Something happened to our forums that they're now in complete disarray (you can't get to the main page of the forums but you can see the forum posts).

I'd love to hear from you all about how to re-organize our forums and make them more usable. Should we break them down by borough? How about county instead? Of should we focus on electoral precincts?

Please take a moment to voice your opinion.

I need your help.

There are far too many changes in the site to fit into one blog post. I still have to update the features page and add a post about new bells and whistles we're running here.

So please, pick three choices. And use the comments section to ask some of the questions you want answered.

Even better ... submit a question through our new "As a Question" section. Once we receive and answer it, it will gIt's like a et published to the front page and archived accordingly.

Live from New York, it's the new and improved Daily Gotham!

Well ladies and germs, after 60 hours of family and friends interrupted development work, I was able to upgrade the site and throw in more than a few new features to the mix.

As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. I am still working out the kinks, so please be patient. Use this post for praise only. I am updating with a special report post in which you can bitch and moan about what you don't understand, what's missing or what's plain just not working.

So stroke my ego y'all. I'm open for hugs and shout out.

It is a mixed blessing for me to be not just a writer but a web developer. If I didn't have a life with two children, I would have already posted the littany of articles I have dealing with political issues and opinions on policy that I have on queue at moment. Alas, there are so many hours in a day for a working mom like.

Please consider sponsoring our effort.

Everyone once in a while, it's a good idea to talk about what we consider the editorial standards at The Daily Gotham, in especially as far as posting and comments are concerned. It's my understanding that our friends at Room Eight are currently wrestling with these same questions, and maybe this will be helpful to them as well.

As to posting, we encourage our readers to sign up and blog their own content. This site is read by many influentials in New York, and your content here will get noticed. Unless we know you, however, we're not going to immediately give you front-page privileges. That's just the way we do things. But by all means, give it a go. Specifically, I'd love - love! - more coverage of Queens, the Bronx, Westchester and Long Island. I'd also love, but that's a question of my personal taste, more gay, Jewish and black-themed content.

To comment on this site immediately, also, you need an account. If you don't have one, your comment needs to be manually approved. So if your anonymous comment does not appear immediately, it's not that us sellout tools of the system want to silence you, it's that we haven't gotten around to moderating it yet. We're sorry about that.

Just a bit of an advance notice: there's a lot of work being done behind the secenes here at Daily Gotham, as Liza and myself prepare to launch a revamped version of this site.

Thing is, over time, we've added a ton of features that nobody ever uses - "Digg This!" "See this in Iambic pentameter!" - to the point where this blog does everything except make your coffee (a feature available with certain versions of Firefox).

Problem is, all these features, bells, whistles, chimes and the kitchen sink have made using this site a bit more difficult than it needs to be, in part because of the visual confusion it engenders. In terms of information architecture, this site has come to resemble a house with too many lean-tos and a double garage tacked on to the living room.

So here's a question: what do you use, as a reader or a contributor? What could you do without? Let us know, in the comments (also up for radical simplification, of course).

Every once in a while, we update our blogroll, mainly to showcase other Progressive blogs in New York State. Here's a request: if we've overlooked your blog, please, by all means, let us know. Odds are, we're not ignoring you because we're bad people who think you don't matter, but because we've simply either not noticed or not gotten around to adding you. Please email editors – at – dailygotham – dot – com when you have a free moment. Needless to say, we exercise some discretion; "Hot Grandma's Golden Shower Blog", "The Bolshevik Cannibals' Club" or similar probably aren't gonna make it.

Anyway, here are the newest additions:

Progressive blogs

Blue Spot
DragonFlyEye
NY 13
Simply Left Behind

Ben Smith's newest

The Politico

That's, if I count correctly, Ben's fourth new blog in a bit over a year. Jeezuz.

[Update] : Heh. Today is the day, as The Albany Project points out, that everyone is doing this blogroll-updating thing. I blame Kos and his secret mind-control rays. More blogs after the jump.

The Daily Gotham is pleased to announce a new contributor, Richard Rothstein; Richard will be blogging here, and - we wish for want must have - hopefully sharing his stupendous photography, otherwise featured on his other blog, Manhattan Details. Richard was recruited straight off Daily Kos, where he currently has a featured diary, which in turn led us to him. Here's a sample of his work:

So, welcome aboard, Richard.

As you can likely tell - the default template has now been reset to the new look - we have a new design. Nice, bright, and pretty, or so I think.

There's not too much deeper meaning; the dominant colors, orange and blue, are of course the colors of New York, and the green accents are a nod to the grassroots (green, grass, yes, we love the obvious).

We've also replaced the green banner, sitting like a fat bit of gangrene at the top.

A small additional benefit: you'll likely find that the pages load faster; there was a code snippet in the old template referring to a non-existent stylesheet, delaying page loads. Odd, the things you find in the bowels of Cascading Style Sheets.

So, all in all, I'm happy. Are you? Comments are much appreciated.

It's a new year, and all things are fresh and exciting, or some other hackneyed cliché of that general sort. In keeping with the spirit of the season, here are some things we're doing on the site: