In the never-ending effort to keep track of who's reading our site and subscribing to our feeds, we've started to use Feedburner to track the subscribers to PdF and techPresident. We've updated our feeds to http://feeds.feedburner.com/pdf and http://feeds.feedburner.com/techpres, respectively. Please update your feedreaders accordingly.

From the annals of self-promotion: On a lark we checked out PC Magazine's Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites to see if techPresident made the undiscovered grade.
Well... we did!  What a pleasant surprise.  We're in the company of fine sites like PrezVid, Kiva, Meebo, Mashable, and TechMeme.

As you may have noticed, we've made some spiffy design improvements to techPresident, all in the name of easily findable and navigable charts.

We've made some changes to our charts, to take into account the consolidation of the field in the major party primaries, and the appearance of some national names among the third party field. We're still keeping an eye on how all the present and former candidates are being talked about in the blogosphere, and we've starting tracking how an array of potential Vice Presidential contenders are popping up. Here are the details.

If you've had any problems accessing techPresident.com or Personal Democracy Forum today, our apologies: our servers were hit with a series of technical problems that briefly brought our sites down and are continuing to make them act a bit funky. Bear with us; things should be back to normal by the end of the day.

Changes are afoot that we'd like to let you know about. As we prepare for the (fingers crossed) imminent relaunch of revamped techPresident and Personal Democracy Forum websites, we're going to be experimenting with me blogging more of the items that normally get condensed in the Daily Digest, which means you'll see more breaking news and fresh analysis on both sites. The Digest will still come out midday -- for those of you who want your once-a-day fix on the latest in the poli-tech world. But with this new approach, I'll be posting faster and more frequently -- so if you really want to stay on top of things, check this site often (or keep looking at your RSS or Twitter feeds).

It might take us some time to get our sea legs with the new format. In the meantime, we hope you'll (a) bear with us and (b) pass along your feedback. We're committed to helping us all navigating the ever-changing world of technology and politics, and we're hopeful that these changes will allow us to do so even better.

We're aware that our RSS feed (which you really should be subscribed to, if you aren't already) has taken to posting the body of each post twice. It's being worked on. Sorry for the trouble.

We've finally gotten a fix to the woes plaguing our RSS feed, and you should now only be seeing single posts -- instead of the double postings of the last few days. We apologize for trouble.

We've finally gotten a fix to the woes plaguing our RSS feed, and you should now only be seeing single posts -- instead of the double postings of the last few days. We apologize for trouble.

Just kidding.

So, as it turns out, when Ashton Kutcher tweets out a link to your site, you get traffic. Who knew?

A big welcome to all of you coming to techPresident for the first time. We're happy to have you. What we do here is examine the intersection of technology and politics, covering everything from the ins and outs of online organizing to telecom policy to how social media is changing what it means to be an elected official -- and a citizen. We'd love for you to be a part of what we're doing, so we hope you'll stick around and check us out. And, hey, Ashton, thanks.

Careful readers and visual learners will notice that we've made some design changes on both techPresident and Personal Democracy Forum. (If you read us via RSS, stop over to the sites today.) We've gone more minimalist, resizing some elements and opting for more muted backgrounds. And the serif fonts really class up the joint, no? There is still some more tweaking to be done, but we hope you like the changes. If you do, let us know. And if you don't, let us know that, too.