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I did some upgrades to the new Tweetville application this weekend. It now supports drilldown rooms. How this work is that you can select a root room like Congress and view everyone in Congress. If you want to limit it to one party then you can select that party in the sub-room of Congress. There is also an “All” room now that will show the tweets of everyone being followed in Tweetville.

Last night while watching TV I kept my laptop opened to Tweetville and it was really interesting watching the conversations going back and forth, especially in the new media room. I hope everyone enjoys this new feature.

I have spent the last few days working on a couple of new features for the site.

Congressional Tool

First off you may have noticed the new widget in the sidebar to search for members of Congress. This is a great tool to find your representatives and ways to contact them, but it doesn’t stop there. You can also use the widget to show all the committees in Congress and who sits on them. If you are viewing a member of Congress and click on the “additional information” link, you will also find what committees that person sits on.

This great tool is powered by the Sunlight Labs API.

Tweetville

Another new feature I decided to build is something I am coining as “Tweetville”. I have what Twitter lists set up to follow members of Congress. Those lists are further broken down by party. You may have noticed the new Tweetville widget on the right. That shows the last 3 tweets from each list, cycling through each list every 10 seconds. There is also a link at the top of the page to go to Tweetville. From there you can view real time updates to those lists. You don’t need to refresh your browser, just go to the page and select the list you want then you are set.

I will be adding more lists to this feature in the near future, including Bloggers and Media types.

I hope everyone enjoys these new features and finds them highly valuable. Please let me know if you spot any problems so I can get them hammered out.

Sorry for the site being down all morning. We had to move out of our current data center into a new one, so John, who handles the servers, has been hard at work all morning doing the physical move.

Now let’s get the day started.

I might not be the biggest blog, but I am the most changing one out there! New design time again. I am going with a much more maintenance-free design now. That was something needed with the way new browsers have been popping up. This layout also loads a lot faster than before. If you see any problems, let me know. I am a coder, so I usually see in black and white, and missing things on templates can happen very easily for me (another reason for the simpler design).

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope your day is full of fun and surprises.

Here’s to a fun day of spending time with relatives you never agree with, only to eat way more than any human should so you can pass out on the couch later, feeling like that turkey that was over stuffed today. Hee haw!

Yeah I did it again. I was getting complaints on the old site. If something didn't load fully, like a YouTube, Ad or some other external object then the background never was drawn, leaving black text on a dark gray background. Impossible to read. This template loads a little better, and if that hang up happens you can still read the site at least.

I'm also going to be adding a couple new sections. The first one will be Cabinet 44, which will be a reference to the people Barack Obama selects for his cabinet. I should have that done sometime today.

I also moved the news headlines up to the top in that fancy scroller. Those are the latest headlines from the wire services.

Hope everyone likes the new look. I actually been playing around with something new for about a month now and finally settled on this design. The header is always the biggest pain to come up with.

I have been busy migrating Crooks and Liars over to the new system and that has taken tons of time. Hopefully after today and a little bug crushing, I will be back to a more normal posting schedule. Meanwhile - check out the new stuff at C&L.

After a little more than six days, I am back online. It's amazing seeing what that wind storm that hit last Sunday did to the Greater Cincinnati area. There are still tens of thousands without power. There is also a lot of finger pointing going on about who is to blame for the extended repair times. In part I blame it on consolidation. Cincinnati used to have an independent energy company, but it was taken over by Duke Energy a few years ago. When that was done a lot of crews were laid off. It sounds like that consolidation is not the best thing to have happened, and Duke Energy is even talking about increasing prices to make up for the loss sales and increased labor costs from this past week. Of course that is a bum deal considering the number of people who could not work and have to replace all the food in their refrigerator. There are going to be hearings about everything and it should be interesting to see the outcome of those.

Anyways - back to blogging (I never knew how much I would miss it until I couldn't do it!)

I am still without internet. I had the back up of dial-up until Monday when the phones went down. Those are back now, but the switching station is being run by a phone company truck at the end of my street, which is still without power. Hopefully I will be back at it by Monday. It has been hell not being connected to the world.

We had hurricane Ike hit us hard yesterday. The Cincinnati area was experiencing wind gusts up to 80mph, something unheard of in this area. Luckily I did get power back after about 12 hours, but still no internet (stuck doing this via dial-up). Normal posting will hopefully resume in the next day or so.

We suffered a server outage last night, but we are back now!

We are back and up to date. It was weird seeing stuff I posted a month ago as the current posts. I know I been busy, but that just scared me.

Yup I have again changed things. I decided to go with a more basic look. The other design was way too busy. I also removed the latest news and blog picks box since I wasn't staying up on them.

As my long time visitors know, I love making changes, so stay tuned. I got more things to add, but since I am now running on Drupal 6, those changes will take some time.

Also I noticed my Feedburner was not working right. That has now been fixed, so the site feed is back up and running.

Yes- I have yet again changed the site design. I have been trying to figure out the new design for months and came up with this one. I actually have been working on this design since before the move to Drupal.

The new design is a lot cleaner and navigation is much simpler. Currently the forums section is missing. That will be returning in the very near future. I am changing that system over to the UIE forums for Drupal, which are much more robust.

Hope everyone enjoys!