Please Pardon Our Dust!

We're back! And building to be better than ever!

After a brief break to update the core technologies running our publishing platform, the McKinley Park News website is coming back online in stages.

This new version of the McKinley Park News is rolling out step-by-step in order to quickly restore access to our original local news and neighborhood resources, as well as get new news stories published while our website updates continue.

All of the news content, features, user accounts and credentials, and other elements of the McKinley Park News are still here: waiting in the wings on the back end of the website. We're re-implementing our website's sections and capabilities one at a time in order to freshen everything up and make sure the website works really well for everyone.

Our new logoAs an end user, you'll find most everything to be familiar: We're retaining our branding design (with the addition of our new logo here and there), and our navigation and other features will be easy to find in the spots you expect.

This total process of updating will probably stretch over a couple weeks, however, we're bringing our biggest and most impactful features online first, such as the original local news articles we've published and the neighborhood events we've listed in our calendars over our past seven years of operations.

Privacy, Security and Accessibility

Although you might not notice big changes to our product and its look and feel, you will enjoy a website that is faster, more secure and more accessible than earlier versions of the McKinley Park News. We are especially proud of our updated support for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which ensure that Internet users of every ability can fully take advantage of the McKinley Park News.

We're also proud to continue prioritizing our end users' privacy and security by moving away from exploitative third-party technical services, including ditching Google Analytics for internally run, open-source analytics we control ourselves. We'll continue to move away from integrating tools and software that "phone home" to third parties, and that endanger you through unwanted for-profit surveillance of your online activities. Readers like you come first!

The Geeky Details

There are a whole lot of technical updates that have been occurring on the back end to get to this next stage of our publishing platform. For the Nerdlingers like myself who may be interested in more detail, this process began last year when we upgraded to cloud hosting. The most recent work honed in on walking the website through major version upgrades of the scripting language upon which our content management system (CMS) is built, as well as a major version upgrade for the CMS itself.

Another big change is moving away from our custom front-end "template" that defines the framework for website layout and design. I've programmed my own template on this CMS since 2005(!), but its new, native, state-of-the-art template offers a balance of customizability and off-the-shelf performance that I could not best. Much of the current work rolling out the website in stages is related to optimizing our website's features for this new front-end framework, which should then offer years of stability and high performance.

Business Development

Countless hours have also been spent this summer pursuing business research, planning and development. As a local news start-up, we've successfully covered our out-of-pocket costs to date. However, to make this enterprise sustainable, it must also support the livelihood of a neighborhood journalist: our biggest long-term business goal.

A breakthrough moment came this summer after discovering the online publishing and revenue strategies espoused by Kenny Katzgrau, an outspoken critic of Google's online advertising monopoly and the chief of his own online advertising network. Thanks to Katzgrau sharing his intelligence, benchmarks and development strategies, we now have a solid path toward revenue that supports a sustainable local news business.

You will see these changes in the new sponsorship and advertising opportunities we're rolling out, new structures and collections for our content, and a return to a full publishing schedule. We can't wait to share these great new updates with you, and we're so thankful for your ongoing patronage and interest in our local news publication.

We wish the best to you and yours. Cheers!

— Justin Kerr
Publisher, McKinley Park News