Shortly after I closed shop on this blog, I got into a conversation with Kevin Whited about what, if anything, I'd do next. As it turned out, both of us have had similar ideas knocking around in the back of our minds for a while: A link-dominant blog with concise commentary similar to Reductio ad Absurdum, Kevin's old site where I used to contribute, the old Ten Second News, the mini-blog that used to appear to the left of RAWbservations, and our respective FURL sites. Over the months since we've talked about it loosely while I've gotten rested up enough to pursue another project. Last week we finally began posting full-time on the new Ten Second News. You can get a better idea of what we're aiming for here.

It will have a different feel than RAW360. It will focus more on politics and culture than personal anecdotes. Though we disagree on whole host of issues, Kevin and I on the whole share the same sort of ownership conservatism as an alternative to big government liberalism, intangible libertarianism, and conservatism of the more paleoconservative and red-meat variety.

Right now we have the main page, a comment section (registration is required as is civility), and a headlines only page for those that simply want to follow the links. In the future we plan to have a separate section for more thorough commentary and somewhere down the line we might even try a podcast.

I'd like to express my sincere thanks to Mr. Whitlock for letting me post here, and for his friendship over the past few years. I will indeed be returning to The Stone City, though the next few weeks will be slow even by my standards. Readers and commenters will always be welcome; it's not as if I'm overwhelmed with feedback.

I had intended to write this on 6/1, but I haven't really had the time or energy. That, in a nutshell, is why it's past time that I am officially pulling the plug on RAW360.

It's become apparent to me that I have neither the time nor energy to get this site to the place I would like it to be and my attempts at compensating for that have been insufficient. The result has been a sporadic, discordant site without a core purpose or mission. Eventually I found myself writing on this blog simply because it is here and it's something that I've built. Once that was my only motivation, I found myself writing to it less and less.

I doubt that this is the end of my blogging career as a whole, but if I do start blogging again it will be in another capacity and it probably won't be really soon (though one never knows for sure). Seeing as how I used this blog to propose to my wife Camille, I doubt that I will ever take this site down completely, but I will no longer be updating it and if I start blogging again it won't be here.

I would really like to thank Kevin Whited for helping me get set up on Nucleus, Mike Ahlf for generously hosting the website (and all of the technical support involved with that), and Art Sammler for his contributions both as a reader and a writer. And thanks to everyone that made it a point to stop by long after I was updating regularly. Heck, thanks to those who stopped dropping by because it made this decision easier!

I'm sure that Sammler will keep writing over at Stone City. If either Mike or I start our own blog again, we will provide a link here.

Thanks again for everything.

For the time being, comments by non-members are being moderated. If you have an account you can log in and comment immediately. Otherwise, I'll be checking the moderation queue and approving comments several times a day. If you do not have an account but would like one (and I know who you are), let me know by leaving a comment saying such on this post.

I hope to have a new post up over here tomorrow, but I posted up a storm over at Ten Second News to the left.

Hello, and thanks to Mr. Whitlock for lending me your ears. I'll try to make it worth your while.

Some recent background: I have been following the topics chosen by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, who has promised to honor fifty reader requests. Fortunately for me, Mr. Cowen cheats. Probably the best post of mine to result from this so far is Name That Tune.

I will probably use Ten Second News for Unpleasantries.

As anyone that's visited here in the past month or two has surely noticed, there has not been very much activity. Unfortunately, I don't have the time and energy to carry a blog on my own anymore. It becomes a cycle where I don't post and then the threshold for having a post being worthy of the first post in x-number of weeks raises, discouraging further posts. But I'm not quite ready to give up entirely yet as I do have things to say and ideas to present.

So I decided to shift RAW360 into a group exercise. If it works out, there may be a redesign or even a renaming in the works down the road. When I decided to give this route a try, two names immediately sprung to mind and to my delight both of them accepted my invitation to become a contributor. The first is Sammler of Stone City, a blog that has gone tragically unnoticed over the years. The second is a non-blogger named C.O. Jones that I am not at liberty to say anything about, so he'll become our resident man of mystery. Both of these men are very busy and neither will be able to contribute on a daily or even weekly basis, but between the two of them and Michael Ahlf and myself I hope to see a steady stream of posts.

I've already got at least one more name in mind for an invitation and will be on the lookout for others that that are interested in blogging but do not have the time and energy to run a blog of their own.

One other piece of news: You no longer have to register to leave comments! Even that onerous step stopped stopping the spammers, so I went back to the drawing board and added a new tool. Now, unless you're logged in you will be asked to answer a question. The questions are exceedingly easy, but if you don't know the answer to it you can refresh to get a new question or spend about two seconds looking it up on Google.

And lastly, a bit "thank you" to those that continue to stop by every now and again despite the lack of activity!

It looks like it's finally going to happen. I haven't posted in two weeks (save for the two-part Big XII post, which has been swimming in the back of my mind since early November) and I haven't missed posting. Even Ten Second News has slowed to a crawl.

And yet it's still hard to actually close the door on this.

We were down earlier in the day, but we seem to be back up for the moment. Not sure what's going on.

Just a reminder that if this site is down, go here.

Going to call the current host tomorrow.

The fun continues.

My current domain host has alerted me that I have two days to renew the domain or this website is going down. The pending new registrar cannot take over the domain until it is unlocked by the current registrar. The current registrar does not unlock domains over the phone, so I had to do it by email. I have done so three times now and only heard back once, asking for more information.

It looks like the chances are better than now we will experience an outage for at least a few days.