With Election Day in the US come and gone, I have completed updates to the Kamala Campaign Timeline website. This site covered the day-by day events of the Harris-Walz campaign from Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race through Election Day. Each daily entry contains a link to the CNN daily blog for that day, links to other press coverage of the campaign, and links to videos of campaign events.
Having covered topical events before (see my Portland Protest News site), I was familiar with tracking down stories and links. The CNN daily blog was very helpful as a starting point for finding other coverage. During the development of the site, CNN began to restrict the number of page views to their site, and to reserve content for subscribers. Whenever this happened, I looked for other coverage.
As with the Portland Protest News site, I found it difficult to make time everyday for site updates. Since I was using a static site generator, I was able to catch up and still keep the consecutive date timeline. I have seen some recent comments about creating news streams. I have created a few streams myself, but aggregating feeds still depends on someone creating those feeds. Kamala Campaign Timeline was such a site (although the template did not support generation of a RSS feed – darn!). To me, the best site of this kind is Political Wire. However, it takes time to sift through the news, pick out the stories of note, and post cogent summaries/quotes, and to do it day in and day out. The DailyKos site is probably the best known Democratic/Progressive news site, and they have a staff supporting their efforts. Similarly, keeping the @kamalahq Threads account going took some effort, and someone, somewhere was paying for that. So, my opinion is that it is a tough job for a single person to carry that kind of load, but maybe there is someone out there who can handle it, or organize it (like Election Law Blog has a set of guest editors).
Anyway, I enjoyed having another shot at creating a daily news site, and hope that this serves as a historical record of a unique campaign. I’m just sorry that Harris and Walz didn’t win.