Q&A Friday #29: Site Maintence And Tech Questions

Questions: “Do you read every post on every string in RWN?” — Harry

“Hawkins, have you ever thought of putting up an RSS feed of your stories? It would be a nice feature IMO.” — bjlillo

“Do you plan on expanding RWN is any fashion? Thread formats? Bandwidth? Design? Navigation?” — D-Vega

“1- Why did you shut off full articles in RSS feeds? This makes it harder for me to keep up at work. Malkin has full articles, come on man! Waahhhh…” — oneisnotprime

“Question, John: What is the best way to search for and – more importantly – link to old comments? I’ve managed to find a way to link to old articles, but I can’t seem to find their corresponding comment threads. It would be very handy to have a list of links to the threads where we’ve disassembled the various lib talking points so tha twe don;t have to recreate the wheel everytime a lib find this site believing he’s the first to raise “amazing truths” that we “haven’t considered”. — Grognard

Answers: To begin with, there is an RSS feed for RWN located at https://rightwingnews1.wpenginepowered.com/index.rdf. The reason why there are no full articles on it anymore is because I wanted people to have to come to RWN to read my posts, instead of letting some other website serve up all my content for free while I received no benefit from it. =D

As far as the posts go, I read some of every thread, but I don’t read everything because I’d rather be writing posts than reading 500-800 comments a day, especially since the liberal posters send almost every thread spiraling completely off-topic within 15-20 posts.

That’s one of the reasons I tend to be fast on the trigger when someone breaks the rules, generally don’t give 2nd chances, and don’t respond to his/her emails. If you’re a moron once, you’ll probably be a moron a dozen times, and it’s entirely possible that I won’t see it every time.

On to the old comments. It’s kind of hard to link to the old comments, because I just had 200,000 of them vaporized as part of an effort to help take care of a resource issue related to the comments script. Ironically, I’m not sure how much that even helped. I actually believe massive behind-the-scenes spam attacks are causing the resource issue that Danny Carlton, my tech guy, is still working on.

As far as recent changes go, I’ve added on a number of new websites that allow me to syndicate their work on RWN and the guest bloggers experiment has been a real success on both occasions that I’ve tried it out.

The only other significant change in the works that I am definitely planning to implement sometime soon is to add a few moderators for the comments section to keep everything flowing smoothly. The changes to my script have already been made, so I can add the moderators in at any time I’d like.

The other three ideas I’m toying with (These may or may not ever happen) are a forum, weekly quotes from around the blogosphere displayed every Friday, and a secondary blog, set up on a sub-domain of RWN, sort of like the The Corner, where I’d have 30-40 smaller bloggers chattering back and forth. It would be good exposure for the other bloggers, would help drive traffic to their websites, and hopefully, it would become popular.

Hope that answers most of your tech and site maintenance questions.

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