarding my own house here.

And so, in the interests of transparency, I offer now this disclosure:

• This site receives its funding primarily from my own pocket. I take time out of my working day to post here and read other sites. I am not paid by anybody to do this, let alone advance any political or commercial point or agenda.
• This site contains display advertising via Blogads. These ads are sold by Blogads on their network. While I reserve the right to reject any ads for content, to date I have not done so. Appearance of ads on this site should not be construed as endorsement on my part. I maintain a "Great Wall" between advertising and content.
• So far, the ads this year have yielded funds on the order of a few hundred dollars. That's nice to have, but it is not at all my primary means of support. Those funds go first and foremost into the hosting space and bandwidth of this site.
• Current advertising rates are public can always be found on the Blogads website. I am the one who sets the advertising rates.
• This site's Blogads are sold individually.
• Blogads on mediagirl.org are marketed on Blogads as part of the Liberal Advertising Network and the BlogSheroes Network. To date, there have been no "strings attached" to mediagirl.org's membership in these networks.
• I am an affiliate of Site5 web hosting. If someone clicks on a Site5 ad or link here and subsequently purchases web hosting from them, Site5 gives me a sales commission. Nevertheless, I host this website on Site5 because I love their services, and endorse their hosting services anyway based on personal experience.
• I write about what moves me. I am my own editor. Whether that's a good thing I leave to readers to determine.
• I write here, and in diaries and comments on other sites, using the anonymous handle "media girl", for personal reasons, and because I am a principal in a small business with a presence online. At this time, the business has no direct or indirect connection to political organizations or candidates, and I am not affiliated with any political party or organization, nor any advertiser on this site except as disclosed in this post. I post anonymously because I like my private life, and prefer to keep a distance between political speech and business. Some of you reading this know me and my business. I ask you to keep it to yourself and respect my privacy in this matter.
• All revenues and expenditures regarding this blog site are reported to the IRS and appropriate state agencies.

I will post any changes to this here in this post, which can be found in the "about" section of this site.

Thanks for reading. I welcome comments and questions. I may even answer some of them.

Some of you may have noticed how truly sluggish the site has become of late. Well, we did a little digging and discovered that, through a data processing error, the system was generating multiple URL aliases for every single page on the site.

Now, with over 800 posts on the site already, it was a bit too much to go through and pick and choose which alias to keep for each post ... so we just deleted all of the aliases.

What this means is that many existing links out there to a specific blog post or article here are now broken. Those pages still exist -- it's just that they're now filed under their default URLs. Making use of search (currently on the top-right of every page) can take you to the page you were trying to reach. (We also added a note to the 404 page itself.)

I know this isn't ideal, and I'm afraid how this will affect our search engine rankings. A plethora of suddenly-broken links won't look good to them. However, the Google sitemap is dynamically updated so that's one step in the right direction. And as we see persistent and repeated 404s for a given page in our logs, we'll manually catch ourselves up.

The hope is that this will greatly improve the responsiveness of mediagirl.org, and make it easier for people to visit and join in the discussions.

Thanks.