What with the holidays, things have been a bit quiet on the DIAtribe lately, but DemocracyInAction has so many fish to fry, such a plentitude of balls in the air, so awfully many buns in the oven, there'll be chatter aplenty right quick. We're cranking on some new tools and some new documentation and help sections that'll be exciting to share and get feedback about. And with the end of the year, we'll be diving back into our data for updated intelligence on last year's popular series of the best Hour/Day/Month to ask for donations, along with whatever else we find. So things ought to get friskier hereabouts as well. In the meantime, circling at last to the allusion of this post's headline, and going once again to show the ubiquity of technology challenges, the ramshackle DailyKos of the right, RedState.com, asked for money today to pay for upgrading the site. It's hard to tell, but it sounds like a consultant sold them a custom-built do-dad as the solution to the dearth of technical resource that makes it hard for them to run the existing software platforms. It's easier to see how that's going to help the consultant than RedState, but that's their business and we wish them well of it. Anyway, this paragraph of the ask is just classic:

If we'd been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves [the content management system] Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren't really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us.

I often find the alignment of technology vendors by ideological affiliation a curious phenomenon, but surely it pales beside market fundamentalists grousing that they can't buy the services they require at the price they're willing to pay.