Trending Left Writing Partners Fund
Donation protected
Thank you for viewing this fundraiser. My name is Brandon Alexander, I am 27 years old, and I am the creator of the website/political blog and Facebook page Trending Left. I sincerely hope you are reading this with good intentions and an open mind.
Like most great tales Trending Left has a unique and inspiring origin story that eventually turns into a quest or goal to assemble a team that can help fight the forces of evil and expose truth and hold it close enough that they never forget why they began their journey.
How this began
Trending Left used to be "The Daily Left" until a massive hosting service error deleted almost all of the code work put into the site over the course of 2016 to mid 2018. Luckily I had saved all of the 125+ previously written/reported on articles written by myself and former writing partners and was able to repost them one by one onto TrendingLeft.com .
Over the course of the past few months both during and after the important 2018 midterm elections, and after transferring all of the previous works to the new site, I have been working hard on tinkering with outside source code, and various plugins to both give the site optimal compatibility and efficiency. I will be finishing setting up the mobile site this week, and all of this is being done using WordPress with BlueHost as my hosting service.
I do have a decent understanding of CSS and HTML along with the ability to write basic frameworks of web coding, but I would be lying if I said all of the code used on the website is my own. However, my love for creating HTML code for websites began in 7th grade when my computer science teacher saw my curiosity and passion for creating things using what was being taught in class, and eventually gave me an opportunity to create and publish a fully functional websites for both the middle school and high school of my town. This was in the mid 2000's and CSS wasn't something being used or taught at the time, and unfortunately I never learned Javascript.
I then took those abilities and skills and applied them to one of the greatest, and most ancient websites of our time, Myspace (the original version), and proceeded to both write weekly blogs, but also create what I thought at the time were awesome customized themes/homepages, much better than the lame pre-made kind most people had.
If you are a millennial like me, you hopefully can appreciate that original Myspace experience and know how much work some people put into their pages and friend making. I was definitely one of those people that would make sweet "share 4 share" graphics to make new friends. That passion for creating graphic designs has led me to become a daily, almost hourly user of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Dreamweaver. I recently have become a pretty big fan of the new alternatives to Adobe CC called Affinity Designer, especially for the new iPad. I have posted one of my recently created graphics with Affinity Designer just to show you how awesome it is.
What does this have to do with finding writing parters?
On top of my love and passion for creating graphics, custom code, video editing, and web development in general, I love writing. I cannot stop writing once I start which is something that has hurt me at times. Most people don't text in full paragraph form like me. So when it comes to Trending Left, and other websites I have been working on, I am constantly torn between writing an article or essay on a topic I can't get my mind off of, or creating something artsy and cool, or simply fixing bugs on my website that isn't really re-launched yet.
So I need to find writing partners who understand Wordpress and can help create content to be posted daily on mainly factchecking political issues, doing stories on healthcare, giving updates on progressive representatives and policy ideas going forward in 2019, and because I love astronomy and quantum theory so much, I would like to dedicate a portion of Trending Left to getting people interested in thinking about how amazing the universe is, and how infinitely small our constant bickering are as part of the big picture. The discovery of gravitational waves in 2015 by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) that later won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 is one of, in my opinion, mans greatest discoveries. Discoveries like this have been theorized for many decades even centuries ago, but have only recently been either proven, or almost proven pending new ways of detecting different particles, energy, and other scientific/quantum physics-sounding things.
So while Trending Left will definitely focus on daily politics, government, healthcare, and progressive people and ideas, there will also be a healthy dose of "taking a step back" in order to remind ourselves of just how little we actually know about ourselves.
Social Media
Currently the Facebook Page has around 650 subscribers and is growing by 10-20 per day.
There was a twitter account with over 6,000 followers under the previous name of "The Daily Left", but unfortunately the account constantly flagged by right wing trolls which led to unbelievable suspensions for no reason and I truly just got fed up with it and how useless the account had become for anything other than tweet wars. That isn't my goal with Trending Left. I just want to help reach a small but decent amount of people who wouldn't normally take interest in a progressive blog with the facts in hopes that Trending Left can help inform their opinions and voting decisions in the future. I hope to bring credibility to the site by making sure to admit when mistakes have been made, and in fact I would like to have a system that would act like a "swear jar" for any major mistakes I would make as a writer or editor of Trending Left. By this I mean for every legit mistake made, a donation will be made to the reputable charity that the followers choose in a poll that both informs them of the error, but also helps them trust myself and any future team members to not make up facts, spread fake conspiracies, and do anything more than put a progressive spin on the irrefutable facts of any topic.
As far as Trending Left goes, 100% of the money would be used for
1. Hiring/finding writing partners and possible reporters in SoCal
2. Promotion of the page, website, and must see articles/videos/podcasts and
3. Roughly 10 percent of that money will go to a charity organization like www.supportKIND.org that help represent children seeking asylum in immigration courts.
Thank you for reading this and I want you to know that every donation, small or big, will be equally appreciated in the most sincere way I know.
It truly means a lot to me if you are able to help support Trending Left
Sincerely,
Brandon Alexander
Creator of Trending Left
Like most great tales Trending Left has a unique and inspiring origin story that eventually turns into a quest or goal to assemble a team that can help fight the forces of evil and expose truth and hold it close enough that they never forget why they began their journey.
How this began
Trending Left used to be "The Daily Left" until a massive hosting service error deleted almost all of the code work put into the site over the course of 2016 to mid 2018. Luckily I had saved all of the 125+ previously written/reported on articles written by myself and former writing partners and was able to repost them one by one onto TrendingLeft.com .
Over the course of the past few months both during and after the important 2018 midterm elections, and after transferring all of the previous works to the new site, I have been working hard on tinkering with outside source code, and various plugins to both give the site optimal compatibility and efficiency. I will be finishing setting up the mobile site this week, and all of this is being done using WordPress with BlueHost as my hosting service.
I do have a decent understanding of CSS and HTML along with the ability to write basic frameworks of web coding, but I would be lying if I said all of the code used on the website is my own. However, my love for creating HTML code for websites began in 7th grade when my computer science teacher saw my curiosity and passion for creating things using what was being taught in class, and eventually gave me an opportunity to create and publish a fully functional websites for both the middle school and high school of my town. This was in the mid 2000's and CSS wasn't something being used or taught at the time, and unfortunately I never learned Javascript.
I then took those abilities and skills and applied them to one of the greatest, and most ancient websites of our time, Myspace (the original version), and proceeded to both write weekly blogs, but also create what I thought at the time were awesome customized themes/homepages, much better than the lame pre-made kind most people had.
If you are a millennial like me, you hopefully can appreciate that original Myspace experience and know how much work some people put into their pages and friend making. I was definitely one of those people that would make sweet "share 4 share" graphics to make new friends. That passion for creating graphic designs has led me to become a daily, almost hourly user of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Dreamweaver. I recently have become a pretty big fan of the new alternatives to Adobe CC called Affinity Designer, especially for the new iPad. I have posted one of my recently created graphics with Affinity Designer just to show you how awesome it is.
What does this have to do with finding writing parters?
On top of my love and passion for creating graphics, custom code, video editing, and web development in general, I love writing. I cannot stop writing once I start which is something that has hurt me at times. Most people don't text in full paragraph form like me. So when it comes to Trending Left, and other websites I have been working on, I am constantly torn between writing an article or essay on a topic I can't get my mind off of, or creating something artsy and cool, or simply fixing bugs on my website that isn't really re-launched yet.
So I need to find writing partners who understand Wordpress and can help create content to be posted daily on mainly factchecking political issues, doing stories on healthcare, giving updates on progressive representatives and policy ideas going forward in 2019, and because I love astronomy and quantum theory so much, I would like to dedicate a portion of Trending Left to getting people interested in thinking about how amazing the universe is, and how infinitely small our constant bickering are as part of the big picture. The discovery of gravitational waves in 2015 by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) that later won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 is one of, in my opinion, mans greatest discoveries. Discoveries like this have been theorized for many decades even centuries ago, but have only recently been either proven, or almost proven pending new ways of detecting different particles, energy, and other scientific/quantum physics-sounding things.
So while Trending Left will definitely focus on daily politics, government, healthcare, and progressive people and ideas, there will also be a healthy dose of "taking a step back" in order to remind ourselves of just how little we actually know about ourselves.
Social Media
Currently the Facebook Page has around 650 subscribers and is growing by 10-20 per day.
There was a twitter account with over 6,000 followers under the previous name of "The Daily Left", but unfortunately the account constantly flagged by right wing trolls which led to unbelievable suspensions for no reason and I truly just got fed up with it and how useless the account had become for anything other than tweet wars. That isn't my goal with Trending Left. I just want to help reach a small but decent amount of people who wouldn't normally take interest in a progressive blog with the facts in hopes that Trending Left can help inform their opinions and voting decisions in the future. I hope to bring credibility to the site by making sure to admit when mistakes have been made, and in fact I would like to have a system that would act like a "swear jar" for any major mistakes I would make as a writer or editor of Trending Left. By this I mean for every legit mistake made, a donation will be made to the reputable charity that the followers choose in a poll that both informs them of the error, but also helps them trust myself and any future team members to not make up facts, spread fake conspiracies, and do anything more than put a progressive spin on the irrefutable facts of any topic.
As far as Trending Left goes, 100% of the money would be used for
1. Hiring/finding writing partners and possible reporters in SoCal
2. Promotion of the page, website, and must see articles/videos/podcasts and
3. Roughly 10 percent of that money will go to a charity organization like www.supportKIND.org that help represent children seeking asylum in immigration courts.
Thank you for reading this and I want you to know that every donation, small or big, will be equally appreciated in the most sincere way I know.
It truly means a lot to me if you are able to help support Trending Left
Sincerely,
Brandon Alexander
Creator of Trending Left
Organizer
Brandon Alexander
Organizer
Newport Beach, CA
