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On election eve, November 6th, a veteran hard-left blogger, one of the co-founders of the Progressive Blog Alliance, ddjango (of ddjangoWIrE, PBA, NetPolitik, American Samizdat, and P! fame), made a devastating discovery.

Without warning or explanation, he found that his Blogger account had been deleted and his blog, P!, had been stripped and stuffed into a basic Blogger template in inaccessible archive status. Over four years of hard, dedicated work was gone and his voice silenced. Repeated attempts to resolve this with Google went unanswered.

With the help of some friends, notably Dark Wraith, he was able to salvage most of his code from cache. Although some elements had to be sacrificed, ddjango was able to salvage much of the blog and get it back up and running.

If you have a link to P! on your site, please update the link URL to:

"http://ddjango.blogspot.com".

You might want to also post a brief note on this situation . . . Google is transitioning the whole Blogger system into its new Blogger Beta. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, let's say that there are bound to be problems.

Our advice, if your site is on the "old" Blogger, is (1) back up your code, (2) familiarize yourself with the new Beta system, because it's difficult to navigate if you're not up-to-speed with widgets and XHTML specs, and (3) consider finding a more user-friendly blogging host.

Our opinion is that the current Google/Blogger management has abandoned the community-oriented, "do no harm" philosophy that made them so attractive to the netroots community that drove their popularity in the first place.

Please visit ddjango and P! at the new location.

Thank you and be at peace.

Hello. Nick's given my administrative access to this site since he does not have the time to maintain it for the moment.

The Blog Roll is currently in a sorry state, not having been updated for what is likely over a year now.

However, Nick has advised me that Blog Rolls may harm the search engine rankings of its members, as the search engine interpret the network as a link farm.

I am currently looking at ways to avoid this - such as adding "rel=nofollow" attributes to the links to make the search engines ignore them - or alternative ways to centralize our blogs without blogrolls - such as a central aggregator that collects all our RSS feeds.

For now, the blog roll is defunct until further notice. Note that even if it does eventually get reinstituted, it will probably not be hosted on blogrolling.com anymore.

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It’s time to start thinking about sending in your latest and greatest for the 9th edition of Carnival of the Liberals to be held at About.Atheism.com, hosted by the ever gracious Austin Cline on Wednesday, March 29th. That’s next week, donchaknow. Austin needs the goods by Monday, March 27th at 6PM EST though. The only catch — oh yes, there’s a catch — is that your posts should concentrate on issues pertaining to religion and liberal politics. Here’s what Austin has to say on the subject:

Paul from Brainshrub has posted his first call for submissions for Carnival of the Liberals #8: The Haiku Edition. For each of the ten selected entries, Paul will be writing an original haiku. CotL #8 will be on Wednesday, March 15 and the deadline is Monday, March 13 at 11:59PM EST. See Paul’s post for more details.

Carnival of the Liberals #7 has been posted at Throw Away Your TV. Jeff has done an outstanding job with the usual eclectic, informative and witty selection of quality liberal blogging but has added his own special twist. Throw Away Your TV is a video blog and as such Jeff has gone out of his way to choose a video quickclip to highlight every post in this edition.

The video clips are often times funny, sometimes educational, and ocasionally the video clips just underscore the anger and frustration we all feel at the sheer madness that is the far right wing. So go and spread some liberal cheer Jeff’s way while catching up on some of the best writing in left blogistan.

Hamilton Habs from Throw Away Your TV is back from vacation and has posted his first call for submissions for Carnival of the Liberals #7. CotL #7 will be on Wednesday, March 1, but Hamilton needs your submissions by next Monday, Feb. 27 at Noon EST. This will be the first time CotL will be hosted on a video blog which makes for a nice opportunity to experiment with using video in your own posts.

The 6th Carnival of the Liberals (a dozen weeks of liberal blogging excellence!) is up for your enjoyment at Slant Truth. Kevin Andre Elliot has gifted us with another amazing roundup of the best of the liberal blogosphere. Some old friends are making reappearances but we’ve got a lot of new faces in the carnival this week which we hope to see a lot more of in carnivals to come. So clear your schedule, take the phone off the hook, pull up a chair and revel in exploring the liberal idea from a variety of interesting, insightful

A brief reminder that Carnival of the Liberals #6 is coming up on us fast. CotL#6 is being hosted by Kevin Andre Elliot over at Slant Truth this week, Wednesday, Feb. 15th. Kevin needs all posts intended for CotL #6 to be in by 10:00PM EDT on Tuesday, Feb. 14th.

Also, Kevin is challenging everyone to submit posts on some specific topics:

• Progressive politics? What do we mean?
• Homophobia and the Black (or any other minority) Community.
• Can art be political, and if so is it still art?

It'd be great to see a lot of posts address these interesting, and timely topics but any great blog post on liberalism, or from a liberal perspective is welcome.

Prepare to enter The Liberal Zone with Modem Butterfly and Carnival of the Liberals #5. Modem Butterfly deserves a lot of recognition for putting together an outstanding edition of the blogosphere's only liberal blog carnival.

It’s the official call for subsmissions for the blogosphere’s only liberal blog carnival.

It’s a cold and rainy January day here in upstate NY. The kind where you don’t want to even get out of bed. Well, if you’ve got those frigid January blues, J.R.’s got the cure over at Don’t Floss With Tinsel and Carnival of the Liberals #4! A hot mix of the profound and the profane made absolutely sizzling by J.R.’s sharp, off-center wit. This is definitely the most creative presentation of CotL yet!

It’s your last chance to get your entries in for the 4th edition of the Carnival of the Liberals to be held this Wednesday over at J.R. Kinnard’s Don’t Floss With Tinsel. Deadline is Noon Pacific Time.

Less than 24 hours left to get your entries in for CotL #3. The third edition of the blogosphere's only liberal blog carnival is Wednesday, January 4th over at Science and Politics. Deadline is tomorrow, January 3rd at 5PM so be sure to get your best liberal blogging in on time.

The first two editions of the Carnival of the Liberals were a huge success. This is your chance to get your best work seen by visitors from all over the web and even pick up some new regular readers.

In response to the Daily Mirror revelation about a Memo in which Bush discusses bombing the Al Jazeera HQ in Qatar, some Al Jazeera staffers have set up an unofficial blog titled "Don't Bomb Us" (http://dontbomb.blogspot.com). Here is a post:

These are the men and women who bring you the news at Al Jazeera. We have a diverse staff complement. Our people are made up of dozens of nationalities...Come and have a look at who we are (here is our flickr photoset). We are not afraid of your threats - we are journalists. And there thousands like us around the world. You may be able to kill some of us - but you will never kill us all.

I'm wondering why the US blogsphere is so silent on this Memo? Or am I just not looking in the right places?

So, this is to let you know about my blog: Disreputable Lazy Aliens ~ The Antidote to an Excess of Right Thinking. It is a generally anarchist viewpoint on the world plus spleen ventage about whatever annoys the contributors.

I came cross this Impeach Bush Coalition Blog - http://impeachbushcoalition.blogspot.com/ . Me not being a U.S. citizen probably the only thing I can to is to post it here to show my support.

Crossposted from The Republic of T.

It's been a while since I posted anything about Zach's story, mainly because since his return home I felt it necessary to back off and give him whatever space he needed to work out what he's experienced. Since then, a discussion about whether Zach was controlling his blog or not broke out on a previous post. Zach's blog is now temporarily disabled. But's that's not what this post is about. It's about the other side of the story, which involves LIA/R being investigated by the Tennessee Department of Health. This evening I got an email from EJ, which linked to his post concerning the outcome of that investigation. The news for LIA/R is not good.

If you have a Blogspot blog, you may have noticed a drop in your blog's traffic since mid-August or so.  The reason may have to do with the fact that Blogger staff have decided to “de-list” your blog.  Although your blog is still available on the Internet, far fewer people will actually get to see it, as I'll explain below.

A considerable amount of your readership and traffic usually come from random visitors who accidentally arrive at your blog by hitting the "next blog" button, or by clicking on the name of your blog under "Recently Updated" blogs on Blogger's home page.  The way it works is that when you publish a new post, it enters a queue, which means two things: (Read more at http://bloggercensors.blogspot.com )

I searched and searched to find a way to do technorati and del.icio.us tagging to the best effect, and quickly. I mean, almost automated. As soon as I tried this new free method, I started getting more than twice the number of hits to Wilson's Blogmanac.

The info can be already found on the WWW, but not a simple set of instructions. I've done the searching and written the easy How-To and I'll share it with progressive bloggers who ask for it.