Some of you may have seen my previous posts about creating a “Shadow blog” as a place that I can hang out with my homies from Blog for America without stepping through quite so much troll poo (as well as navigating around all of the “Oh my G-d, look at all this troll poo!” comments). Well, that was the original intent, but the thing has kind of evolved. I can’t remember where I read this–maybe it was in a description of what “right brained” type people are like–but my way of doing things can sometimes be described as “Ready–Fire–Aim”.
It’s turned into a different sort of site than it was a month ago, and even though it still has “shadow” in the url, a great deal has changed. Below the fold, I’ll tell you more about the changes at Howard-Empowered People: An online community of Dean-inspired activists.
A great big thank you to Demetrius for creating a new banner for the site.
He was in the middle of a busy time when this new blog was first going online. So I put something together using one of the components Demetrius created for People-Powered Graphics, and used my entry level Photoshop skills to put some text on it. But now that he isn’t quite so swamped with work, and now that this new blog has had a chance to grow up a bit and develop its own unique personality (and it’s own name!), I asked Demetrius to make a custom banner for this blog. The result is what you see above.
You may also notice some other changes. One of them is that I’ve taken down the headline feeds (Javascript has been a bit troublesome) and added direct, named links to more grassroots-created sites, like National Nurse, Blankets for America, Underground Railroad, and Disabled Americans for Democracy. If I’ve left off your favorite grassroots Dean-inspired site, please let me know so that I can add a link.
I’ve switched to the Haloscan comment system, which, after an initial period of me figuring out what I was doing, has been, has had some definite advantages over the standard Blogger commenting.
Corinne has been doing a kick-ass job of providing original content/commentary, and Oscar in Louisville has been providing links to the daily ‘toons. We heard from Demetrius on Talk Like a Pirate Day, and from Catreona on September 11.
I do–oh heck, what is it that I do? Lots of site tinkering lately, but also some link roundups, some interview transcripts like when Howard Dean was on Hannity and Colmes and on Now with Paula Zahn. And when people post their grassroots type events in the comments, I make sure to front page them. And I write some original stuff too, like the post about optical illusions.
So if you’re an unrepentant Deaniac–er, I mean “Dean-inspired activist” and you haven’t seen the site (or haven’t seen it lately), we hope you’ll stop by.
http://shadowbfa.blogspot.com/
