It’s been a while since my last post (4 days!) but it has felt longer since I’ve been busy doing a lot of blog stuff unrelated to this blog.
During the weekend and over this week, Craig Smith and I have been working extended hours (Craig tells me that he has a day job… a reality outside of this grad student’s life) moving Blogging Tories to its own server to give it some more space to roam.
We’ve also been upgrading the site’s software and its plugins. Due to a new caching program that we wrote, the aggregator no longer is the bottleneck for load times. Upon launching this new feature, we noticed an increase in hits. The small percentage of you who gave up on the page after 10 seconds of load time, welcome back!
Perhaps the most exciting change to Blogging Tories is the launch of our new group blog: The Brookstreet Group. The blog is named after the Ottawa-area hotel where some conservatives (fresh off of a federal election victory) got together this year and talked about [censored]. It has also been reported that the Bilderberg group met there soon after. Secret meetings and hidden agendas… what better name than “The Brookstreet Group” to generate some conspiracy theories among some of our nuttier left-leaning friends?
The Brookstreet Group Blog will be written by “conservative notables” (as Steve Janke puts it) and will hopefully generate a lot of discussion and perhaps some news.
The Blogging Tories Television plugin has also been upgraded to add the capability of hosting YouTube videos along with the Google Video standard that we used in the first version. The plugin is still being upgraded (as I find the time) and will soon feature a video archives feature, a full screen feature and video submission capability. For now though, if you have an interesting video that you’d like featured on BT-TV, send me the Google Video or YouTube link.
Blogging Tories Television will also be host to some exciting new BT-produced content soon, so what better reason do you need to install the plugin on your own blog! Please help us launch Blogging Tories version 4.0 and install the BT-TV plugin today. (what a pitch!)
We’ve also included more gimmicky features such as the Stephen Harper “days in office” mini-skyscraper graphic. This was mostly a diversion to figure out how to get PHP to dynamically generate an image, but it will inspire Conservative bloggers to help that number grow… or it will inspire Liberals to minimize its final total (NDPers don’t know where they want that number to go these days). Blogging Tories, show your pride by showing your visitors how long our friend “Steve” has been in office!
We’ll be launching a few more features that I haven’t mentioned yet (I may update this post as they become available), so keep watching the site. If you’re a long time conservative reader of this blog and/or of any Blogging Tories blog, why not join our ranks as a member?