We have a new Forum category, Global for quick news, discussion, reports on globalization or anything related to the global economy, other nations.

Since other nations affect heavily the United States economic health (after all we're just one big consumer market and labor pool! sic), might be useful to have a category to post these events in separately.

The WYSIWYG editor link disappeared if you saved your diary in a draft (click private, then the submit button) or went to re-edit your post after any submit (which is the save).

I think I've fixed it so the WYSIWYG (or the "rich text" editor toggle link) is now visible whenever you go to edit either a blog or a forum post.

Check it and let me know it's working for you.

Again, ya all, just put any bug reports on this thread. I want to make the site easy for you to use but need feedback, bug reports and so forth to fix things.

Tell me do you see this diarrhea yellow or this nice pale yellow as the site main background in the middle?

I appreciate this, I'm tracking down another bug.

The other makes me think of bumble bees.

Maybe a little bit lighter shade of pale yellow though to make it easier to read.

This is to the people writing comments but not wanting to plunge into a full bore blog post.

Over on the top left is a Forums menu and it's a fly out menu and then it's also found via the Discussion page.

There you can post a link to a news article or something short. There is always so much going on, I certainly cannot post small important news briefs or write a couple of comments in reference to a news brief and so forth. If you want to add to the site, when you see some outrageous piece of news, or important article or just plain want to start a new discussion thread, try the forums.

If you see in the middle column there are links to the most active forums, which means anyone who comments in one, it will pop up there and also new forums are in the right hand column.

The site can be much more than a blog if people really start using it to discuss, debate, raise awareness on economic/labor/trade/tax/guest worker Visas/globalization/outsourcing issues.

You can start a new thread by starting a new topic, or just comment on a topic already started that you see.

One of the bug me of the blogs is it's a timed media. Midtowng just wrote an in depth piece on the deflation of the U.S. Dollar and I'm seeing some comments about how it deserves more attention. That is certainly true, we have some very in depth, high quality writings.

So, how to give writers their due by getting more readers and visibility?

1. The blogs are timed. The biggest web traffic is M-TH, more towards the mornings and early afternoon.
2. The readers and their interests are timed. It appears the economics readers are morning people.
3. Cross link and reference link to a good post. In the user guide is the code to put in a cross link at the top or bottom of your post. Reference link (formatted), means to simply cite the post in a comment or another blog post where appropriate
4. Join Technorati and other blog aggregators and add EP to your favorites. You can even add an individual blogger to your favorites for they have their own blog news feeds
5. Properly format your posts in XHTML (see user guide). Beyond looking nice, News Aggregators, blog aggregators, feeds and search engines do not like incorrectly or unformatted blog posts.
6. If allowed, add a link to EP in your signature on your favorite sites. Be careful on this one, not every site likes signatures
7. Cross posting is posting the same blog piece on multiple blogs around the same time. If cross posting, change the title a tad and the first few lines of the post as well as add the cross link from the user guide. Search engines do not like duplicate posts and will punish a blog site by lowering their visibility and ranking due to duplicate posts on multiple sites. So, while you think you might be increasing your visibility, in fact you are at risk of decreasing visibility unless you change just a few things so the search engine does not believe they are duplicates.

I have a search on this site that is not a timed search, but a content search. This is to pick up writing by phrases and keywords so it can be easily found. There are also meta tags but the search is parsing the writing itself as well as the meta tags. There is also search engine optimization going on behind the scenes so someone can find your writings via Google or a blog search by keyword on the first page results. Google ranking is an art onto itself, but the more popularity a site has, that helps in getting on the first page of the search engine results.

That said, the biggest thing we need to make more people aware of EP is to get EP on blog rolls. Anywhere you have or know of a blog roll (for example, on dailykos each individual has a place for their own blog roll), make sure you request they add The Economic Populist. Blog rolls matter for not only it is a way to find new blogs and interesting writing, it's also another way web sites are ranked and increase their visibility.

Finally, recycle. Some of these writings are more like chapters in a book or a series article in a magazine. Therefore one can update older posts, modify the content or add to it as one gains insight into the topic and plain repost it anew.

To my knowledge EP is the only community blog, where everyone can write their own blog, have their own say on economics, blog site out there. I think we're one of very few which allows anyone to post to the front page.

Ya all, when you cross post, please give us a plug by adding this in your blog/diary.

Cross posted on The Economic Populist

or something to make folks aware that we exist and that it's all econ all of the time.

Almost anything on this site can be turned into a news feed.

For example, let's say I want to monitor just one of the discussion area topics, say Macro Economics.

Go to the main address in your browser to that discussion area and type /feed after it.

Wala, if a feed exists, there it shall be! Neato huh!

Macro Economics RSS Feed

I do not have implemented a comments feed. I have that planned for the entire site update. That said, if someone wants it now, let me know and I'll add it now.

Hi everyone. Yes, it's delayed and yes I plan on redoing the entire site. But in the interim, I just changed the right column to show the posts which have been read the most for all time.

Some of the modifications I have in mind for the site require me to rewrite the core code underneath of this site and that's ok but why some things are on hold.

What I would like to hear about in reply to this comment is any features you would like to see.

One of the goals I have as we grow is to make all of us equal in terms of what gets the most visibility on the site over time as well as what gets promoted.

What I'm trying to do is overall have a bottom up blog system so the readers, the writers control what is on the front page, what posts and information is most important versus your typical top down structure where the person who owns the blog or a few select folks only get to write on the front page.

We are now getting loaded with fantastic material and I want to make sure it's easily found.

Also, by having a list somewhere of what people want, when I can get to the real code rewrite, site rewrite I can plain remember it all!

Just an update that a major CPU crash happened this morning and the Account suspended notice is an error. That pops up when there is a CPU crash.

There was a bug with private posts (drafts) using the creation date instead of the "made public" date when posting.

That meant if you worked on a piece for a week under "private" when ready to publish it, the date would be one week old and thus rolled off of the front page already as well as the news feeds.

I decided to give a field which allows you to change the date of your post. When you're ready to publish your piece, just clear out the "authored on" field and it will put the present time you publish your post.

Now you can also use this feature to "republish" a piece if you have significantly updated it as well.

I just hope no one abuses it, truly you should mainly use this feature when you are ready to publish a post you have had in drafts (private checked).

Please don't abuse it and change the date of your posts that are already public unless there are Major revisions.

Hopefully we're all good boys and girls and this will be useful.

I was asked on how to use Microsoft Live Writer with EP and does it work. It does work.

Here are some instructions. Just replace your account (your user name) for Admin.

I combined the RSS feeds for the blog posts and the InstaPopulist into one feed.

Reminder the blogs are always on the front page so you might want to put more of your post by changing the page break to where you want it to require the reader to click read more.
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Folks, if you are replying to a comment, please use the reply button (little green arrow next to it on the left inside the comment box you want to respond to).

Comments on EP are threaded, hierarchical. That means when you hit reply, that person will see your reply in the tracking system.

What's the tracking system? If you go to the right hand column, "my account" you will see a list of all of your comments and it has a count next to it of replies. That's a real easy way to have a conversation and track your comments and other people's replies to your comments.

When you see the "new comment" box at the bottom of posts that starts a new comment thread.

Maybe I need to make the reply button more visible, but in the interim, heads up!

Hey man, this ain't no blogger Google blog! Lots of features on here!

IE6, Internet Explorer 6, should display the site properly now.

Folks, anyone using IE6 should switch over to FireFox.

Not only does ie6 have many display bugs but it also has a lot of security issues.

If you're on W2k then you cannot get IE7, but FireFox does have a W2k version, also win98.

I know we have a lot of new visitors to the site. This is a community blog, which means anyone can register and write their own content. As long as it's based in statistical reality, referenced, we hope you'll join us and help us all understand economics from a national, working America interest.

Other folks, don't forget there is a promotion/demotion system on EP. If you like someone's post or want an Instapopulist to appear on the front page, you can uprate it and if you want it off of the front page, well, you can down rate it. Enough people agree with you, those votes will move content around the site and wala, you control what is on the front page and read on EP.

Please put as many keyword meta tags as you can in your blog and forum (Instapopulist posts).

You might not realize it but all blog posts and forum posts on a particular meta tag literally have their own web page.

Let's use meta tag "Peter DeFazio", then if you look here you will see all posts with that meta tag.

Cool isn't it? It also helps people find your writings in search and blog search engines or more importantly all writings on a particular topic.

There are a lot of new economics blogs coming online.

26 Econ ranks Econmics (and a lot of sites in my opinion that have nothing to do with economics yet claim to!) via Technorati. We just jumped to 117 and Technorati itself jumped to 135k. They also list new economics blogs. Obviously economics blogs are not the most popular topic on them damn Internets!

This is all good, about time people started discussing more than pigs, lipstick and other ridiculous things that matter little in the long run.

Another economics rankings site. This is really out of date and on top of it we rank so low because I keep all web stats private. I finally decided to release some top level to get some visibility to EP..but this rank is based on 1 month with about 10 days of actual statistics...so this is an incomplete month in his calculation.

Right now we're getting about 4000 reads a day and that is a massive jump a 233% increase.

Last 30 days we should rank about 30 on this site...

So ya all, people are liking what we have to say and are joining in!

Hey, all you lurkers out there reading this stuff...come on, don't be shy, you can be anonymous, leave a comment!

This is our site, your site, it's here for you to discuss, point things out, rant, rage out on what is going on...

just as long as it's all about the money! (Welcome to EP!)

If you are replying to someone's comment, please hit the reply link to respond.

Comments are completely threaded and you can track replies to your comments under the "my account" link in the right hand column...

But to use the threading and tracking, people need to use the reply link and not post a new comment, thus starting a new comment thread.

There is a very dense/deep discussion going on right now and I cannot figure out who is responding to who because people are not using the reply button to respond.

When you update a previous post with new data and change the publication date (which is all fine on EP as long as it's new content), when you change the blog title, you break every link that was referencing the original.

That's not good. What happens is many readers reference your posts on other sites through the link, which is the blog title.

So, when you change the title, you break all previous links to your blog post.

So, either start a new blog with a new title and it's legal to copy your previous post into the bottom of the new one...

or don't change the blog title if you are updating the post and changing the publication date.

[Oh those damn Internets]

Before you post, double check the spelling in your blog title.

Blog titles also create the URL to the post so when you misspell it and change the title, you break the original link and ...well, ya know the rest.

I've done it too, firefox spell check won't work in the titles so fair warning.

I think some of you are missing the reply link in the comments thread and you think you are replying to a comment but just posting in the open comment box, which starts a new comment thread, doesn't attach itself to the original comment you are replying to and isn't tracked as a reply.

The comments are threaded and trackable (see the "my account" right hand side) but we have to hit reply to a comment in order for the comments to be trackable.

Let me know if anyone has some lay out suggestions to make which button to hit more obvious because it's an ongoing problem that people are not seeing the links or realizing the comments are hierarchical, threaded and one can keep track of individual conversations within the comments through the "my account" section.

I personally find the tracking system cool so I can reply to someone who said something to me and have a comment system that is more like a real conversation versus comments on a particular blog or forum post and hope others realize this is here for us. Makes a blog way more chatty and community oriented versus a "top down" sort of structure but it needs to be used.

You do not have to worry about changing your blog post title now.

The title of your post turns into the URL to reach your writing. In other words, your title is turned into a link to your post.

But, wa la! You can now change that title after the fact and the old link created will now resolve to the new title!

Bottom line you don't have to worry about this and you can change your titles any damn time you please!

(we am to please here at EP, your technical geek admin, thanks for listening)

We now have the RSS feed from the Bureau of Economic Analysis on the bottom right column.

Since the CBO director is now going to the Obama administration, I'm not sure if the new acting director will continue blogging or not but he put a farewell blog post, so I discontinued the RSS feed.

I just added some new security in the code base of this site.

It is to automatically remove spammers and advertisers.

All of you real people, if you have any problems posting and so on, just let me know so I can iron out any bugs.

I just found one major bug and it's possible there are others but I know at least one pesky spammer has found the site and has managed to get through the things I have in place so I have added additional layers.

I hate spammers, what can I say.

Thanks for your help.

My enormous apologies. I had a new script to automatically block spammers and it bugged out last night and this morning and was labeling you all spammers and blocking your posts.

It's fixed now and you are back to being real human beings and the site should work as it always had.

So sorry I know that must be completely frustrating to write such in depth posts and have some script say it's spam and block you.

Not good! Anyway, it's fixed.

Should we have the blogs be more short? Right now we have some people writing pretty much magazine articles (except for the Friday Night Videos and Sunday Comics, where are posted at the slowest reader times) and they really deserve a strong read.

On the other hand, requiring someone to write such in depth pieces means we don't have new blog posts.

I think we need some middle ground here. One thing no one is using is if an Instapopulist (forum), you think deserves more attention, you can simply vote it up and 2 votes will put it on the front page.

Thoughts? Suggestions? To keep the site growing, one of the problems is one needs new content at least daily if not 4 times a day and Technorati for example, only pulls in blog posts, not the Instapopulist (forum) into it's feeds. Same is true for others. They can get the entire feeds but they don't like forums I guess. ;)

Go to the upper right hand column and create an account! If you post anonymously, while not logged in, you go to a moderation queue where the admin must check to see if you are a real live human and not some spam advertisement machine!

Hope all like it (see site banner). If you don't give me a suggestion for the EP slogan.

Finally, I hope they worked out something but now it appears we can embed directly short video clips from the CNBC website and not pray someone else ripped off CNBC and put it up on youtube!

Yea!

To really use the site for discussion, consider creating an account on the upper right hand column. (Spam Free, we ain't making any money here!)

That bypasses the "prove you're a human" and the site features are enabled, so you can have an easier time replying to each other.

Remember to hit the reply link to reply to someone else's comment.

Enjoy!

Hi,

I just fixed the content promotion/demotion bug. You may have noticed when you promoted an Instapopulist to the front page because you thought it was just so sexy (i.e. really good and important) that you saw this displayed:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function userpoints_userpointsapi() in vote_up_down_actions.inc on line 103.

etc.

I'm just alerting you to this and to report any other error messages or problems when using the content promotion/demotion system to me so I can address it.

I'm playing around trying to speed up the site performance and page loads.

So, if something goes wrong, please report it here.

If anyone has any speed up and/or really slow loading pages, let me know about that too.

We're pushing the envelope in terms of stressing the server. Of course some of this is my slowness (sorry trying to earn a living so on the back burner) to upgrade the entire site...

but other things are Drupal itself.

So, I'm trying some new optimizations.

I noticing one thing, it seems external image servers slow down the site. Amazing but true. So, I'm thinking we might want to host images locally to help that.

I had to remove one module because it's too buggy and I don't see an easy fix and it was eating up server memory like Pacman.

but let me know if the site loads faster, that's a key deal here.

This is a test of the CAPTCHA by admin. If you wish to avoid CAPTCHAs, create an account. You currently must be manually approved due to a recent spam attack, but we want you to join up, so please be patient and grab an account!

We had a major site crash (my fault).

Unfortunately some people, getting all huffy on a minor thing in a comment, try to delete all of their posts from their account.

Deleting a post from an account is a privilege on EP that most blogs do not allow, because it breaks links and causes all sorts of database havoc.

Well, someone did this and it messed up the site. I went looking to delete that privilege of removing entire account posts and it caused a major database crash and a memory overrun.

So, for the moment, look, if you get upset please don't screw with EP and delete all of your posts. It's juvenile to react to one comment in such a fashion frankly.

If people really didn't like what you had to say, believe me, you'd already know it with your posts already deleted when you published them...

so don't get your panties all in a bunch over a comment, try to pick up your toys and come home and abuse the flexibility of EP.

The reason I gave that feature is frankly sometimes one writes something and realizes 6 months later it is really wrong or sometimes you write something and think 20 minutes later, boy is that stupid, so EP enables people to have that "after hitting submit" moment...they wish they had not.

Also, due to the memory overruns, to get the site back, I had to temporarily disable the polls you can attach to a blog post.

A lot of people aren't using them anyway and one can still write a poll and have it go to the left hand side, it's just separate from your post.

I'll work on getting it back but for now, it's gone.

has temporarily been disabled. It has some bugs that need to be fixed.

Hopefully it will be back on soon.

In the meantime, if you need to get a hold of us, email

admin at this domain.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Folks, EP has just been added to Google news. This means be ON YOUR TOES in writing quality, content and especially accuracy.

Also, Google wants original material so while the Instapopulist still stands, just be aware that to be considered as a news source, one needs to really write original material as the majority of the pieces. (and always cite the source if a quote is not original!)

All we have for our credibility is our writing, so because of this new addition, I will be even more viligant on making sure all posts are well sourced, referenced and of course look ok in a RSS feed and on the site!

Congrats to all, we've obviously been working very hard but I think we're entering a new realm of journalism from blogging per say.

So, I hope all either took Journalism along the way or know the rules, so far I believe most do actually but just as a reminder, if we want to be read and quoted as an authoritative source, we need to police ourselves even more so to make sure that is indeed the case!

I got an email last night from one person who is having trouble, with an account, logged in, posting comments.

I'm not sure what's going on but if anyone else is having any problems like this or had problems and were logged in, please email me, using the contact form, so I can chase out the bug.

That's not very fun if that's happening and I need to fix it asap.

Gee wiz, EP has never gone without someone commenting this long since it's start! Do people have CDO burn out or are there new technical problems getting on the site?

Email me via the contact form if that's happening.

There is a lot of information coming fast and thick, much of it we covered over a year ago, so maybe that's what's going on.

With "all things Goldman Sachs" hitting the news, a lot of this is old information, but it does appear, finally, more brave public souls are trying to get their heads wrapped around derivatives, which is good, but that's why we have this rehash.

This comment has been moved here.

Hi all,

I figured out why no comments. The CAPTCHA became corrupted. I just replaced it with one I hope is much better and less grief.

I am doing modifications that are the "pre" upgrade this week, so if you cannot get on the site, there are major bugs, it's crashed and so on.

The address is admin at this domain. Please email me. I'm determined to get these upgrades done but this is a fairly active site and lord knows I won't catch all of the problems.

Wow, we have a new spam bot, these are little software programs that hunt the Internets looking for places to spam a site and break a site security. This one faked me out! This one writes a complaint about not being able to login, with a "please help me", and so on so you would allow the comment to post with some freaky internal paths it figured out in the post, all to try to break the site security.

This spam bot is busted and stopped now but I have to wonder how much does it pay out really to write these things and who buys them?

Anyway, score one for site security, very clever bot, scary stuff.

I use the link method for graphs and the Fed server has crashed. Hopefully it will be back online soon.