I've shared in past Letters from the Editor how a big part of the work we're doing is related to "platform" - the interlinked technologies that power the McKinley Park News.

I'm most happy to share word that a process of improving and upgrading our platform is now complete. This is work that has stretched over the course of years and has involved:

• Upgrading our hosting to cloud hosting (100 percent powered by renewable energy, by the way). This gives us whatever capacity we need to support both the McKinley Park News and any growth into a neighborhood news network .
• Upgrading to the latest versions of the Content Management System (CMS) software and its extensions that run the McKinley Park News. (We do not use WordPress, by the way.)
• Upgrading the server-side scripting language and database technologies that power the CMS and connected systems. This makes everything more capable, faster and more secure.
• Changing over to an entirely new template framework and front-end layout code that still allows us to keep our attractive look and feel and branding.
• Fixing many errors and bugs that caused issues with layout and navigation.
• Continued improvements to support all our users on mobile devices. (Hi!)
  
• Improvements to user accounts, profiles and subscriptions.
• Restoration of all member and community features, now concluded with the return of the McKinley Park Neighborhood Forums .
• Implementation of long-planned new features for Sponsors and Institutions .
• Ejecting predatory and harmful service providers like Google from our website's infrastructure.

All this work has taken some time and pulled attention away from our core product of local news for the neighborhood. However, this work is necessary for ongoing and future success .

At this point, the McKinley Park News has zero "technical debt" or baggage that could hold us back, and I no longer have these ToDos hanging over my head. It's a great feeling!

Of course, if you encounter errors or problems, or wish to share any feedback with us, please let us know, and we'll attend to the issue. (You can post here in this forum or Contact Us directly.)

Here's another just-launched tech improvement I'm stoked about: support for AVIF image files, which makes the site leaner, faster and easier to manage.

For non-geeks: This relates to the type of file format used to store image data. We and many others have predominantly used the JPG standard, which dates back to the 90s. The JPG standard is universally supported, but it's been surpassed in some ways by other formats, especially for serving up web images in sites like the McKinley Park News.

AVIF (or AV1 Image File Format) is a newer, open-source, license-free image format that uses a newer -- and much better -- compression scheme to make image files smaller while keeping their appearance looking good. I've been playing around with the same file saved as compressed JPG versus compressed AVIF, and the results are dramatic!

AVIF image files are now supported on all major browsers, operating systems, and common devices, and they should appear just like our other images always have on the McKinley Park News.

We're going to start implementing AVIF files in new images we publish here. The end result for you is that the site will download faster. And on our end, we have less data to store on the server: win-win!