Thread: ALIPAC's Core Mission: Building the Archives

Friends of ALIPAC,

As our website has grown and faced growing demands and challenges, it has been modified and patched up many times and is as an evolving tool to help us in our struggle.

While our activists spend their time rushing from one fight to the next in this battle, I think it is important to make sure everyone understands one of our most important roles.

When I was first asked to do some research on the topic of illegal immigration for a Gubernatorial campaign in North Carolina in 2004, I told my candidate it would take me about two days to get her an estimate of the number of illegal aliens in the state. Much to my chagrin, it took me two weeks!

While attempting the research, I found huge gaps in the information found online. The news articles and reports from the past on this issue could only be found in bits and pieces that were strewn across multiple websites.

Today, almost anyone researching this issue will find ALIPAC.

The ALIPAC website is now the largest archive of information in existence on the topic of illegal immigration.

Our design and functionality has practically revolutionized the long term memory of the Internet on this topic.

This has been no small task and our archive is not some dusty collective of information waiting around for the occasional scholar.

Over 68 million pages of our site have been viewed since we started on 9/11/2004. Our web traffic has grown thanks to the hard work of activists that build our archives and reach out to others on the net. Our national media presence and other outreach methods also help to drive traffic.

Our new monthly traffic levels now range between 3-4 million pages viewed per month. While many of these page views are people that peek into the site briefly and then leave, there are many others.

Our web traffic is so strong and our archives are in such demand that our site is now hosted by the same company that hosts AOL, Ebay, and MTV. While becoming more expensive each step of the way, we are constantly having to upgrade the Internet hardware needed to meet public demand for our site and the information found on ALIPAC.

Of course, our opposition is always crawling the site, with a baleful eye watching our core activists work online. They are always trying to think of ways to attack us or disrupt our efforts. They have tried and tried about every dirty trick in the book and failed perpetually to stop the ALIPAC juggernaut.

Today in America, any US Citizen that decides "I'm going online to find out more about what is happening with this illegal immigration issue" will most likely find ALIPAC.

The ALIPAC website patches up and repairs many of the information deficits and structural information failures that I found when I started back in 2004.

After all, for someone to truly understand an issue you must know about the past developments on this issue in order to connect the dots.

ALIPAC: Helping America Connect the Dots! is a good slogan for us.

Of the over 100,000 pages on our site that will be viewed today, some of the people viewing the archives will be using the information we have collected for campaigns, lawmakers, school projects, media articles and reports, talk radio shows, legislative staff, etc...

And our core activists that use the Discussion Groups area of our site are constantly looking through information and using it in the public relations battles and pushes for legislation we are engaged in.

For the last two years, we have used the term "lifting the rock" to describe an American citizen that decides to dig in on the ALIPAC archives for the first time to bring themselves up to speed.

When we were all little kids, someone eventually lifted a large rock for us to see what was underneath. Half of us ran away when we saw the creepy crawlies living beneath the rock, while the other half stood and stared transfixed by what we saw and started poking at the worms and bugs with sticks! Our archives have the power to open eyes, change lives, and either turn someone into an activist for our cause or send them running for the nearest bar or bottle of psychotropic prescription pills.

Another role our archive serves is the passage of information around the nation. Many times at ALIPAC, we have broken stories that have gone to the top of the new food chain or faced heavy censorship.

We track how news travels in this nation and many times we have watched in horror as stories of national importance, which we picked up from local news sources, have been blocked from wide circulation in the media.

We have proven growing success at running these roadblocks. Today in America, people will hear information from our archives being relayed on some talk radio show. Our site has become a regular check in point for many talk radio show hosts and producers for the major networks visit us often for story ideas, since our activists have done much of the legwork tracking this information down and compiling it.

So you have the visible operations of ALIPAC that you see in motion and reflected in the media from time to time, but beyond that we are having an impact each day in ways that you cannot see the visible connection to what we do.

There are two main ways that people access our archives. The Internet search engines and direct searches on our site are the main avenues of access.

Over 800,000 pages of information from our website are on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. When people type in search terms such as "illegal immigration", "Border Security", "MS-13" etc... they often find us.

We can tell how interested the nation is in our topics on many days by the level of incoming visitors from the search engines.

Occasionally, we will appeal to our activists to place links to http://www.alipac.us on other websites and Discussion Boards. This is because each link directed at us raises our entire archive higher on the ladder of information indexed on the search engines. Each link in increases our reach to Americans. We depend on you to post these links in and to write your favorite website administrators asking them to post links to ALIPAC.us

Unfortunately, navigating the information on our website can be difficult.

Our online activists scour the web looking for news on the topic of illegal immigration and they post the articles in the NEWS section of our Discussion Groups. We do our best to train everyone how they can avoid posting duplicate material.

The posting of news articles into the Discussion Groups creates the majority of our Archives and soon after posting the material, the search engines will pick up the information and make it available to anyone searching the web on terms contained within the articles. We call this section THE ARCHIVES.

Each day, a member of the ALIPAC "Homepage Team" reviews the latest news and selects 3-4 of what we deem to be the most important articles and these go on the homepage.

Articles posted to the homepage go into what we call our "MAIN ARCHIVES". The homepage is designed for those of you that only have enough time to check by every day or so for the most important news. Those of you that can handle the extra time needed and stress of consuming this information can stick your head into the Discussion Groups area for rapid information displays.

Our online activists are allowed to post comments beneath the news and each article on the homepage going into our "Main Archives" has a link at the bottom directing people to the ARCHIVES post, where they can comment or read what others have to say. Each post made beneath articles in our ARCHIVES serves as an opinion attached to the news and each post made increases the importance of the information on the web by raising it higher up the search engine information ladder. It is quite common for news article and your posts to be read thousands of times within one year of being placed on our site.

Some of the articles in our MAIN ARCHIVES, built by the homepage team, end up being viewed tens of thousands of times.

Accessing and compiling all of this information can be difficult, but we do provide you with some help in that arena.

We want each ALIPAC supporter to be as informed on this issue as you possibly can be.

You can spend some time reading into our archives in five ways.

1. You can access the MAIN ARCHIVES by going to www.alipac.us and clicking on "Story Archives" in the main menu on the left. This will take you to our collection of almost 3,000 articles that were posted on the homepage since we began in 2004. Spending a few hours in our MAIN ARCHIVES can be a real eye opener and can turn any American into a professional on this issue quickly. These are the articles that have run on the ALIPAC homepage over the last 3.5 years.

Direct Link to MAIN ARCHIVES
http://www.alipac.us/archive.html

2. You can view the top 30 articles of all time at ALIPAC by going to www.alipac.us and clicking on "Top 10" in the Main menu. We have turned this into the top 30 articles. The top two articles on this list have been viewed over 70,000 and the bottom of the list contains articles viewed over 12,000 times. Any new article will have to climb above 12,000 to make our top 30 all time list. This list helps you see some of the information that readers have shown the most interest in.

Direct Link to Top 30 Articles
http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=Top

3. You can also use the TOPICS section found under the Main Menu at www.alipac.us to access articles broken down by different topics we cover or have covered in the past.

Direct Links to TOPICS section
http://www.alipac.us/topics.html

4. There are three Search features on our website you can use to look for specific information in our archives. There is a Google search box on the homepage that you can only see, if you are logged in as a user. This Google Search will search our MAIN ARCHIVES AND PRIMARY ARCHIVES. In short, it searches the entire website except for the information the search engines do not registers. There is a Search feature in the Main Menu, which only searches the Main Archives of 3,000 articles that ran on our homepage. There is another search feature found at the top of each page in our Discussion Groups. This search feature will search our PRIMARY archives of everything ever posted in the Discussion Groups. Each of these search features can be tricky and problematic and you have to practice to know how to get them to perform to your liking.

5. You can visit the News section of our Discussion Groups, where the PRIMARY ARCHIVES are being created each day. You can comment on articles or you can post articles you find for others to see.

DIRECT LINK TO PRIMARY NEWS ARCHIVES
http://www.alipac.us/forum-6.html

If you find an article that you want to make sure goes into the ALIPAC archives, you should sign up for an account and post what you find in the News section of our Discussion Groups.

"Jean" is our News Director and she can be contacted online via the Discussion Groups area. She can help you post material in the standard way our activists do. Jean is also a member of our homepage team and helps to decide what makes the front page. We ask that everyone please pay close attention to try and avoid posting duplicates. Jean makes sure that ALIPAC has the most comprehensive list of the latest and most important news on our website.

I apologize for the length of this message, but this is a very important part of what ALIPAC is doing for our cause and we want each of you to understand the importance of our efforts and know how you can find the information you need to become a top activist on this issue.

If you have any questions about this information, please post your questions and comments here at this link, where we can answer them for all to see. We are especially interested in hearing from those of you that have taken a few hours to explore our archives after reading this message.

Questions and Comments at..
http://www.alipac.us/ftopicp-595534.html#595534


Yours in the cause,


William Gheen
www.alipac.us
Americans for Legal Immigration PAC

Today, almost anyone researching this issue will find ALIPAC.

The ALIPAC website is now the largest archive of information in existence on the topic of illegal immigration.

BRAVO WILLIAM and ALIPAC

WAY TO GO ALIPAC!!!!

Very informative post William.......thank you!

Thank You!

So glad to read this, to know we have had that much impact on what Americans know about illegal immigration, verusu what was available before.

Great work William, your efforts here have given Americans something they depsreately needed, but were being denied by virtual blackouts of information by the MSM.

added to the homepage

http://www.alipac.us/article2897.html

glad to know we're having such an impact.

on another high note, ron paul came in second in the louisiana caucus!!! he's still in the running, so don't give up. final results aren't in, but this is the preliminary result.

Thanks for the information and clarification. I learned some things I din't know by reading your post. Thanks.