221 Goodbye.

Wednesday, November 25, 1998

I just finished uploading the last Jefferson Report commentary to the website, and the last thing I saw in my Frontier status window was the message, "221 Goodbye." The FTP server was indicating that the transfer had successfully completed, and that pretty much sums up how I feel about this project.

I met Robert Jefferson, the author of these political commentaries, just over three years ago. At the time, I was working in a law firm, but I still had an eye toward politics and was working on the South Carolina Democratic Party website. That in itself is a story, so a brief digression.

Looking back, the time around the1994 elections marked a real personal watershed. These elections were the first time I worked on a political campaign, and as luck would have it, they were also a major political disappointment for me. As you might recall, 1994 was a bad year for Democrats, and after all the votes were counted, many Democrats in South Carolina seemed to go underground for several months, not knowing if this particular election was a fluke or an omen of worse things to come for the party.

Late 1994 was also the time I discovered the web. I had been online since 1991, when the internet was all gophers, newsgroups, ftp servers and email, accessed from a terminal connection to my campus mainframe. I left graduate school in 1992, and it wasn't until almost two years later that I signed up with a new ISP in South Carolina, installed Netscape 0.9 for Mac, and was blown away.

The political disappointments of 1994, teamed with my new enthusiasm for the web, turned out to be a powerful combination for me. In the spring of 1995, I built a website for the state party on my PowerBook, and went to visit the Executive Director. "Here is what I've done," I said, giving him a quick tour of lousy page design and primitive graphics on a tiny B&W passive matrix screen. "I want to put this online as your official website", I then told him, and to my genuine surprise, he agreed enthusiastically.

A few months later, while hanging out at party headquarters, I found a fax from something called "The Jefferson Report". I had never heard of it before. I read the two or three paragraphs, and was immediately impressed. Finally, I thought to myself, a progressive voice that's not afraid to take risks and tell it like it is. I quickly picked up the phone and called Robert Jefferson up. I found out that Jefferson did a daily, 90-second syndicated radio commentary, and also faxed and emailed out the text of those commentaries to a smallish list. "I want to put your commentaries on the SC Democratic Party website," I said. Again, to my surprise, he agreed without hesitation.

Thus began my association with Robert Jefferson. The first commetnary went up on the web on October 5, 1995. We worked together for about 8 months, until the summer of 1996, when reluctantly I had to give up control of the party website after moving to Connecticut to work on the Democratic Coordinated Campaign. During that time, the party website languished, and the Jefferson Report section wasn't updated on anything close to a regular basis.

After the elections, I talked to Robert and convinced him to let me take him solo, and thus http://www.jeffersonreport.com was born. For the next two years, I worked to automate the publishing process (thanks to Frontier), started to do some serious graphics work, set up a listserv for distribution of the email version, and in sum, had a grand time. The Jefferson Report wasn't the most influential political commentary on the market, but the online part of the project was mine, and mine alone. Almost everything I know about doing websites comes from my association with Robert and his wonderful writings.

Ironically, perhaps, I had already blocked out a good portion of the Thanksgiving weekend to make some substantial improvements to the process of updating the site. My goal was near-zero maintenance, and I had already worked out the most of the process in pseudo-code in my head — how to automatically pull the commetnary down from my POP server, format it, email it back to me at work for any needed manual editing, then post the final copy. All that was left to do was translate these ideas into real code.

But then yesterday I got a phone call from Robert. He said he was hanging it up, that today's commentary would be his last. He said that the Jefferson Report was taking up too much time on his end, that he had accomplished what he had initially set out to do, and that now he wanted to move on to new projects. Robert, I wish you the best, and I know that you'll make a real difference — again. And now it is time for me to move on to other projects as well… if only I knew what they were. Well, I do have some free time that's opened up over the weekend, so it's time to get busy!