Tag: Site News

Two years ago (almost to the day), David brought me on board the Swing State Project as a contributing editor.  The past two years have been an absolute blast, which is why I’m very pleased to announce a couple of important milestones in SSP history:

1) Earlier this month, we received our four millionth visitor since David began publishing this site in 2003.

2) This diary marks our 2000th post since we moved over to Soapblox from Movable Type in November 2006.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who visits and reads the Swing State Project for your valuable insights in the comments and user diaries sections.  It is you guys who have really made this site a success.  Take a well-deserved bow.

Some exciting news for the Swing State Project: We’d like to welcome aboard longtime community member The Caped Composer as a new contributing editor. We’ll let CC introduce herself in a post of her own, but for now I’ll just say that I know she’ll deliver the same top-notch horserace news and analysis that you’ve come to expect from SSP.

So please give Caped Composer a warm welcome!

You might have noticed that the steady flow of posts here has turned into more of a slow drip in the last week.  Sorry about that.  A lot has happened lately on my side of things in the last couple of weeks: I ended my internship with TPM, I moved a few thousand miles (again), I managed to get a sweet new job, and I’ve been scrambling to finish my Christmas shopping.

So, I think now is as good a time as any to take a break.  We might make a few occasional updates if the mood strikes, but the Swing State Project is officially taking the rest of the year off.

Happy holidays, everyone!

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Notable User Diaries

Because we forgot to do this last week, we belatedly present the cream of the crop for the week of 12/15 – 12/21:

• Benawu takes stock of Ohio, where the Jan. 4th filing deadline looms. He finds that four GOP-held House seats lack confirmed Democratic challengers. Time’s running out!
• David Kowalski passes along the news that GOP Reps. Mary Bono (CA-45) and Cornelius Harvey McGillicuddy (FL-14) (better known as Connie Mack IV) recently married. Will the strains of a maintaining a three-city lifestyle push either Republican into an early retirement? And what might this mean for Dem prospects? David has some thoughts.

A note to SSP readers: We underwent an upgrade last night, with various tweaks and goodies installed into the Soapblox platform.  To see the full changes, you may have to do a “hard refresh” (Ctl + F5 on most browsers).

With the upgrade, AJAX-powered comments are back.  (In other words, posting a new comment will be similar to your usual DailyKos experience.) Please let us know if you notice any glitches; we had to disable AJAX a few months ago after some users had problems posting particularly long comments.  Hopefully those wrinkles have now been ironed out fully.  AJAX seems to be working fine, but it doesn’t appear to actually be part of the upgrade.  I’m going to turn it off as a precaution.

If you have a moment, please feel free to make test comments in this diary.  We want to make sure that all the code is up to snuff.  So go crazy — links, blockquotes, alt codes, long replies, short replies, you name it.  Just in case there are any glitches, we’d like to identify them immediately.

Thanks, guys!

Follow this link for a cool new SSP feature: a sortable calendar containing congressional filing deadlines, primary dates and run-off dates. The best part is that you can click on the column headers to re-arrange the list. So you can view things alphabetically by state, or chronologically by filing deadline or primary date.

We’ve drawn on data collected by the FEC (PDF), so it should be accurate. But if you notice anything that looks amiss, kindly let us know. Please note, though, that the SSP calendar does not contain presidential data. The FEC file does have that information, and the Green Papers does an admirable job of keeping up-to-date with the constantly shifting presidential primary calendar.

In any event, please check out our calendar and let us know if it works for you. I’ve tried it successfully in both Firefox and IE for Windows, but not on a Mac. Just make sure you have JavaScript enabled. We’ll also place a permalink to it in our new “Resources” section on the right-hand sidebar. (Look just below the “About the Site” section.)  Thanks, and enjoy!

In the past few days, numerous users have informed us that they’ve been having serious issues posting comments here on SSP.  Namely, with the new AJAX system in place, particularly long comments were somehow being lost as people hit the “preview” button.  I’m very sorry for the inconvenience–there’s nothing more frustrating than spending a lot of time writing a post and then losing it.

So, for the time being, I’m disabling Soapblox’s new AJAX comments feature until all the bugs can be worked out with tech support.  I’d definitely like to bring it back as soon as possible, though.

Fifteen months ago, DavidNYC extended a humbling offer to promote me from the comments section to the front page of the Swing State Project.  It’s been an absolute blast to write for and help steer this blog over the past year, which is why I’m very excited to announce that the Swing State Project team is adding a new contributing editor this weekend.

Please give a warm welcome to Trent Thompson, an energetic young Democrat from Alabama.  This spring, Trent made a major splash as the publisher of Sack Sessions, a blog dedicated to the defeat of Senator Jeff Sessions.  Trent was also instrumental in helping us build an exciting (if ultimately unsuccessful) effort to draft Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks into the Senate race this year.  He has since gone on to join Left in Alabama, a growing community blog for progressive action in his home state, as a front page poster.  I can’t say enough good things about Trent; he’s an excellent writer and he’ll offer a valuable perspective to SSP, especially on Southern races.  With Trent on board, we stand to be in even stronger shape in the near future.

Big news for the Swing State Project: we now have an AJAX-enabled comments section.  Now, like on DailyKos, you won't have to endure a full page refresh everytime you want to post a comment.  I hope that you find this feature as cool as I do.

In order to get the party started, you may need to do a hard refresh of the site for the feature to register in your browser.  On Firefox and Internet explorer, hold the Control key and press F5.  For other browser instructions, see this complete list.

Once you're good to go, feel free to take the new comment feature out for a test drive in this thread!

(Bumped – promoted by DavidNYC)

To shove the AllSpark into Optimus Prime’s chest? To perform the vital task of compiling everyone’s Senate predictions into one combined ranking? May the hardy among you fire up your spreadsheets and post the results in comments!

Wouldn’t it be delicious if the GOP had to defend yet another Senate seat next year, should David Vitter resign? Oh, and, trivia question: There are already going to be two Senate elections in Wyoming in 2008, and there might be two in Louisiana. When was the last time that two states held two Senate contests in the same year?

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UPDATE (James): If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated with HTML tagging while writing a diary, we’ve got good news for you.  The Swing State Project has enabled a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get“) diary editing function.  Of course, if you prefer to write out all your HTML tags, you can revert to the old “Auto Format” by selecting that option in the formatting prompt above your diary draft.

In other site news, we also hope to have DailyKos-style AJAX comments coming to the site in the near future. For a preview of what this will be like, check out our friends at the recently re-designed Blue Jersey.