ParliamentaryDebate

I couldn’t get access to apdaweb and promised to put The Clash online within a week of elections. So here it is: the wordpress-powered APDA newsletter. I’ll eventually add old articles, but for now there are a few things about the site I’d like to highlight:

The RSS Feeds: Unlike the feed that used to be on parlidebate.com, these feeds, available in the top right corner of the page, will be updated automatically. You can subscribe to the “posts” feed to hear about new articles when they’re released, the comment feed to read people’s reactions, or both.

Dino Blog Links: While this is a poor substitute for an actual dino directory, hopefully this can help the circuit keep in touch with some of its former debaters, and keep up on their lives. I’m on the fence about expanding this to current debaters (for fear of it becoming a very large list), but let me know if you think the link list should be open to people currently on APDA.

Registering an Account: The link to register an account is located on the right side of the page under the “meta” header. You’ll need to register to comment on articles, but once you’ve signed up, you can also submit articles of your own. Every new registrant has “contributor” status, which means they can submit an article using the wordpress interface for possible editing and publication.

I think this has the potential to be more than “APDA Forum #2.” Hopefully peer editing and a paced publishing schedule will keep article quality high. Limiting The Clash to articles we can let google index will create a concentrated debate resource that APDA can access and the world can find. And we can pressure people into writing critiques of their own speeches - displayed in an embedded video - something only the most vain debaters would do without prompting.

I’d like to see The Clash replace the forum for discussions about things like running tournaments using a pool system, because too often those ideas get buried by ride requests and demands for overdue payments. Just creating an “articles” section of the forum would sacrifice peer editing, Google indexing and perks like the RSS feeds, so I think this is a better alternative. And of course, the ability to tag articles makes finding relevant content much easier.

Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see changed, added or removed. I realize this is nowhere near complete, and would love to get feedback about what needs to be done.

Thanks,
Matt