Welcome to LibDemWorld

LibDemWorld is here! I’m hoping to turn the site into, not just a personal blog, but also a general place for LibDem news and information, as well as fact-checking (and for goodness sake, the Tories and Reform in particular make up so much misinformation that anything that can be done to put the record straight is sorely needed). I think the articles on the site will speak for themselves and need no further mention here. So instead I’m going to self-indulge and use this welcome to talk a bit about how the site came about.

Why Now?

I’d been vaguely mulling over the idea for this site for at least a year, but two things happened recently to crystallise it. Firstly, although I’m a software developer by profession, I hadn’t until recently done a lot of website coding. But this summer that changed. You see, in my spare time I help to run a series of community competitions for the computer strategy game, Civilization 4 (Great game by the way: If you like strategy games, check out our competitions at https://gotm.civfanatics.net). Anyway this summer, the people who own the aforementioned website that we use to run the competitions decided to move it to a new server and upgrade it. That totally broke the website, plunging the competitions into chaos. And worse – the guy who originally wrote the site (coincidentally, a fellow LibDem) has long since retired and is no longer available. So we had a huge broken website that no-one understood. And this wasn’t just a website that looks pretty and displays some text. Well, actually it doesn’t look pretty at all – it’s 20 years’ old and very dated by today’s design standards. But it is very sophisticated: It runs competitions, automatically analyses people’s entries to check whether people have played according to the completion rules, compiles results and league tables, and so on. And it was written in a computer language (php) that I had never used. But it was apparent that no-one else available knew how to fix it so I ended up volunteering… And in the process of fixing it, I learned php and realised that I could actually code up websites, and – in terms of technology, launching LibDemWorld was well within my abilities.

But then something else happened. You see I’ve been a LibDem member for a couple of years but was never really that active. And I live in an area (Greenwich) where the party is – frankly – only just functioning, bravely kept going by a very small number of volunteers, so not much happens anyway. But in September this year, I attended the annual LibDem conference in Bournemouth. It was an eye-opener. I met so many great people, had fascinating and very thoughtful discussions, and as a result for the first time felt truly connected and part of the party. I also realised from various discussions that there is a lack of independent LibDem blogs and similar sites - I met people at the conference who were clearly feeling frustrated about that and felt a lack of ability to make their voices heard. That gave me my motivation not just to get much more active and involved with the LibDems, but also to go home and start work on this site. And here is LibDemWorld!

Will it succeed?

I don’t know. Right now, it’s barely started. It’s going to take a huge amount of time both to code it up and add features to it, and to write articles. And since this doesn’t earn an income, it has to be done in my spare time. Maybe I’ll spend months working on this site and it’ll turn out no-one is interested in it anyway. I don’t know. But I feel I have to try. Wish me luck….

Why don’t I use a ready-made blogging platform?

I’ve hinted at all the work to code this site up. But any experienced bloggers may wonder why I don’t just use a blogging platform like Wordpress or Blogspot. Non-computer-programmers everywhere use them to set up blogs almost instantly with minimal work.

Well to my mind, the trouble with those platforms is they set you up quickly, but then you’re boxed in: They are designed for blogging and don’t support much else. And as I’ve hinted I have bigger ambitions for this site than just a blog. Ambitions that go far beyond what software like Wordpress can do. So I’ve chosen to code up LibDemWorld from scratch by hand instead. And that means features are going to be added gradually over a period of months. That’s why, at the time of writing this, there isn’t even a Comment feature, or a Contact Me form. Don’t worry – those are coming… It’ll just take a little time.

Simon Robinson