It has been a rough week, Kim’s grandfather’s funeral, problems with one of my hosting services, getting a new website up and the hard disk on my laptop crashing. I’ve written about Kim’s grandfather’s funeral in several entries. I haven’t written about the website I’ve been working on. DemSpeak is based on CivicSpace, like so many of the sites I’ve been working on.

One of the advantages of CivicSpace is that you can enable many people to be contributors, or even administrators. A problem that this can create is that worse than being a site developed by committee, it can become a site developed by a committee of sorcerer’s apprentices, and as you approach launch, it can become a committee of panicking sorcerer’s apprentices. Despite all the panic and hard work, the site has turned out very well.

I’ve also been making a lot of progress with SmartCampaigns. I set up SmartCampaigns as a framework for my wife’s campaign website. I’ve used it for other political campaigns, such as Lali Watt’s campaign for Village Trustee. When I ran across the Progressive Blog Alliance, I met up with Nick Lewis. Working with Nick, we are looking at taking SmartCampaigns to the next level. It has been a lot of work, but it has been going well.

I’ve been less fortunate with laptop. It crashed about the time Kim’s grandfather died. The hard disk appears to be on its last legs. I managed to reinstall the operating system and a few programs, reboot the computer and copy a bunch of files off of it. This morning, the computer wouldn’t start again, so I’m still trying to restore the computer.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing all kinds of thinking about political blog entries, but haven’t gotten any of them written yet. Traffic on the site has dropped of a little bit. Hopefully, I will get a chance to do some writing this weekend.