What's New

March 14, 2008

What should be new? My mind is filled with options to improve this site, bring in new readers, increase interactivity and put some of the ideas in practice.

Unfortunately, my calendar is also mostly filled. And with a new family member on the way, this constraint will be tighter yet. So, I'd greatly appreciate your suggestions for setting priorities. Which of the following do you want to see the most?

But do note that I must balance reader desires with financial concerns. Years of hardcore political activism have been bad for the bank account. With a child on the way and a car wearing out I cannot justify much nearterm effort into this site unless it results in ad revenue or a book deal.

Since last fall I added advertising and have been attempting to search engine optimization. Alas, my efforts at on-page optimization have born little fruit; traffic is still flat. More recently, I re-researched the Stop Global Warming chapter, added some carbon tax calculators (potential link bait) and went about the web asking for links. I got some, but the additional traffic is small; I am outranked on the search pages by more focused sites, including many that are trivial and/or spammy.

Search engines love focused sites, and Holistic Politics is anything but! I think I'd get more readers by breaking the chapters into separate sites with domain names indicating their content. Either that, or I need a lot of incoming links to get the word out.

My options:

• Rewrite existing chapters to make them more readable and link worthy. (They could definitely use it; I look at my old prose and cringe!)
• Make some new chapters that are better at attracting links.
• Add a forum to this site.
• Improve the site layout. (How? Get rid of flash? Or use a flash menu for faster download? Or what?)
• Get active on social networks to build incoming links.
• Put a blog on this site so I can trickle out new pages instead of releasing entire chapters. This also adds comments, trackbacks, etc.
• Work on my other sites and send traffic from them.

If you think chapter rewriting is the best use of my time, please let me know which chapters are most in need of rewriting. As for new chapters, here are some I am considering:

• Shrinking Sprawl.
• Traffic. (About improving traffic flow without paving the planet.)
• Breaking up “The Balance of Wealth” into several chapters: “Fixed Pie or Rising Tide”, “The Secret of the Super Rich” and “Paid to be Rich.”
• Rethinking Retirement.
• Reinventing Democracy. (A complete rewrite of “Power to the People”)
• Waging Peace.
• Holistic Thinking. (The old Holistic Politics chapter greatly expanded.)
• Almost Natural. (regarding food)

Currently, I drive in some traffic via quiz2d.com – which gets over four times the page views, thanks to stumbleupon. At quiz2d.com I could:

• Add a forum to allow quiz takers to suggest better questions/answers.
• Include discussion of my “Business Plan for a New Party” on said forum.
• Develop a new quiz based on my equality/liberty map vs. the Nolan Chart.

I also have carlmilsted.com which is a placeholder domain I bought some years ago in case I ever ran for office. This could be a place for a blog on moral philosophy and third party political strategy; the name is topical as I am somewhat (im)famous for efforts at reforming the Libertarian Party. Maybe I should move the Business Plan for a New Political Party here.

Carlmilsted.com might also be a better platform for promoting the religion vs. liberty articles, as many conservative Christians are put off by the hippie motif on this site. Also blogging seems a better way to reach people on religious matters as the Christian web directories are not geared to studies such as are on this site.

Last, and definitely not least, I am contemplating a very focused site on school privatization by developing private schools so good that they are competitive with “free” public schools. This would be a switch from explicit politics to “counter economics.” Such a focused site would be more search engine friendly, and would be people friendly to those who agree with me on this issue but not on others. I have a book on education ideas trying to escape my brain, but I’ve held off as it would require research and experimentation to do properly. Under-researched speculations are appropriate for a blog, however, and a blog could put me in contact with those actually trying the ideas, thus providing the research.

So, which direction do you think I should go? Please drop me a line.

March 11, 2008

Narrowed the paragraphs a bit, which should reduce eye fatigue when reading long articles. What think ye?

February 6, 2008

Uploaded a rewrite of Stop Global Warming—the Cheap and Pleasant Ways. Hopefully, the writing is more compelling. And even if not, I have updated the calculations, and added some calculators so users can determine carbon tax rates based on their own revenue targets.

January 10, 2008

Ugh! The Ron Paul racist newsletters have surfaced, and Dr. Paul refuses to out the author(s) and hang him(them) out to dry. My efforts on his behalf are over barring some much greater repudiation of racist connections.

So, I am out of politics for now. Maybe I'll have more time to work on this site.

December 24, 2007

Even more cleanup of "What is Freedom". And I have added a "Privacy Policy." The latter may seem weird, but I hear that search engines take the existence of such to be a sign of legitimacy. If I add a forum in the future, this page might even make sense to have.

Late November, 2007

Well, I have finally given in to greed, and polluted this site with advertising. Now the good news, the prospect of making a bit of money with this site has given me incentive to spend more time on it. Notice the new front page. "What is Freedom" is being rewritten. In fact, I need to rewrite a bunch of the older essays. My style was rather clunky at times. (Can do a bit of SEO while I am at it...) Finally, the Amazon ads are actually useful. I've had "Further Readings" all along. Soon, such readings will only be a click away...

November 6, 2007

Improved on the template a bit. With JavaScript turned on, the banner should wake up the proper size instead of refreshing after loading.

July 27, 2007

I have updated the Getting There article significantly. While I am still webmaster (until I can find a replacement) of the Libertarian Reform Caucus, I am no longer a member of the Libertarian Party. I have personally concluded that starting a new party is the best route long term, and have posted my Business Plan for a New Party on this site. That said, there is a small but non-zero chance that Ron Paul could win the Republican presidential nomination, so I will focus my political efforts there for the next few months.

Also note that I have added links to various link sharing sites. If you like what you see here, please promote the site!

July 5, 2007

A Narrow Path is up! There may be bugs to fix, but now I have a better system going from Microsoft Word to PHP. (Wrote some ruby code to semi-automate the process.)

April 1, 2007

The New Levites is finally up! It took me a long time to write this one, but it's important — more important than politics, perhaps.

March 4, 2007

OK, so I haven't posted here in over a year. Been busy with the Libertarian Reform Caucus. Winding down there. I am ready to start a new party, since the purists within the LP insist on one value trumping all others. So it's in the LP's court for now. Meanwhile, I have been writing shorter essays related to those on this site. You can find them on the Free Liberal web site. Those of you interested in environmental issues should check out my posts from the last few months.

February 7, 2006

I have played with the sidebar a bit. The current chapter button now goes at the top, along with the section links. This way, you don't have to hunt for the links to the sections within the chapter. On the other hand, I now have the bright button for the current chapter near the big banner. Perhaps this is redundant. What do ye think?

I have also constrained the sidebar to be 150 pixels wide to make things neat and tidy.

February 1, 2006

Getting There is now up. (Actually, it has been up for a few days, but it wasn't complete.) This chapter evaluates various strategies for getting the ideas on this site put into practice. Included are images useful for linking to this site and PDF versions of some handouts based on the this site.

January 21, 2006

The Power of Mercy is now up! Whew! These Biblical chapters are difficult. I have two more before I move on to easier things like shrinking suburban sprawl, reducing consumerism and feeding the world without destroying the environment. Actually, I might cheat in sneak in an easy chapter or two before finishing this Bible series. I have a draft of a chapter on "Getting There," ideas on how to implement the ideas in the other chapters...

May 15, 2005

I have finally finished The Law of Liberty! This took a lot of effort to write. I couldn't just take some ideas and run with them using logic. No, I had to do real detailed research. Not my forte. And this one will likely take you a long time to read. But is is worth it. This one is important.

I used the King James version for my citations due to copyright issues. I highly recommend getting a New King James Bible and looking up the citations while you read.

April 20, 2005

OK, so I haven't gotten The Law of Liberty up yet. Been lots of interruptions in my life lately. Also, I have been putting my available efforts into another site, the Libertarian Reform Caucus. This is an effort to make the LP platform less extreme and to hopefully incorporate some of the egalitarian and environmental ideas from this web site into the platform. If you have libertarian tendencies and like what is on this (Holistic Politics) site, please join the caucus!

December 19, 2004

The Law of Liberty is now in the hands of reviewers. I hope to have it up in a few weeks. I hope to begin research on The Power of Mercy this week. Notice that I have moved the "What's New" page from its own "chapter" to a section of the "Home" chapter.

August 26, 2004

Stop Global Warming is now up. Currently in the pipeline: "The Law of Liberty" which is a study of the Old Testament law. I have quite a bit yet to do on this one.

June 20, 2004

Save the Critters is now up. And I have just today finished a handwritten draft of Stop Global Warming. Hopefully, I will have that one up in a few weeks.

March 16, 2004

God's Welfare System is finally up! I also made a few tweaks in the formatting. I tinted the chapters according to general topic. Let me know if this hurts readability.

On Enforcing Morality is also up! Two in one day!!

March 3, 2004

I have rearchitectured the site to make it more search engine friendly. If you look at the URL at the top, each page has its own php file instead of everything going to the top index.php with urls like index.php?Directory=Home&Page=PageOne.

I have several articles in the queue that should be posted soon, including "God's Welfare System" and "On Enforcing Morality."

July 4, 2003

Power to the People is up; however, I still need to clean up some of the formatting.

July 3, 2003

Wealth to the Working Class is finally up! Coming real soon: "Power to the People."

May 11, 2003

Welfare That Works is now uploaded.

May 6, 2003

Have a page counter up and running. Not the most beautiful in the world, but it works. Welfare that Works is almost ready. Been delayed getting ready for Rolling Thunder in Asheville.

April 18, 2003

Greed vs. Freedom, my first blue chapter is now up.

March 23, 2003

The Balance of Wealth is now uploaded. This is a big one!

February 26, 2003

Really Natural Rights is now uploaded. Also have the banners working in Netscape. Fixed page numbering bug.

February 11, 2003

Shrinking the Corporations is now uploaded. Note how its button is just a bit redder than the others. I have also posted contact information in the Home area.

February 6, 2003

What is Freedom? The answer now lies behind the button of that name. There are freedom elements both to what the Republican Right is saying as well as to what some in the Radical Left are saying.

January 26, 2003

I realize it will be a while before I have all the content areas filled up. So, I have implemented a convention: topics with no content yet have greyish buttons now. The only exception is the remaining Rainbow buttons, but I will have content for them soon.

January 23, 2003

Got the banner to stretch -- at least under Mozilla and Internet Explorer. Added content for the Holistic Politics topic.

January 21, 2003

A complete list of topic buttons. Or, at least, nearly complete. Now I just has to fill in the content...

January 20, 2003

Sort of have the buttons working now. The banners should be working now also.

January 19, 2003

Initial upload of the new layout. No content yet except the home page. Pretty colors, no? Will likely try to get all the buttons up and then fill in the content. Still TBD.

Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Next

Copyright 2003-2007, Carl S. Milsted, Jr. All rights reserved.