As anyone reading this is aware, Room Eight has had periodic technical difficulties recently. So for Christmas my older daughter set up an alternate blog for me to use if I wish. So from now on what I post, or try to post, on Room Eight I will also post on the alternate site, in the hope that it will actually be available somewhere. The alternate blog is called “Saying the Unsaid in New York.”
The new site has two advantages. First, the “attachment” function still works, so it will be easier for me to provide spreadsheets with data for the reader’s use. You just click on the link right in the text to download. Second in addition to the ongoing blog, the site allows the creation of “pages” for information that I want people to have access to all the time. In addition to “About” I have created two of them. The “Helpful Background and Greatest Hits” page contains a series MS Word files with posts or series of posts with my basic worldview, the most all-encompassing “foundation” essays I have written. And “The Latest Public Finance Spreadsheets” page contains just that, always available with Background essays on where the data comes from and how I compiled it in MS Word format, the spreadsheets themselves, and MS Word documents with my analyses of them. Much of this was written for and still is on Room Eight.
From a technical perspective, to be honest, I have no idea what I’m doing, and no idea if or for how long the new site will last. My daughter gave me a three-minute lesson, and left town for the semester. And I have no idea why Room Eight has the problems it does. The site owners tell me it needs “maintenance.” I have no idea what kind of maintenance a computer program needs, or how to do it. Do I need the change the oil? Do I need to add water and flush out the rust, as for my steam boiler, or clean the filter, as on my dishwasher? Any advice would be appreciated.
What I do know is Room Eight is plagued by spam, and I get very few actual comments. Probably the majority of my comments are stuff I forget to add to the post to start with, and write in afterward. To protect against the new site being wiped out by spam, I have made the comment settings very restrictive. Basically you have to be an approved commenter. Which means you either have to have my e-mail address and ask me to include it (and that address changed sometime back when AT&T Worldnet stopped serving this area), or you have to send me a letter via the U.S. Post Office asking to be added. I live in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn and can be located if anyone is interested in doing so. I don’t want to publicize the e-mail address, so that doesn’t also end up being overwhelmed with spam.
Since my goal is “saying the unsaid,” there is obviously less motivation to say things I’ve already said over and over, but I have an interest in making the information available to those who have not seen it in the past. The pages on the new site will help solve that conflict, because anyone can see the most important information I have provided at any time. I will continue to write as I feel I have something new and interesting to say that isn’t being said elsewhere in the media, while sometimes calling attention to something that is not unsaid that I believe is particularly worthy of attention.
The new site will carry the same posts and style of the old one. It isn’t really about politics as practiced by insiders, and about those people who I do not know and who do not know me. It is about state and local government as the people experience it – what it does for them, and what it takes for them, and how they live with or without it. So you will rarely hear anyone’s name mentioned. Unless they really tick me off.