by Brian Leubitz

In August 2005, I worked with a number of amazing folks to push forward a community blog about California politics. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but it allowed as many people as cared to get together to talk about progressive politics, goals for organizing, and a few unrelated topics as well. And we had a great team to build the site over the years, just to name a few: Dante Atkins, Robert Cruickshank, David Dayen, Lucas O’Connor, Julia Rosen Chaplin, and Jeremy Woodburn.

Over 15,000 posts, and nearly 50,000 comments, later, it is time for a change. Soapblox, the software provider behind Calitics for the past ten years, is shutting down. The software, originally developed by Paul Preston and then very capably managed by the good folks at Warecorp, was critical to the development of this site and many other progressive community blogs. (Take a peek at the Hillbilly Report’s recap of the recent history of Soapblox)

So, over the weekend, this site will be transitioning to WordPress. (Or if you are reading this, it has already switched over.) All posts, comments, and user data will be preserved, but links may change. Fortunately, wordpress and google will be able to search if you are looking for something back in the archive. User information should remain, but you may need to reset your password if you would like to log in.

And as you have probably noticed, I’ve sort of taken a hiatus from the task of day to day blogging. I’ve been busy with a range of projects, which initially made it hard to keep up my writing. But the greater issue is that once you get out of the daily rhythm of writing and doing all the other tasks of maintaining a site like this, it becomes hard to return to it. I don’t plan on this being the end of Calitics, but it will be a different type of site. Going forward I’ll do a bit of writing on Calitics, but if anybody else wants to help guide Calitics going forward, send me an email (brian AT calitics.com). I’d love to chat with you.

At any rate, keep watching the Calitics Twitter feed and Calitics facebook page for more information. I plan on keeping those updated and posting some thoughts on the state of California politics every now and then.

Thanks!

Brian