Hi all, I have a handful of things I’d like to share with you this evening. It’s a little late for a ‘brunch’ so I went with after dinner drinks. Why not?
I have a few housekeeping tasks first. I changed the header at the top and took out the menus up there. This was based on feedback from readers that the top looked “too busy.” Additionally, I could not make the time to develop the content that was to go with those links. For example, we had a link to a category called “organizations.” This category was meant to be populated with a series of posts on progressive organizations in Michigan … Progress Now, We Are The People Michigan, MI List, etc. Since there seemed to be no good reason to keep the links there, I dropped them.
I have also been watching the performance of the site. I dropped the flash tag cloud from the bottom of the site, based on feedback that the site was loading slowly. Alexa tells me that we are still taking about 4 seconds to load, which means that about 90% of websites load faster than we do. I’m not personally experiencing slow load times and I’m not sure what is causing this. I’ll be trying some things over the next couple of weeks, such as removing the “Recall Rick” gallery at the bottom of the site and removing or reducing the Twitter feed on the left. I’d like to see what kind of effect this has.
And finally on to our advertisers. Please patronize our advertisers / sponsors / etc., they are helping us out here at BFM. We’ve got some advertisers over in the left nav bar and we have a few here & there in our posts. We’re also hoping to partner with an organization who will be doing some issue advocacy & live blogging with us, and in exchange for this we will give them advertising spots at zero cost through the site. I’ll also be opening up some nice advertising spaces on the site and in our social. If you know of anyone who might like to advertise with us please let me know, we can get pretty creative with how we promote something.
Ok, fun stuff now.
Did you guys see the Rick Snyder rant? Now I know some of you are turned off by all the bombs, but I laughed so hard I was crying. And it’s what a lot of us are thinking anyway. Especially the part about how Rick fooled a lot of people. If you enjoyed the video, please go like it up on YouTube.
Recall Rick needs volunteers. Please please please help. And if you don’t want to help, that’s ok. Sit down and let the rest of us take care of things for a while.
There’s an excellent diary on DKos regarding the GOP war on education and the impact it is having on public opinion. The good news is that the public thinks even more highly of their local schools than they did in 2007. The bad news is that the public thinks less of schools across the nation. The good news is that the public thinks highly of their local teachers. The bad news is that the public thinks less of teacher unions. The good news is that the public thinks that teacher unions have had a positive impact on education. The bad news for Paul Scott is that he has some schools in his district.
And here’s Rick talking about pushing public schools into a “school of choice” program. There’s little surprise that he’s getting pushback from the locals on this. What Rick is encountering here is the schizo American “I want I don’t want” mindset. The public wants medical marijuana, they just don’t want the dispensary near them. The public wants to house the homeless, they just don’t want shelters near them. The public wants more prisons, they just don’t want the prisons near them. The public wants better schools, they just think that their own schools are fine. (see above paragraph).
So Kwame’s coming back to Detroit to pimp his book. Is it wrong to just want him to go away?
Speaking of going away, it’s time for me to call it a post. Teachers come back to school tomorrow, and I am unprepared. Emotionally, physically, spiritually, and in all other ways, unprepared.
Make it an awesome week!
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