Upcoming Website Work on the McKinley Park News

Greetings!

I've been working non-stop preparing critical infrastructure updates for the McKinley Park News website: back-end systems and software stuff that you likely wouldn't notice ... until something breaks, of course! 😅

Part of our updates will involve temporarily taking the website offline while we conduct work on the software engine that powers the McKinley Park News. This should not be too disruptive: We'll try to have the website offline during our lowest-traffic hours. However, during this time, all accounts will be logged out, and the website's content and features will be temporarily unavailable.

Thanks For Your Suggestions

After the upgrade is complete, you'll likely only notice some minor changes: We're retaining all our content and features, user accounts and subscriptions, navigation schema and URLs, and primary branding and packaging design. The latter will probably be where you'll notice the most changes, as we're reapplying our brand to renewed website infrastructure for improved performance and user experience across a range of devices.

The new logo of the McKinley Park NewsI have no doubt there will be additional user interface tweaks after our upgrade is complete, but we did not want to delay this technical work any further: It's a necessary precursor to some great new features we've planned. Many of our ideas for fixes and improvements come from our member community, and we thank everyone who graciously shared their feedback.

McKinley Park News 4.0

This publishing platform upgrade — and work like it — is a work-intensive, infrequent, monolithic job that yields years of high-value, nearly hands-off publishing performance and stability when implemented with best practices. Indeed, the McKinley Park News website has already been upgraded twice through this process since we first launched a neighborhood website in 2012.

Unfortunately, like our foundational business development work that also requires massive amounts of time, this big job has been taking away from reporting neighborhood news and growing our community, even though we've still kept our core features current, including neighborhood event calendars, breaking news and subscriber content and features.

Incremental Progress

As a solopreneur needing to cover all bases, progress on platform and business development has been frustratingly incremental. It's also a challenge to jump between the different head spaces required for a publishing enterprise, especially technical and coding work, which benefits immensely from undivided and uninterrupted attention.

The good news is that all this monolithic work is nearly complete. I cannot wait to get back to a regular editorial product, now upgraded to the state of the art. I also look forward to implementing our qualified plan for business development and growth, leveraging all the great assistance we received over the past year from the Metro Media Lab at Northwestern University's Medill School.

Geeky Stuff Below

That's the primary update you need to know as a reader of the McKinley Park News, and you can stop reading here if you're not interested in further technical detail (which I still wanted to share, since our platform operations are pretty unique). Our upgrade should be happening within the next couple-to-handful of days from posting of this Letter From the Editor.

Like our schedule for "flipping the switch," I'm sharing technical details here in a very generalized way. Best practices also apply to systems security, and we've seemingly been successful at keeping everything airtight, including through obfuscation. (All the hacking bots think we're running WordPress. 😱)

Independent Platform = Independent Publishing

An online media outlet's publishing platform is an integral part of its operations, and it both empowers and limits business strategy and opportunity. Running the McKinley Park News ourselves on open-source software in a commodity web hosting environment has allowed for things we never could have afforded were we paying an order of magnitude more for one of the many news-website-in-a-box services.

In fact, the McKinley Park News would likely never exist if it had to use one of these expensive services. Our online publishing costs should also continue to fall as web hosting gets cheaper, faster and better.

Another priority has been website portability: The McKinley Park News is built to run independently in just about any common hosting environment, and its compressed size is under 4 gigabytes, including all the data and content from 11 years of publishing. (Optimizing all those photos prior to upload really paid off!) This makes it easier to move between vendors, if desired, and it's especially useful for disaster recovery.

Competitive Advantage of DIY

The cost of running your own website software is the occasional big upgrade (like now) and then very minor and manageable amounts of ongoing upkeep, much of which can be automated. Once well-configured and running, good publishing systems are pretty hands off and very fault tolerant.

Sometimes these tools seem almost magical, given their power and value. However, I've come to trust and rely on their capabilities, flexibility and robustness, as well as the software development philosophy and product position of the volunteer-powered open source content management system we use to run the McKinley Park News.

Media enterprises often throw big bucks at tech vendors not based on well-considered product or program requirements, or even vendor qualifications, but to have someone to blame when things go wrong. Or decisions are led by following the crowd, as it's often easier to sell an industry's de facto solution as an internal corporate budget item.

Big platform spending at other outlets, as well as lock-in to a managed services regime where prices will never go down, might position competitors at a disadvantage versus a publishing setup that tracks with the ever-decreasing prices of commodity hosting and distribution. The amount we pay per year for hosting and commercial open source software add-ons pales in comparison to the hundreds and thousands of dollars charged per month for many news website platform services.

Adieu, Google

Another big change is another big step away from Google/Alphabet and its services. The McKinley Park News has always tried to serve website software resources and libraries primarily from our own domain and hosting environment, versus reaching out to third-party sources to load their resources into our web pages. One big exception has been our use of Google Analytics to track our website traffic via insertion of a chunk of code that calls out to Google and tracks you.

There's a whole bunch of reasons we're moving away from Google and its services, including its analytics:

• Using Google does not serve our audience. In fact, it exposes our readers to opaque, unwanted consumer surveillance for unregulated distribution, exploitation and profit. Your news should not spy on you.
   
• More Internet users are smartly using ad and script blockers, and it shows! There's a big discrepancy between what we're seeing in Google Analytics and what we're seeing in raw server traffic logs. Especially given this publication's pro-privacy stance — and admonition that, yes, you should be running ad and script blockers — Google Analytics is no longer providing accurate results for us.
   
• Google is a direct and unfair competitor. Google acts as hegemon over so many aspects of our Internet use and online lives, ranging from services like Google Analytics through embedded tools that phone home like the Android operating system and Chrome web browser. By controlling both ad distribution and manipulating its markets, and leveraging every competitive advantage of its cross-industry dominance, Google has an unfair advantage against every other ad seller on the Internet, including the McKinley Park News and other local news outlets.
   
  We don't wish to be the customer of a direct and dominating competitor, even though it's basically impossible to completely escape from Google and its influence. Even our top-level .news domain registration is controlled by Google Domains and can't be transferred to any other domain registrar: yet another example of Google's hegemony.
   
• Google wants publishers to keep doing more work that mostly benefits Google. An updated analytics tool and regime is rolling out from Google soon, requiring more work to integrate and understand. I lump this non-news-focused labor with similar asks from Google and its ilk, especially Search Engine Optimization (SEO). How many hours have publishers put into this continually moving target? How much money has Google saved by not having to hire editors to organize its own search engine? I'm tired, Google, and have better things to do.
   
• Better solutions are available at affordable costs. Much like running our own open source software engine, we're also set to run our own free, open source analytics engine internally, from within our own domain and hosting environment. This will not only give us better and more complete understanding of our product, it allows us to help control responsible use of our audience's data: Our Terms of Service has always stated that we do not share our collected user data with outside parties.

Building on Previous Work

Our aforementioned solopreneur status means that everything we do has to build upon previous work, and I've been prepping for this upgrade for more than a year. One of the earliest things we did was migrate the existing site and services to cloud-based hosting: This makes it super-easy to quickly and dynamically grow our capacity, whether for the McKinley Park News website or other services.

Another step was pushing the existing site through an upgrade of the server-side scripting language that powers our content management system. The whole system is much like an onion, with each layer of software powering those above it while being dependent on those below, and all constantly improving through new releases that fix bugs, add features and improve performance.

We've also set up a "development" environment that parallels our hosting setup so we can test everything in the upgrade process before we apply this to the live site. (I'm happy to say that our tests and process has been successful in development, thus we're looking forward to doing it here very soon.)

Thank You!

I really appreciate the patience of our audience while we get all this work done, step by step. We are working hard to build a better local news outlet for you and Chicago's McKinley Park neighborhood.

Cheers!

— Justin Kerr
Publisher, McKinley Park News