If you’re involved in our discussions on Coastsider, even if you’re reading and not writing, Paul Graham has written a good description of how to disagree in online forums and how to judge the quality of your disagreement.  This is a pretty sound framework for thinking about what you’re writing and evaluating what you’re reading.

We’re looking for a few Coastside nonprofits who are interested in some free advertising on Coastsider, so we test out our new advertising systems.  Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you’re interested in participating.  To keep the overhead low, organizations that are able to produce their own Web ads will get priority.  If you’re selected, we’ll send you specifications.

Coastsider members can now post your items for sale, lost & found, public notices, garage sales, jobs and other classified-style ads in Coastsider’s new Unclassified Ads forum in Town Hall. If you have permission to post in Town Hall, you already have permission to post in Unclassified Ads. To check if you have posting permission, just visit Unclassified Ads.  If you see a "New Topic" button, you can post. If you don’t, email your username and email address, along with your real name to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

You ads will appear in the "Latest Town Hall Topics" box on every page.

Unclassified Ads replaces our old classifieds system, which was overrun with spammers (which you never saw) and required that every notice be premoderated.  All unclassifieds go up as soon as you click "submit post".

We’ve been working on Coastsider’s Gallery ever since the redesign. It’s still a work in progress, but we’re re-launching it as a beta so we can run our extensive album of photos from Half Moon Bay High School’s production of Grease, which opens tonight.

To visit the gallery, click on the link in the top menu bar.  To visit our Grease albums, click on any photo in the following story, or just click here.

We’ll be adding photos and working on the gallery this weekend, so things may change or seem a little out of whack. If you see a problem, try reloading the page, or try again later.

Coastsider’s presidential poll is back. We took it down late last year as the campaign slogged through the holidays. With last week’s Iowa surprises, and the primary season about to begin, and California’s primary coming up in less than a month, it’s time to get the conversation going again.

The presidential poll is in the right-hand column, about one page down from the top.  If you haven’t voted in a month, you can vote again.

We’ve added another new feature to Coastsider’s comments. On every comment on every story on Coastsider (there are now about 5,000) the word "posted" in a comment’s header is now linked to a complete list of all comments by that particular member.

The word "posted" in this story is linked to all comments by Barry Parr.

We’ve added a new way to keep track of comments as they are posted on Coastsider: an RSS feed of new comments. You can use our comment feed in a few ways:

If you already have an RSS reader, such as NetNewswire, Google Reader, just add the address https://coastsider.com/index.php/site/rss_comments/ as you would any other feed.

If you use My Yahoo, click on "Personalize this page" at the top of the page and select "Add RSS feed…", and enter the address https://coastsider.com/index.php/site/rss_comments/

You can view this address and create a bookmark directly in Safari, Firefox, or Internet Explorer 7.

You can also use this feed in lots of other customized pages and social networks.  There’s a permanent link to this feed on the right side of the page, about halfway down, under "Coastsider feeds"

BONUS FEATURE: The links in "Recent Comments" now point to specific comments in each thread, and not just to the story being commented on. Try it out.

NOTE: Many of you may not have seen this already. We showed this new design briefly last weekend before our technical problems. We’re relaunching it tonight.

We’ve been working on this redesign for a while and dreaming about it for a lot longer than that.

Things came together a couple of weeks ago after a meeting with about thirty Coastsider readers at the Point Montara Lighthouse. We received a ton of excellent suggestions that motivated us to finally change the structure of Coastsider to make it easier to implement future improvements.

We think the new design is much better looking, a lot more contemporary, and much more consistent from page to page. But the most important improvement is that the new design is much more flexible. We’re now using a grid that allows us to add new features and elements without undermining the basic design.  You may notice that two features are missing right now. Coastsider’s Gallery and Classifieds are now closed for renovation. We will return them to the site as soon as we can.

We hope you like it. Feel free to add your questions and comments on the new design to this story. We’ll try to follow up on all the suggestions we receive.

Barry Parr
Editor & Publisher

After some technical difficulties, Coastsider is back online and running better than ever.  We expect to return to our new design shortly.

However, you may notice that two features are missing from our menu.

Coastsider’s Gallery is down for repairs. We’ll be working on bring the gallery back as soon as we’ve released our new design and integrated Town Hall a little better.

Classifieds have been removed from Coastsider. We’re working on a replacement, but it will involve an entirely new system. What you couldn’t see is that we received about twenty spam messages (which we had to delete) for every genuinely local ad we published. Expect to see an improved members-only Classified system in the near future.

You’re probably noticing that Coastsider’s a little buggy right now and that we’re not updating much.  We’re working on the problem and have taken some steps that will solve these problems and generally improve our reliability. More on that later.

In the meantime, if a page on Coastsider doesn’t load properly, hit "reload" once or twice and you should be able to see it.  "Reload" is control-R on Windows and cloverleaf-R on the Mac.  Sorry for the inconvenience. Things will get better.

Thank you for your patience.

Barry Parr