This weekend I'm working on the format and some other features.
The site may change or you might see test posts periodically.
Over on the left bottom, you will see an up/down arrow. This is a voting module. By default all blog posts go to the front page. Any blog post receiving negative points(votes) can be removed from the front page by user consensus.
Any forum topic that receives enough positive points will be promoted to the front page. If a post receives enough negative votes(points) it will be unpublished.
Comments are also rated and with enough negative ratings will disappear from the site. Positive ratings over time will give that user more site privileges.
The idea here is to generate a front page that are the best writings and the most reasoned blogs. Registered fellow bloggers determine the content versus just myself as arbitrary dictator on high.
There is also an abuse system in place, but I believe people blogging on this site are highly analytical, fair so we shouldn't run into some sort of abuse or popularity contest.
It's only to shape the main content of The Economic Populist by the actual site users. A bottom up decision tree.
I would especially appreciate feedback on the site look as I change it and hope you comment.
The blue site can still be created by switching your theme under myaccount->edit and selecting amadou. In other words, if you hate this site, just switch your theme to amadou in your account settings and wala, you have the narrower blue one. Everything should work the same. Who says choice isn't an option?
I'm working on making the current look, the default site layout.
I also am working on new features, such as the below where you can attach polls to your blog posts. This blog post is the first example of this.
Any bugs I hope you leave a comment.
You can also attach files to your blog posts and have them prominently displayed. This enables you to attach spreadsheets, large images and pdfs. This should help references large tables, spreadsheets, statistics in your blog.
Note, I'm also making more formatting choices!
Whew! I'm done playing web 2.0 designer for the weekend, I hope ya all try this, give some feedback. Right now there is no written "how do I?" for users of the site, beyond the FAQ and I know you need one. Anyone wishing to volunteer, let me know.
Comments
comments
The subheads to navigate to books, contacts, forum,etc. are even further over to the right than before. On my laptop the forum pick is off the screen and I have to scroll sideways to see it. I think left justifying these would make navigation easier.
I'm not a big fan of voting on any site, perhaps others feel differently. What one finds is that popularity is not a good proxy for "quality". Take dailykos, any posting which supports Obama will get lots of votes and those which support Clinton won't.
I'm not a fan of FIFO either, except for time-based postings such as on an event focused site.
I thought you were trying to set up a site where more fundamental issues could be discussed over an extended period of time. For this a forum layout is better. Those articles which get the most views or comments can be set to rise to the top of each forum section.
The new color scheme is nice...
FIFO & dailykos
For anyone else, FIFO stands for "first in first out" which is the same as first come first served.
I sure am trying to create a space for in depth discussion on economics/labor/trade analysis/policy, so feedback is critical for what I may think is cool, others may not.
I changed the width, moved the forum menu over and am working on adding dynamic menus to navigate especially the forum more easily. Any more feedback is greatly appreciated.
I have wide screens, so I didn't think of that rolling to the side! We need the ability to somehow post detailed graphs, spreadsheets and this sort of analysis details and make it readable and I'm kind of hunting around to make this blog more "math head" friendly. I just added file attachments because some data just is not easy to format via blogs. Anybody know of any features out there to make it better for math heads to post their research, analysis on websites/blogs, I am looking for those kind of features.
I agree with you that dailykos is cult zoo. I don't even think people read the posts frankly before rating, ranting.
I'm assuming something as geeky as economic policy isn't going to attract those types but if it does, I will just plain remove that kind of stuff because it's clearly off topic on here.
Right now, if a forum post gets points, it will be promoted to the front page and I'll lower the threshold so we have a better chance of discussion threads getting more traffic that are good ones.
I just got this system working and it's pretty rough as well as rudimentary in algorithm. Hopefully later I can add a "time" slope on it so the length of time a post is on the front page will be longer based on user feedback. Long story short I have to write software to create it (or dig around for a long time with non-functioning code, incompatible and so on).
I want to give the default to the front page so at least a blog post will be read and if it's not so hot, well, people can just vote it down and it will not be on the front page anymore. That means while it's still FIFO, the more in depth posts will be on the front page longer due to filtering, user defined. One cannot post to the front page a short blog post to also promote quality writing. Blogs should be reasonably in depth.
If I see this turn into a user popularity contest versus focusing in on the depth of writing, insight, facts, I'll write up some algorithm or do something to fix it.
I hear ya when someone writes something in great depth on dailykos only to have some psycho babbling idiot do a comment drive by and proclaim your topic as not progressive or not Democratic and usually much worse!
I'm assuming an economics blog just isn't going to get that many of those concrete head non-thinkers who seem to live to troll rate and cheer lead and if there is a blog post or something just completely off topic on here, I do monitor the content and I'll just plain remove it. I've already done that. Since I'm encouraging immigration policy discussion from a globalization and labor economics view point, things that don't have facts or numbers in them are getting off-topic.
I imply it in the site rules that people better argue from the facts and analysis, so far so good no real problems and we have had some controversial blog posts already.
Forums: both blogs and forums have nested, threaded comments, which enables a sane discussion that's readable, replies in either.
Active Forum Topics, in the middle column, that's a FIFO override for forums that are still active, so someone can comment in a forum post that started months ago, but it will bop up in that active forum list because the discussion is still ongoing.
I don't like Democratic Underground because to me the forums become unmanageable to figure out who said what and have any in depth discussion in them. So, I'm looking for any design ideas to improve all of this and take the best of the ideas from the blogs and incorporate them over here.
The site design is also "dynamic" which means changed as I can get to it, get feedback as well as can write up code to improve it. ;)
Dynamic menu
over on the left, just under the site picture is a dynamic menu which should enable better navigation to the forums.
I don't like the forum layout itself, too many clicks, but it's a TBD. (to be done).
color of background
I like the yellow background, perhaps a lighter shade?
In MS Paint (under custom):
Hue: 38 Red: 254
Sat: 235 Green: 250
Lum: 202 Blue 175
Also, please make the authentication/human verification code easier to read.
bug
I'm aware that when the vote threshold is reached to move content to/from the front page you see an error message. I have to fix it but for now just refresh the page and it will go away. It's not anything serious and the module is working.
I like it!
Voted same.
I am now going to put up the sort of typical post I do in so far as 'economics' is concerned. I'd be greatly interested any others views as to 'Complexity Economics' with regards to:
It's current standing in academia and business?
If it is regarded as the new paradigm?
If there are other paradigms regarding a massive restructuring of current economic theory out there, what they are called and how they rank in terms of academic and other acceptance....
Not too much to ask.
I am so sure!
'When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.'
Admin - Site Issues - Please Read - May 2
For all who are posting on EP, we are going through one hell of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This has been going on now for over 48 hours. They are working on it, but please be patient. If you see the site not respond or have a slow response, that is not normal for this site and will be resolved as soon as the DDoS is located and stopped.
A distributed denial of service means that a series of hackers, usually from China actually, hack into vulnerable PCs and then all at once, try to access one domain. I use bluehost.com and so there are many accounts and many servers upon which this attack is being made. In other words, it's not EP they are probably attacking.
You might be interested to know that DDoS attacks are constant now, attacking sites in the United States so they is a major problem, not just for our site but for major sites such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
When this site is running normally the response is fast, it can handle large traffic and hundreds of users, no problem, this is a temporary issue.
Update
I just got off the phone with bluehost and supposedly they should resolve this by tomorrow. Some of the site RSS feeds are not working properly because of this problem.