For over a decade of ups and downs, chaos and dedication, arguments and agreements, The Agonist has earned a place in the blogging community. We have had some marvelous writing, outstanding posts and spirited (to say the least) conversations.
We are contemplating compiling a Best Of Agonist ebook, to be made available free of charge.
We are investigating several distribution methods and will pick whatever provides the widest availabilty.
To that end, we hereby invite all members to submit their favorite posts/writers and let us know via the site Contact Page, since relying on comments here might result in overloading the comment system and emails are easier for me to keep track of.
Once we have assembled a reasonable list of posts, I will copy/paste/edit them by hand, since all the software I’ve seen to automate this process creates a very ugly and nearly-unreadable product. It will therefore take some time to put together.
If there are those who specifically do not want their own posts to be included, we will certainly respect their wishes.
Furthermore, we will only publish comments on an Opt-In basis.
Your comments will NOT be included unless you specifically give us permission.
Nota Bene: There may be posts whose names you recall and which show up in a search but turn up missing when clicked on. (We have an issue in the site database). I may be able to retrieve some of these posts from the clone site, as the export/import seemed to have resolved the issue on the clone site. If your favorite post doesn’t display, note it anyway and I’ll try to track it down.
In addition to providing the posts/comments, we may also ‘blurb’ the writers if requested, so that those who blog or write elsewhere may get a little ‘boost’ in visibility for their non-Agonist world. If that category includes you, feel free to provide us any bio or links you would like us to include.
There were indeed some great posts from the early days, but I was under the impression they were lost after the site went through many of it’s reconfigurations. If that is not the case, how may we access them?
The earliest we now have date from June 2004.
I think anything before that may have been lost.
Posts after that date may sometimes show up in a Search but not display when clicked, due to a problem in the Database. I exported/imported all our data to a clone/test site which cleaned up the DB issue so these posts are accessible and I just need to assign the correct author.
If you (or anyone) remember posts by name or some unique searchable, do a search and give me the name of the post(s).
There’s also the option of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That goes back to 2002, though exhaustive it isn’t.
Yeah – but it’s exhaustive even to go that route and probably not worth it for the slim pickings. I’m hoping folks remember specific great posts and/or writers I can track down.
BTW:
Being retired, I’m willing to do the heavy lifting of cut/paste/edit, since I probably have more time than most of us, but I’m hoping the project will be a group effort.
Recommendatons and suggestions are welcome not only as to posts and writers but also to organization – by author, subject matter, date?
Subject matter, then date…
But seriously, wouldn’t the organization be determined by content?
Clarifications – We’re looking for three things:
Request your posts not be published.
For whatever reason, some may not want their posts in the book. We respect that.
Permission to publish your comments – Yes/No.
Even if you’re okay with your posts being published, we recognize that sometimes the comment discussions get reactive and things are said in the heat of the moment, so we want to get comments specifically allowed.
Recommended/Favorite posts.
Some writers may prove to be favorites but not every post by even the best is a masterpiece and there are gems written by people I (and probably many others) never knew, from the early years.