Birthday, Tech and Info

While we are watching a complete re-alignment of the planet, GlobalSouth.co has its 1-year-old birthday in the month of August.  No, I do not know the exact day because I’d been writing already before the site went live.  It’s been a year of hoping for a boring day, yet mainly heart-stopping excitement.

When I started the site, I envisaged a little small site that can pick up on the move to multipolarity from a Global South and multipolarity perspective.  The multipolar world did not allow that, kicked into high gear, and the past year was hectic.

Initially I let around 4 to 5 friends know about the site, and that was all.  The others picked us up on the go so to speak.  I had this little small server and to my own great astonishment, we had to upgrade twice and the last time, we had to upgrade the server to a bigger machine over the past year.  Yikes.   We have a lot of readers and if Daily Chronicles is late, they let me know in no uncertain terms!

In addition, I refused a moderation function, and this needed some technical tweaking throughout the year.  So we have a dual commenting function.  People may comment on the fly so to speak, and they get moderated.  Reliable and long standing commentators comment non-moderated and I don’t know if you noticed the last tweak, but you don’t need to click that stupid little box that asks if you are human. (I declared war on that box!  Besides, in China they don’t like Google.)  The function of commenting is now much better and there is space to grow with all the usual social media functions which I will bring in as they make sense.

So with time, our friends started finding us.  I am so grateful and in awe of our regular features – Pepe Escobar, Michael Hudson and his grouping, Larry Romanov, the lovely relationship with the Latin American Saker who picks up a lot of what we do here for translation, Nat South, Batiushka, the open access to Andrei Martyanov’s work, and Prof Engr Zamir Ahmed Awan found us just recently, and I have a cornucopia of his work to still post.  We literally (not literally, but electronically hugged one another – it was like Old Home Week!).

And all this when I initially let only four or five people know that I’m creating this ‘little’ site.  And there was the case of a few little Fatwas to deal with as well – but that’s another story.

A lot of the site work is done behind the scenes and our site has gathered a group of friends (in the theme of Russia, friendly countries), who regularly give me content or a reminder or simply tell me what I must post something because it is valuable.

A big thanks to AHH who always furnishes the rich detail for us.  He also holds the Hearty Salon as his domain and in reality, I am only his tech support over there. This functionality is open to anyone else that thinks they can maintain an interesting long term thread of current information. In fact, history please! Let me know if you feel an interest.

Let’s step to ethos for a moment and this does not mean rules, and we really have only one.  This site for me is not always ‘my site’, but it is always ‘our site’.  Just like AHH took The Hearty Salon as his space and he looks after it – I hope he harvests much joy from his work.  I don’t have much of an ego need to promote myself as the Big Bwana Site Owner.  For me that is just making the decisions on tech and on what we post and so on.  Believe me, I’ve been there and done it, so for me, the ethos is that it is our site.  Having said that, I am not hesitant to make the decisions that need to be made.

Let me mention it one more time – the one rule that rules them all.  Our site is one for adults.  If you want to start accusing others and point fingers, you may go away.  Over this past year, this has happened but one or two times, and on the moderation side, I think I moderated a total of about 8 or 10 posts.  Not too shabby!

The very open part of this site is over on the Hearty Salon, which is truly a free for all.  But the main dictum still stands.  You may gripe, complain, forcefully state your case and debate hard, and you will find kindred spirits here.  If you want to point fingers at others on the site, or at writers, you will find yourself on the wrong site.  What happens is that you then cause problems, and problems bounce back to me and I do not have the energy, time, or patience for that.

For new commentators, you get gathered in some form of a honeypot and I clean up on the front end.  There are a lot of junk commentators there and it is in that space where I clean up the trolls and the advertisers.  If you think I’ve been unfair and rejected you without reason, please feel free to use the Contact Us function, and contact me.  We frequently have problems with .ru emails and sometimes I have to set up those accounts.  So kindly let me know if you think I was unfair.

In the design of the site, I was hoping to gather merchandise for us and make the site self-supporting. However, the merch we were designing wouldn’t fly in the western world and the risk was that the western world would make me fly off.  Alas, with only my hands on the management side, I could not bring this to the table.  I have not found a good time stretcher lol. So for this moment, it is on the back burner.  Anyone that feels like picking this up as their project, let me know.

After a year I thought I would be good with the budget that I set aside for the site.  But, with 2 upgrades and a bigger server, the budget is most certainly pinched.  So, I opened up a Buy me a Coffee account where people can donate AND ONLY IF THEY HAVE IT TO SPARE.  If you feel you receive value and you feel this is our site, this is the time to put some money up to meet the monthly and annual costs.  Heaven knows, with decent journalists and sites having to maintain themselves because of cancel culture – all the shoes pinch.   We still run a cheap show in terms of monthly cost and are running at less than 1,000 bucks a year.  This is all we need to gather given that we don’t need to do major upgrades.  So, if you want to put some in the Buy Me a Coffee hat, I would certainly appreciate it at this stage of the game and it may bring you blessings.  This application is the simplest and takes the least amount of maintenance.

There also is the possibility of crypto and for that, kindly write to me and I’ll give you Bitcoin, or Bitcoin Cash, or Ethereum or Monero or eCash wallet addresses.

From the site statistics, I thought to show you who you are talking to across the world.

Happy birthday all!