Reflections of a retired blogger
Time for me to step down as a writer here. A closing ramble, proceed at your own risk…
vanity posts
Why I voted two ticks Labour
The Nats do not deserve to lead NZ so I voted for change. The electorate vote was simple. I struggled with the party vote.
Welcome to The Standard
Welcome to any new readers checking out this blog today as a result of the “dirty politics” segment on The Nation. Here’s a bit about us…
Update: For those that didn’t see The Nation, there is a summary in The Herald.
I’m done with TV
Brief reflections on a few decades of TV from an ex watcher.
Damn you readers :) Upgrades again
Well ok, after the election I figured that I could shift the site to some slower storage with a whole lot of redundancy in a RAID6 array of slower drives. We’d have a lot fewer readers than our peak for 6 months after post election, right? Nope – wrong. You are making me work…
Meet The Standard
Some of you will be wondering what the announcement at the top of the screen about an outage tonight is about. I have to power down the system to put in uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) to handle possible power outages. After 5 years on server farms, The Standard has moved home
Being media again
I’ll be in Wellington from the 4th to the 7th for the Labour party congress on the 5-6th. I’ll be on a media pass again which will relieve me of the duties that I have usually had to undergo as a delegate, like having to think too much. This will be the first congress I have attended as media. I’m expecting to have a lazy time watching others work. If you’re around Wellington, come and see David Cunliffe’s speech on Sunday. He is promising a big speech about what he and Labour will be taking to the voters this year.
StopPress and comments
I did a email interview with Damien Venuto of StopPress (an online advertising industry mag) a few weeks back. It has now been put up online if anyone outside of that industry is interested. I’m in my usual pleasant, widely expansive and egotistical best with my beautific face beaming out at you
The prescient oracle
Over the last year or two, our prescient oracle Irishbill has been writing posts on need for the Labour party to make themselves relevant. As the number of regular lurkers on this site are somewhat larger than the number of members of the NZLP, I suspect that he has done more than his share in assisting the doubling of the size of the party.
13,000 (and a bit) posts
I’ve managed to miss a milestone on this site (again). As you can see, we’ve passed 13,000 published posts over the weekend. That […]
Bryce Edwards needs to find a clue
Here’s a gem from his latest NZ Politics Daily.
Time out
I’ll probably be back at some point, hopefully next year, to see Labour under a new leader win the election.
Our Jen on the Nation
Standard author and all around good leftie Jenny Michie will be appearing on the Nation this morning to discuss the Labour leadership.
Update: the interview’s not on the web until tomorrow but there are a couple of grabs from it in this story
12,000 posts
I just noticed that we passed 12,000 posts a few days ago. Appropriately, it was our stalwart, Anthony, who hit the mark with a post on Mini ‘W’. As always, it’s about the community. 12,000 posts from us would be just pissing in the wind without your 551,000 comments.
Project complete (at least for the moment)
Project code is complete and getting stamped on the hardware.
I have some time for maintenance and writing at last…. So put in your wish lists.
Oh and this is a warning to trolls. I have time to measure you and comment on your obvious lacks and deficiencies again 😈
Closing in on 500,000 comments
We’re on track to reach half a million comments before the week is out. Who will be number 500,000? As always, its nice to mark these milestones because it’s a reminder of what a big and vibrant community this is. Those half a million comments have sure made writing here a lot more fun than it would have been if no-one wrote back. Cheers.
Don’t worry, be happy
10,000 posts
1,376 days ago a handful of us, lead by Lynn, got together to set up The Standard. The was idea for a strong left-blog to counter the dominance of the Right in the blogosphere. I reckon we’ve succeeded. We’ve had 413,000 comments and over 13 million pageviews. We’ve had 40 authors over the 3.5 years – 3 of us are left from the start – and 528 guest posts. The community, and the readership, keeps on growing massively.
Who we’re voting for
Over at norightturn idiot savant has declared his voting intentions. And let’s face it, in a representative democracy how you vote is where the rubber hits the road.
With that in mind Standard authors who feel comfortable with the concept are declaring the who and why of their democratic activities this Saturday. Commenters are free to join in.
Why blog?
In which r0b ponders why he blogs, and decides to come out. Very boring and predictable, I promise.
A correction
I’ve long held to the principle of owning your mistakes and as such I’ve gotta say I was wrong about one aspect of the “stop asset sales” campaign – the signs are authorised.
I’m sorry, I’m out
Every country that has ever sleepwalked from democracy to dictatorship has done it in the belief that it was taking extraordinary, temporary measures in response to an emergency. Seeing Labour denounce every aspect of CERA and then vote for it has shaken me to the core.
Quarter of a million comments soon
As of Tuesday morning, we have had about 249,250 comments since The Standard launched three and a half years ago. We’re averaging a 317 comments a day since New Year’s. Although politics has rightly cooled in the past week due to the quake, the quarter of a million mark should still be reached on Thursday. Who will be the lucky commenter?
Some personal reflections on the quake
There’s been lots of good stuff written on the quake, I’m not going to try to add to it in any systematic way. These are just a few random personal reflections from inside the disaster zone, big picture and small, all that I can put my head around writing tonight.
3 million pageviews this year
Yesterday, we hit 3 million pageviews for 2010. Today, we’ll have our millionth visit. 45% growth on 2009 even with the few days we were offline and a couple when stats data wasn’t captured. It’s not just a small cadre of hardcore fans (although, do we love you guys and girls) – over 212,000 unique visitors have visited The Standard this year.
Re:Cunliffe re:me re:his speech
It was pretty cool that the next Finance Minister wrote a post about my post yesterday. Even if was to say I was dickishly misinterpreting him 😀 I’ve got a couple of points in reply but the biggest is why is Labour talking about (restrictive) privatisation and PPPs policies when there are much more important economic issues at hand?
200,000 comments
We like to make a big deal over the comments because it is you coming on here, contributing your thoughts and ideas, that make The Standard what it is. Without all of you, it would just be a dozen or so people arguing with themselves/ If we wanted that we could just hang out with the Libertarianz. So, who was comment 200,000? Well…
Yes it will
As far as I know I am the only Standard author to have been right in the middle of the Darfield / Christchurch earthquake. To all commenters and readers in the region – greetings, and keep safe.
11/10
Managed 11/10 in this week’s stuff politics quiz.
Just under 0 seconds.
No guesses.
Try your luck, if you think you can do better!
Why blog?
So, against my better judgement I’m now a card carrying Standardista. Finally managed to get through the initiation ceremony without fainting. I’ve been […]
100,000th comment
Our first comment was on our second day, August 17th 2007 “Where will it lead? ” by trythisone on our third post… who […]
Calling it a day
When I first started writing for The Standard way back in August 2007 I never envisaged it would become what it is today, […]
Dom Post: Fail
The Dominion Post has this column on Fridays called the Diary [offline*]. It’s written by some anonymous staffer and is supposed to be […]
Steve shuffles off his mortal coil
Protecting workers’ rights, protecting ACC, safeguarding jobs, public services, and SOEs, opposing privatisation. These are all important fights. But it’s a crime we’re […]
Worrying, or what I did with my holidays
I’ve meaning to write a wee post thanking Young Labour for inviting me along to speak at their Summer School the other weekend. […]
Right’s attack on free speech fails, again
National activist and pornographer Cameron Slater took a complaint to the Electoral Commission against myself and others who took part in a satirical […]