Welcome to the new website! Our previous version, written with the Mambo content management system, was getting long in the tooth. It was inelegant to work with, and it got so that only Internet Explorer would edit the posts, and that won’t do.

The e-mail newsletter interface and appearance was less than optimal, and it would add random exclamation points to the output.

All that, and the host moved from San Diego to somewhere in Florida, and sometimes the latency would give you sufficient time to go to the restroom waiting for a page load.

I have wanted to play with WordPress, and true to its reputation, it’s elegant and well-documented. When I discover a new feature, I tend to think, “Damn, this is good.”

So I made some new banners in Photoshop, deleted a line of CSS code that made the spacing too high at the top, transferred stories going back to 2005, imported the newsletter subscribers, and added some new posts. The old news transfer was laborious, but it was my own fault for misplacing the password for the database administration, which kept me from doing a text dump.

It’s come a long way from the first edition in 1997 that I edited manually on Netscape Navigator. But the content loaded fast, photos were often added, and hey–the news got out.

I hope to add some very useful new features, including comments from members on our stories and the ability for sponsors to sign-up and renew online. The site is already simple enough to operate that any of you could add a story easily.

I still have to create and post the sponsor banners and move additional old posts.

There’s never enough time.