To our readers,
We have completed our behind the scenes upgrade of the basic program that runs this website. In case you do not know, since starting in 1995, this site has always been independent and has never used any commercial blog or service. The basic reason for this is to maintain control of the information and be able to archive everything without Google or other mega entities dictating terms to us.
From 1995 until early 2008, all content was posted by hand and designed inhouse. Then John Meloy, a talented local programmer, musician and photographer, helped set up a database driven system. This allowed us to add other writers and to enable comments to articles. Over the past year, we have planned to upgrade the underlying program, Expression Engine, to enable even more improvements. John helped us transition to a new programmer over the past weeks as he moved on to some new professional opportunities. But John's presence will still be felt as readers will discover soon.
So, we are closing the two short articles that told you we were upgrading. The upgrade was finished last night. Starting in April, we will be bringing some new improvements. One of the first will be to make it easier to register to comment - and to retrieve your password if you forget it. We will keep the use of real names. In a free society, we should not be afraid to attach our names to our opinions and perspectives.
Finally, I hope this site is useful to you as you try to keep up with local political developments. We, the writers, our copy editor Deb, and Tip Johnson who backs me up, try our best. It is all run on a shoestring, but one of the hoped-for benefits of the upgrade will be a better ad package for businesses. That would help a lot. Regardless, we will continue to publish.
Comments by Readers
Douglas Smith
Apr 10, 2012Looks good John! And I have a different browser (dolphin) for my Android phone. It looks like this browser is working with your site much better than the stock Android browser. If I can hit the submit button I’ll know it works. If anyone else had that problem of the full site jumping all over when trying to write a comment using a mobile phone then they can try using a different browser…..
OK!!! It worked for me using the dolphin browser for Android!