I’m pleased to report that with the addition of the multi-partisan Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, the Blogging Alliance of Non-Partisan Canadians can now count one hundred blogs amongst its membership.
While truthfully the number might be a bit less if I go through the list and cull the blogs that have stopped posting more than three months ago, I still think this is an impressive achievement, placing us right up there alongside the partisan associations in the Canadian political blogosphere. It illustrates, in my opinion, the need many Canadians have to not be tied down by party politics, and also to look for a different way of doing things that hasn’t yet been found by the established mainstream parties.
I’ve always been pleased at the diversity of opinion we’ve gathered here, from non-partisan socialists to libertarians, centrists and Green Party members who are grandfathered in now that the Green Bloggers are up and running and doing quite well. It’s not unusual to find posts on the aggregator which contradict each other, and yet the posters are comfortable speaking in the same venue. That warms my heart, at least, and I think it says good things about us.
I have taken the liberty of upgrading CaRP, the program which pulls the aggregator page together. Using the Koi version, the page should now load quicker and offer new features, like the time and date each poster posted his or her post. Also, after noticing that certain blogs were inadvertantly flooding the aggregator with posts, due to the nature of their blogs, I limited each blog to posting just the five most recent articles on their feed. This should allow all of the members of the BANPC better access to the aggregator and spread out the links more evenly.
And thanks once again to Andrew Anderson for his program Squish, which gave the BANPC its own RSS feed, and Robert McClelland for his suggestions on how to make it work properly. You see: you can’t get more non-partisan (or multi-partisan) than that.
I welcome any comments or suggestions you have on how to improve the Blogging Allliance of Non-Partisan Canadians, and I’d like to remind you that if you have a blog and you don’t feel as though you belong to the partisan blogrolls out there — or you don’t feel particularly political at all, you are welcome to join. The instructions on how to do so can be found here.