The Observation Deck

Whatever happened to the Lakewood Democratic Club web site?

It's been down for a couple months. We had some problems with the server, and hope to be back up soon.

Ed FitzGerald wrote:It's been down for a couple months. We had some problems with the server, and hope to be back up soon.

Ed

This is not the first I had heard of this. With an election coming up and so many candidates, I would have thought this an important tool for the Dems.

We have launched 10 different civic sites at no charge, do you want us to take this over for you?

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Should be up shortly, thanks for the offer.

I'm glad it will be up soon. I think it's important for us to remember who the democrats are in races.

I checked today. The site is apparently still not up.

As a Democrat, I would respectfully like to ask the particulars as to why? What server might be giving trouble? What is the specific trouble here?

We need to have the list of endorsed candidates for our community available for public viewing.

It is back up thanks to DL Meckes. The server wasn't down - the bill hadn't been paid. DL paid out of her own pocket and listed the endorsed candidates - Way to go DL!

http://www.lakewooddemocrats.com/endorsements.htm Is this it? (not up)

Should be it - DL will have to tell us what's up. It was announced at the Lakewood Dems Club meeting tonite.

http://lakewooddemocrats.com/

it is up

Thank you, Suzie! (and apparently, dl!)

Now, why was it apparently allowed to go offline in the first place?

Who was responsible for this, and why?

Apparently there was some problem renewing the domain name. As a club member, I checked into the situation and moved to renew the name.

Since I am not the web master, I have turned the information over to the club treasurer. I do not have the files to recreate the original site. Meanwhile, I simply posted the endorsements at http://lakewooddemocrats.com

It is my assumption that things will be straightened out soon.

The Observer did offer to host the club's site for free, and I will need to make that offer clear to the club, the treasurer and the web master, in case they wish to save that hosting expense.

Observer advisors or web masters do not control these free sites, the clubs administer their sites themselves. These sites have been designed for average computer users to manage.

The Observer makes this offer to any of the city's clubs and not-for-profits.

The Observer makes this offer to any of the city's clubs and not-for-profits.

DL- Thanks for adding this line. This thread was starting to make me a little nervous about the true openness of the forum.

I hope everyone remembers that it's issues, not parties, that are important. This is especially true of local politics, where policy isn't dictated by national platforms.

If you choose to vote for candidates that are all from one party or another, that's fine, but please don't let that be your only reason for doing so.

We are proof that the Observer's offer is open to all city clubs and not-for-profits. The Lakewood Historical Society now has a website: lakewoodhistorymuseumstore.com. Thank you Jim and Dan Ott!

You can learn more about us and best of all you can purchase tickets for events, buy books, memberships, wreaths, calendars and make donations.

Our site has been a wonderful success so far. We have only been up an running for about 3 weeks. I would encourage any non-profit to pursue this as an avenue for fund-raising and raising your profile in the community.

Thank you Observer!!

Rhonda Loje
President
Lakewood Historical Society

Brad Hutchison wrote:The Observer makes this offer to any of the city's clubs and not-for-profits.

DL- Thanks for adding this line. This thread was starting to make me a little nervous about the true openness of the forum.

No matter what my personal feelings or beliefs may be, the Observer project is about Lakewood and Lakewood citizens. I am only one of those citizens.

The Observer is truly about empowering anyone who wants to do something for the city, its groups, or even the project itself.

I don't agree with or like everything I see in the paper, but I LOVE the paper because people are participating in it.

The opportunity to offer free websites comes from the same basic philosophy that groups need web sites (and don't have a lot of money to spend on them), so let's make that happen. Special software has been designed to make the process easy.

And again, the Observer advisors, etc. don't figure in to that process.

If I am a member of a group and feel strongly that I want to help with their web site, I would make my request to the group as an individual, not as someone from the Observer.

(Of course, we do web design for a living, so we're not shy about looking for new customers!)

But the offer goes to any group that wants to accept, that there's free space on the Observer server and good, simple software to manage a site.

It's a tremendous deal to have a spot in a growing project that gets huge numbers of visitors every single day!

As for the Deck, WYSIWYG. All we (and by we, I mean the people who volunteer to do this) try and do is verify that people who join the Deck are real people using real names. That's something the advisors thought was important from the start. All comments are owned by the person posting.