Fair Use Note

WARNING for European visitors: European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent. As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies. You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities.

Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

8 December - Concerns and Commiserations

Social Security Poster: old manImage via WikipediaAlterNet - Hot News & Views

Must We Embrace the 'Sacred' to Survive Peak Oil?
The community-focused response to peak oil and climate change has been spreading globally. Rather than simply embracing those with a spiritual or sacred perspective on the task ahead, some are arguing that the entire movement needs to rediscover the sacred, or risk failure. Focusing the movement on an explicitly spiritual approach is "the perfect recipe to alienate, bewilder and sideline Transition in the US or anywhere else, to condemn it to the back pages of Kindred Spirit magazine and restrict it to a very narrow slice of society.
Peak Oil | September 2005Image by Idiolector via Flickr

How Our Trillion-Dollar Empire Is the Cause of Our 'Deficit Problem'

We could make the budget deficit disappear and fully fund Social Security and Medicare without raising taxes, if we only outspend our biggest military rival by threefold. 

Solution: The Pentagon Continues to Overpay for Everything; Let's Fix It

This is the debut of a new column for Truthout to look for realistic and achievable solutions to the problems in the federal government. For more on the background and goals for this column, click here.

 

Hackers Attack, Take Down Site of Bank that Froze Assange Cash

Payback: Bank That Froze WikiLeaks Funds Hacked

Riz Khan - The WikiLeaks War 

A 2,000 Mile Pipeline of the World's Dirtiest Oil to Run Through 6 U.S. States

Majority of Americans Say No to Tax Cuts for the Rich, But Who Cares?

 Tract housing near Union, Kentucky from the air.Image via Wikipedia

The Cuts Won't Work  They'll Just make It Worse

 X NewsCover of Cover of Paranormal Activity

Posted: 17 Nov 2010 11:17 AM PST
Disqus is the best way to build a community out of the comments on your blog or website. But Disqus is more than just a great tool for websites; it’s also a thriving network of discussions from the 500,000 communities connected through Disqus. And we’ve just hit a huge milestone — the Disqus network now reaches over 200 million people per month. That makes us the 4th largest network in the US according to Quantcast
. We announced hitting 100 million back in April
, so it only took about 6 months to double that traffic! To coincide with this, we’re announcing another type of milestone. Today we’re releasing the fourth major revision of Disqus. This new Disqus (referred to as v4 amongst our team) is comprised of dozens of enhancements, new features, and under-the-hood changes. Everything was designed to improve the usability, utility, and overall experience of Disqus. Here are some things we’re most excited about.

New design and interfaces

Disqus.com
.
has a completely new design that we’re very proud of. We’ve revamped the user interface to be easier to navigate and more enjoyable to use. We were careful to retain many familiar parts of Disqus that worked well, and we believe that the many new changes are intuitive enough to immediately pick up. For admins, we’ve introduced a number of enhancements and refinements to existing tools throughout the website. Just want to poke around the new design? You can start by exploring some of the 500,000 communities using Disqus

Understanding Hate, Part II – Misogyny, Planetary Destruction and the Secret Fears of Macho Men

"Consider how different our behavior would be if the default positions within this culture – the positions we are taught to accept, were…that the world is not organized hierarchically but rather in a complex interweaving, and that to hyperexploit one’s landbase is to destroy the tapestry that supports one’s own life; that relationship is more important (and more fun) than the acquisition and wielding of power, and that beings are more important than things…(Derrick Jensen, Endgame Volume II).” 

Dashboard for commenters


Many people using the Disqus website are admins and moderators coming to manage the comments and other activity from their communities. But there also tons of Disqus users who are solely commenters (there are currently over 18 million profiles on Disqus). We’re introducing a new dashboard to help you manage your own comments. You can view and search all of your conversations from the dashboard, as well as edit or delete comments you’ve previously made.

Add-ons — enhanced tools for growing communities

About a year ago, we introduced Disqus VIP, a premium program for larger websites who would be using Disqus at big scale. Big scale meant that these websites would need tighter integration features, more powerful administration tools, and priority access to support. This was intended to be a fairly exclusive and limited program, but strong interest from users indicated to us that we needed to make these features and tools accessible to more Disqus users.
Today, as part of the new Disqus, we’re introducing Add-ons
. Add-ons are optional, premium tools and features that augment the core Disqus platform. They’re designed for growing communities that need the best tools and integration available from Disqus. What are some add-ons? Analytics gives you a unique insight into your community and its growth. Single sign-on lets you seamlessly integrate Disqus with your existing authentication system. An advanced theme editor lets you craft your own custom theme for use with the Disqus platform. Moderation logging and reporting are tools that are invaluable for websites with multiple moderators or admins. To view the full list, you can visit the Add-ons page on Disqus
.
Currently, you can get add-ons by purchasing an add-ons package. You can activate a package on the add-ons page and start using the new features immediately. Packages start at $19/month (good for smaller blogs) or $199/month for the fuller Professional package (designed for pro-blogs, businesses, and networks).

The new API

As part of the new Disqus, we’re also introducing our new API. This is a completely new API, redesigned from scratch to support nearly everything we internally do with Disqus. It’s still a work in progress, but we’re already very happy with it. In fact, the new Disqus website was written using this exact API.
So what can you do with it? Like most APIs, the Disqus API enables developers to interact with Disqus data from their own applications. You’ll be able to integrate Disqus into your own mobile apps, write plugins for more obscure platforms, and eventually you’ll even be able to write your own comment system frontend with this API.
There’s a lot of great data in the 160+ million conversations across Disqus and we’d love to see all the cool stuff people do within their applications.
Get started by checking out the new API docs
. Disqus also offers a new API console
(inspired by Twitter and Hurl) which allows you to run tests.
We hope you’ll enjoy the new Disqus. Let us know what you think in the comments! Not yet using Disqus on your website? Give it a try
— we think you’ll love the new version.
Your car is Japanese. Your pizza is Italian. Your potato is German. Your wine is Chilean. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your tea is Tamil. Your watch is Swiss. Your fashion is French. Your shirt is Indian. Your shoes are Thai. Your electronics are Chinese. Your vodka is Russian. And you complain that your neighbor is an immigrant? Pull yourself together! Copy if you are against racism!
Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments:

Post a Comment