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October 24, 2005
Site Announcement: Return of the Tennessee Candidate Pages
They're Baaaack! (Like the reference? I don't, but it's apropos for Halloween, I guess.) Whatever. What I'm trying to stumble toward is an announcement that the Chattanooga-Hamilton Civic Forum Candidate Pages, which went away from being linked-to from the main page for a while for some re-tuning,* are now linked-to from the main page again. Internet search engine users will know that they never really went away (since I just couldn't bear to deny the public its information, even during re-modeling), but they just weren't advertised.
Speaking of advertisements, you'll note that some do appear on each page. I won't do this often, but right now I will implore you to click away on these to your shopping heart's content. Never mind that most of them are for political campaigns, while a few are for political yard sign companies, and then you have your handy "Meet Republican Singles" cheesers. That's the nature of AdSense. It's all about the context, baby. Hear this now, too: I do plan to solicit some additional advertising and I will give preference to candidates, political parties and issue advocacy groups in Tennessee. More on that later.
Joe, how do the candidate pages work? Boy, am I glad you asked. You just go to the page that covers the governing body you're interested in, and at the top of the page there'll usually be a table (CSS purists: I couldn't help it) that holds links to all of the elected positions at that level of government. For example, if you navigate to the TN Senate page, you'll see a table with the numbers 1 through 33. Pretty boring, eh? But I haven't gotten all fancy with clickable maps, so that's what you get. If you click on 9, you'll be taken down the page to the candidate listing for the ninth district (currently held by Republican Jeff Miller), and you'll see that Sen. Miller may have a challenger in 2006 (I just learned this today). I don't know for certain that either Mr. Miller or Mr. Hathcock is running, so they are both listed in the "Potential" section under District 9, for now. As papers get filed, candidate names will move to the "Declared" section. If you've filled your knowledge cup for that district, you can click the ubiquitous "Back to Top" link and, ZAM, you're at the table again. Yes, it's pretty clunky, old-school design. I'm an amateur and I'm busy. Oh, and I'm poor, so I don't do this with any kind of software except Notepad and — believe it or not — Microsoft FrontPage (but I only use the HTML tab, and occasionally do a quick preview; that first "Normal" tab is wack). Hey, lay off. The coloration of tags helps me with long pages; sometimes my eyes go all wiggity in Notepad.
I'm I was going to put a post at the top (it will stay would have stayed there until after the November 2006 elections) that will point would've pointed readers to the Candidate Pages list in the sidebar. (Note to self: don't re-design the sidebar.) Unintended side effect: the post-dated post was hogging the first row on the Chattablogs front page, so I removed it.
(*Disclaimer time: By no means have I gotten these things to where I want them to be. It's just time to roll.
- I think my plan for RSS feeds from each page is still on vacation. These pages are not organized like online news sites or blogs (i.e., descending chronological order), so my limited knowledge of RSS prevents me from composing feeds that will make sense. If you can help, contact me.
- As (if) I get questions regarding these pages, I will build a FAQ.
- If you hadn't noticed, there are 132 General Assembly seats (116 of which will be elected in 2006), nine Congressional seats, one Senate position, one gubernatorial race, and 35 positions in Hamilton County that I'll be trying to keep covered. Oh, and Chattanooga elects a couple of judges next year. That's a lot of data. All I can do is promise to do the best I can at keeping up — and I am relying on readers from across the state to help me with candidate names, websites, and facts. Do your part, and help promote this site, and we'll all benefit from a government elected by a more informed populace.
Thanks for reading!
