Wow, donations for journalism?

It is with no small amount of mixed feel­ings that I notice that Michael Tot­ten has embarked on a dar­ing new exper­i­ment in reader-funded jour­nal­ism.
Oh, wait. It’s not new at all. (See: Iraq​.com, Back-to–)
On the one hand, I’m glad that more peo­ple are work­ing to do their own thing and bring­ing nuanced, insight­ful jour­nal­ism to the read­ing pub­lic with­out the bag­gage that main­stream media often attach. On the other hand, Tot­ten usu­ally has a some­what con­ser­v­a­tive rah-Amurricah tone that sets my teeth a-grate. That said, he does get out there and do some report­ing. While he’s not my cup of tea — I find his Mid­dle East report­ing naive and American-centric — give him a read. I’ll let you decide if it’s worth donat­ing. I’m going to pop him $5 on principle.

Tonight on the Majority Report

I’ll be appear­ing tonight on The Major­ity Report on Air Amer­ica. (Check your local list­ings for time.) OK. I guess I do go on lib­eral shows.
But, for the record, Front Page asked to inter­view me and I agreed. But then I never heard back from them. Oh, well.
*UPDATE:* There are archived pod­casts avail­able, but you have to be a pay­ing pre­mium mem­ber to get access to them. Alas.

More Bloody Housekeeping…

BAGHDAD — Jeeze. Switch­ing servers is a pain in the ass. Any­way, peo­ple have com­plained that they’re not get­ting noti­fi­ca­tions of new entries, etc. I’m using a plu­gin that allows _you_, dear reader, to man­age your own sub­scrip­tions. (Yeah, I’m lazy. Sue me.)
In the tran­si­tion, how­ever, the noti­fi­ca­tion list has been hosed. This is, in some ways, a bless­ing. There were many dead emails on there and peo­ple were get­ting noti­fi­ca­tions who didn’t want to get them. Now, we have a clean slate. (Were that Iraq were so lucky.) This means that if you sub­scribed in the past and you still wish to receive new entries, _you must re-subscribe._
If you want to sub­scribe to B2I as a whole and get emails when there is a new entry sign up through the sub­scribe link in the side­bar on the right. It’s right over there. You can’t miss it.
Addi­tion­ally, if you want to fol­low a dis­cus­sion in the com­ments on an indi­vid­ual entry, you can do that too. Just fill out the signup box at the bot­tom of each com­ment sec­tion. That will assign you _only to that entry._ This can be an addi­tional sub­scrip­tion to the main blog.
Once you sign up, you will receive a con­fir­ma­tion email from notifications@​back-​to-​iraq.​com. *You must click the con­fir­ma­tion link to con­firm any of your sub­scrip­tions.*
If you ever wish to remove your­self from any sub­scrip­tions, each noti­fi­ca­tion email has a link to do so. You’ll again have to con­firm your opting-out, but I’m sure you’ll be able to fig­ure that out.
Let’s hope this ends the tidy­ing up around here.

Update B2I’s Look?

BAGHDAD — I know there’s been a bunch of house­keep­ing going on here lately, and I’m sorry for that. But I’ve been bogged down with other sto­ries and free­lanc­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties and haven’t had much time to get out and see what’s going on in the last five days or so.
Be that as it may, I’m think­ing of jazz­ing up the look of B2I. If any­one has a blog they think looks cool, and that could be adapted for this site’s look, I’m open for sug­ges­tions. I’m look­ing for clean lines, some­thing that speaks of deserts and the Mid­dle East, yet is mod­ern and cool look­ing.
Yeah, I know. A tall order.

Notification issues

BAGHDAD — Regard­ing my pre­vi­ous post­ing, in which I said you would have to re-subscribe, that is unnec­es­sary. I found the old list and have added the old sub­scrip­tions. Many of the emails are bad, and bounc­ing, but that’s OK. The list needed to be cleaned up any­way. If you received and email ask­ing you to con­firm your sub­scrip­tion but you don’t wish to do so, do noth­ing. Delete it and we’ll each go our merry ways.
If you do wish to sub­scribe, just click the con­fir­ma­tion link and you’ll be good to go. Sorry for the spam, how­ever. This should not be nec­es­sary in the future.