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.

This Friday 27th of April I will be taking The Daily Gotham offline at 10:30pm to work on the site's system upgrade.

After much discussion and deliberation I am upgrading the site from a now almost defunct CivicSpace distribution of Drupal to a custom culturekitchen distribution based on Drupal 4.7, along with a cleaner and easier to use interface based on Michael Bouldin's DailyGotham design.

How can you help?

Please consider sponsoring our effort.

Your sponsorship not only help towards paying for our time and effort, but all sponsors will be acknowledged on a special sponsors post, email annoucement and blogroll.

Y'all a traditional 9-to-5 bunch aren't y'all? The stats show us that most of the traffic on this site happens between the traditional working hours. But I am not a traditional 9-to-5er and, quite frankly, my writing biorhythms don't kick in most of the time until 5pm.

So, to better the New York political zoology after dark, I am going to try out posting here during the afternoons and evenings.

I hope y'all join me sometime.

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.

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:

With the year drawing to a close, it's appropriate to look back and do a little introspection on all of this blogging stuff.

The Daily Gotham was started in April of 2005, with the intent of mirroring at a local level the functions of Daily Kos. These are, at the risk of being reductive, to provide a media platform to Progressives shut out of the lamestream media's obsession with horseraces and process gossip, and broadly to assist the Progressive movement in organizing, messaging, fundraising, and so on. It also came about, more along the way and by accident, that we promoted Progressive candidates who did not fit the media's storyline of the moment, such as Steve Harrison and Chris Owens. In that, I think we've succeeded. As things stand today, The Daily Gotham is the City's top left-leaning news blog, by any measure: traffic, Technorati rankings, Google rankings, ad revenue, you name it.

We've also been lucky enough to expand our roster of contributors, especially in the last few weeks. There is Dan Jacoby, well-known in La Movida for his activism, especially with DFNYC; and Paul, NDM's well-regarded Political Director; we're also in ongoing discussions with several more people, whom we expect to come on board in the near future. For example, I just got off the phone with Roy Moskowitz, formerly Steve Harrison's communications director, who adds inter alia the perspective of a Staten Island resident. Welcome aboard, y'all, and please know that we are thrilled to have you.

Swearing to use her powers of persuassion for another day, BlogDiva has taken the herculean task of using her web standards might to vanquish the evil Internet Explorer bugs unleashed by the villanous Lord Billious Gateous.

BlogDiva, hurt but not vanquished, has saved the Web 2.0 day.

Bow to the blogdiva, bitches.

This is really why I blog : While mainstream media won't open the doors to people like me, I have been able to raise the profile of voices of dissent in the new Library of Alexandria that is Google.

How many people have access to a TV or a radio minutes before going to vote? How many have access to a computer through their jobs? How many of those people will be able to find anything that is remote interesting about the candidates in the mainstream local press?

People have been coming over to the blog in droves through their Google searches. And I have found that we've been featured on many of those search pages as a preferred source.

Good job to David, Daniel and Michael.

Now, I would like to focus on not just bringing more people to the front page but to turn The Daily Gotham into a true community blog of actvist citizen journalists covering all the races. And I would like to expand our reach and have people covering and/or cross-posting their work from all around the state. I'd especially love to have a community-produced Voter's Guide for November.

Who's in?

Thanks to everyone who've expressed their condolences. It's been a trying week since the day my niece died. You can read more about it at The Tao of Motherhood.

I've kept busy so as not to go mad with grief. The past week I've done quite a bit of web design and development work.

A slightly new template for the site is coming with 4 new designs. With it, I've created design shortcuts for easy styling of text and images. You won't need to know any CSS to be able to align elements on a page or make them look pretty.

The redesign has another practivel purpose : It makes space for advertising I will be selling directly. Details to come next week.

Why? I'm going to BlogHer. I'm leaving today in a few hours and won't be back until Sunday. I will be checking in on y'all every day, though.

To those of you who've discovered the forums, Congratulations! If you have not discovered the forums, now is the time for you to do so. Wanna talk about the Atlantic Yards or Tom Suozzi til kingdom comes? Knock yourselves out.