CampaignFoundations.com

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/black-agenda-report-publishing-fewer-articles-week-due-holidays-oh-and-were-growing

Back in the days of Frederick Douglass, you could send abolitionist newspapers through the mail for free. This is a loophole the powers that be closed up a long time ago. Not only is freedom not free, but talking about it to an audience of any size costs money.

This week we are publishing fewer articles than usual. Glen Ford and Margaret Kimberley are taking a well-deserved break, and we are doing work under the hood. Black Agenda Report is having problems, but they're good problems to have, and we are solving them. Some weeks ago we realized that our hosting arrangement had for almost two years imposed an artificial cap on our readership. Any time more than seventy or eighty people were on our site at once, it ground to a halt. When at peak hours traffic ninety, a hundred or more at a time accessed it, the site was inaccessible. We're writers and journalists, not tech gurus, so we asked for help.

With the assistance of the good people at Campaign Foundations, www.campaignfoundations.com, we are now implementing a more sophisticated and scalable architecture. When demand for our site rises, we are now able to scale up additional web servers on demand and balance the load between them.

Like many sites, BAR employs what is called a “content management system” or CMS consisting of a back-end database containing stories and site components, assembles its pages with a PHP server, and passes these to a web server which delivers them to you. The use of feature-rich CMS packages like Drupal, which we use, combined with years of material like we've got, can result in very large databases that take a lot of server resources to query. So it's common to separate your database server from your web server, and to have multiple web servers available when demand rises.

Rising demand for Black Agenda Report is good news, and our implementing the technical solution to meet that demand is good news too. It means there is hope that we can eventually come close to being self-sustaining. We have lifted our cap now, and we expect that Black Agenda Report will experience significant growth this year, perhaps doubling or tripling our readership over the next several months.

But this kind of sophisticated technical solution is expensive. Our hosting costs are rising to somewhere between five and eight times what we used to pay. We need to raise ten or fifteen thousand over the next couple months to guarantee our continuity through the summer. Besides the technical fixes that enable us to serve a bigger audience there are other innovations we are weighing and cooking. But now is the time to click the “donate” buttons at the top of every page and the bottom of every story. One-time contributions are welcome. But what we really need are recurring contributions of ten, twenty and more dollars per month. PayPal handles our web payments, but you don't need a PayPal account to contribute.

In a just society, the broadcast airwaves and cables and such would belong to the people. Internet would be a public utility, like paved streets and roads. Back in the days of Frederick Douglass, you could send hundreds or thousands of your abolitionist newspapers through the mail for free. The powers that be closed that hole a long time ago, so we are reliant on you, dear readers, for our support. Our previous web home, Black Commentator, has gone subscription-only. We don't expect to do that. So click the button. Help us make it happen.

We take this opportunity to thank our readers and supporters for the last three years --- we've been publishing weekly since October of 2006. Glen and Margaret and the rest will be back next week. CBC Monitor, watching the Congressional Black Caucus (so you don't have to?) will be back this spring. And the need for independent news and commentary is not going away. Neither will we. Help us stay out here.

The Editors.