We're Moving!

Today we directed the routers of the world to look for the topichotlist.com domain at our new domain name servers, completing our move to a new Web host that began a few weeks ago.

We've been settling in, adjusting the furniture, upgrading some of the trimmings, and after kicking the wheels (and mixing our metaphors) we feel the new home is ready to go.

What this means to you is hopefully a more reliable service, less prone to the vagaries of our previous hosting situation, and hopefully an environment that will enable us to grow.

So over the next few days, as the servers of the world get wind of the change, the service will eventually migrate all visitors to the new digs.

How will you know you're at the new site? The most obvious indicator will be that we've gone back to updating the Hotlist every 30 minutes all day and all night.

As usual, if you have any feedback or notice any problems, please let us know. We think we've made all the adjustments necessary, but it is possible we missed something along the way.

Otherwise, it's business as usual, with better things to come on the horizon, with thanks from the Sunlight Foundation, whose grant earlier this year has made the move possible.

We're Running a Survey

While we always welcome feedback at any time (feel free to email us or enter comments on a blog entry), we thought it was about time we ran a formal survey to ask our users a few questions.

So please, if you have a moment, respond to our survey so we can better gauge what works for you and what doesn't.

The survey ends April 14th.

The PNW Topic Hotlist Earns a $5000 Sunlight Foundation Mini-Grant

I am very happy to announce that the Sunlight Foundation has awarded us with a $5000 mini-grant:

WASHINGTON, DC -Today, the Sunlight Foundation is announcing new mini-grants as part of its commitment to support original ideas, tools, Web sites, and bloggers that further the organization's mission of using the Internet to foster a more open government.

"The projects Sunlight is funding today demonstrate new ways citizens are creatively using the Internet to give the public the power to learn more about their elected representatives," said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. "All of these new Sunlight grantees create greater transparency about elected officials and will strengthen citizen participation in the democratic process."

Ours was one of six mini-grant awarded:

$5,000 to Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist. The Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist aggregates over 100 political news blogs in the Pacific Northwest and organizes several hundred postings by topic, specifically highlighting coverage by local bloggers of legislative issues and their representatives in Congress. This grant will provide funding for Web hosting services for this news aggregator site and its accompanying widgets.

The grant money will help us re-host the Hotlist and ramp up the feature offerings that have been hampered by our lack of bandwidth. This is something we hope to do in the coming months.

I would like to thank Ellen Miller for taking this supportive step in the growth of this service, that until now has been funded entirely on sweat equity. The grant will ensure not only improved services and features, but guarantee we're here for some time to come.

And thanks to all the bloggers out there who have supported us by including the Hotlist widget in their sidebar. Without you, none of this would exist!

Good News Announcement Soon

It has been a while since we've posted anything to the site blog, but that's not because nothing is happening.

During these "quiet" times things are simply running along smoothly.

However, we hope to have some good news to post very soon regarding the future of the PNW Topic Hotlist, and over the coming months we should have some new features to offer that have been put on the back-burner up until now.

Stay tuned!

100 Blogs Listed

We're now scanning 100 blogs from Idaho, Oregon and Washington with the addition of three Idaho blogs: PrideDEPOT Blog, Ft. Boise and Isle of Sanity.

Welcome to the new blogs!

We continue to keep an eye out for the leading blogs in the three states and if you have any recommendations or suggestions please let us know about them.

Tracking Top Hot Topic Entries

One of the fun things we like to do is track the hottest of the Topic Hotlist entries. Added this weekend to the The Top Hot Topic Entries slide-out listing on our main page (select the Hottest Entries menu item to display the list) are simple up (), down () and sideways () arrows showing the movement of an entry within the chart.

The data is updated with each new aggregation, so you can check the progress of postings up and down the chart with each new update.

Taking the PNW Topic Hotlist to the Next Level

Do you think the PNW Topic Hotlist worthy of a little financial support?

I do, which is why I just submitted an entry into the BlogPac Progressive Entrepreneur Contest. BlogPac is running the contest

to find the five best new, grassroots progressive infrastructure projects in America, and provide those projects with the money, exposure, and connections necessary to get off the ground.

Well, while we are technically already off the ground, we are constrained by the cost of hosting, and are jumping through all kinds of hoops so that you don't notice. For the most part we've been successful in working off a shoestring budget, but we want to grow this sucker, and we really can't without a little love and affection, and financial help.

I'm a pragmatist, so I don't expect my entry will be selected as a winner, but it doesn't hurt to make a pitch, and if my pitch to BlogPac doesn't pan out, perhaps you'll consider helping out with a small contribution through the PayPal button in the sidebar, or on the main page of the site.

Thanks.

Update: Well we didn't win, but you can see the list of winners here. Congratulations to them all.

We're Still Here!

It has been almost three months since the last blog entry here, and while not much has changed, I wanted to at least blog that not much has changed.

The Hotlist continues aggregating away every 30 minutes. We're currently aggregating 97 blogs including a few new ones the were added in the past months:

- 5/17
- Newcastle Voice
- Spokompton

We continue to look for new worthy blogs to add to our blogroll, so if you know of any you'd like to suggest send us an email and let us know about them.

What's New?!

That's a question being asked at the PNW Topic Hotlist all the time.

Each time you visit the site you'll notice lots of different new! indicators marking those topics that have been updated since your previous visit, or blog entries that are new since your last visit.

Updated topics are indicated with a simple ».

If there are new blog entries hidden in collapsed topics there now are new! indicators for that too.

You can also track changes in the past 24 hours by selecting the "SHOW NEW IN LAST 24 HOURS" option. On your first visit that's what is indicated by default.

Full disclosure: the time of your visit is tracked with a simple browser cookie. If you want to look for it it is clearly named: "PNWTopicHotlistUpdate". That's all that's being tracked.

Some people don't like cookies. They don't like being tracked. But in actual fact the information is stored on your computer and only interfaces with page logic that runs on your computer. None of the information can be tracked to an individual, and none of the information is used or stored anywhere else.

The benefit is that each time you visit the site you can more easily focus on what's new, and hopefully you'll agree that's a good thing.

Customizing the Sidebar Widget with CSS

They say no two snowflakes are alike, but the same could be said about blog templates and blogger design tastes.

When you add a widget to your sidebar, often you'd like that widget to fit the look and feel of the rest of your Web page, and to that end the Hotlist sidebar widget is configured to provide you with the ability to customize the display through CSS classnames.

There are ten of these defined for the Hotlist sidebar widget that control different aspects of the display:

pnwhotlisttable
pnwhotlistmainheader
pnwhotlisttagline
pnwhotlisttopicheader
pnwhotlistblogtitle
pnwhotlistentrytitle
pnwhotlistentrytext
pnwhotlistmoretext
pnwhotlistupdatetime
pnwhotlistfooter

Step 4 on the Sidebar Widget scroll out page (accessed from the menu atop the main Hotlist page) provides you with a means to visually see exactly what each classname affects. Simply mouse over the classname and the sample display will highlight the text it controls.

Using CSS you can change the font face, style and size. You can insert spacing between topics or blog entries.

You can add a thin black border around the entire widget by adding this markup to your blog:

<style type="text/css">
  .pnwhotlisttable {
    border: 1px solid black;
    width: 100%;
    padding: 3px 3px 3px 3px;
  }
</style>

If you'd like to provide your own sidebar section title, you can omit the "PNW Topic Hotlist" header from the widget's display by adding this markup to your blog:

<style type="text/css">
  .pnwhotlistmainheader {
    display:none;
  }
</style>

Working with some CSS configurations can be tricky, but the possibilities are considerable. If you feel you need assistance, that can be provided. You can use the comment thread below, or submit your questions via email.