We’ve upgraded the software we use to publish Coastsider’s photo gallery as part of our Silly Season upgrades.  We think you’ll find it easier to use and the design much better looking. We’ll be tweaking the design over the next few days. Please let us know if you have any problems with the new gallery.

August is a slow news month. It’s called the Silly Season because so many frivolous stories get published.  It’s also a slow month for Web traffic, because everyone’s on vacation.

We’re taking advantage of the summer doldrums to replace the software we use to publish Coastsider. When we’re finished, the site won’t look a lot different, but we expect to use this platform in the fall to add new features to the site and to take a fresh look at our our design.

We’ll continue to publish daily, or close to it, but if the flow of news seems a little slow, blame it on the Silly Season.

UPDATE: Recent comments are back on the home page.

Get a Coastsider.com bumper sticker for your car, and let you friends and neighbors know about our site.  Send your mailing address and the number of stickers you want to Barry Parr, using the email link in the top left column of this page. Please write "Bumper sticker" in the message subject.  We’ll mail your stickers back to you at no charge.

You’ve probably noticed that there hasn’t been a lot of news on Coastsider this week. At least, I hope you have. I’m in in Amherst, Massachusetts, speaking at a conference on citizen journalism.  I’m out here with a bunch of A-list journalism bloggers, j-school professors, newspaper executives , and (first and foremost) people who are doing in their communities what Coastsider is doing in ours. It’s exciting and inspiring to be among so many people who are moving in the same direction to remake community news. I expect to return with a new sense of purpose and lots of new ideas.

I’ve got a number of stories in the queue that I hope to post from the road, and I’ll keep moderating comments, but Coastsider will be relatively quiet for the next few days.

I’m on a couple of panels this afternoon, including one called "Can Free Media Sustain Democracy?" It would be an understatement to say I’m optimistic. 

If you had a problem loading our latest video from the construction at Devil’s Slide, please try again. We have fixed a small bug in the markup that affected some users.

Click on this link to see Coastsider’s visit to the Devil’s Slide construction site.

I wasn’t able to spend a lot of time patrolling the comments last week, and things have gotten out of hand in some places.  Coastsider is a place where people should feel free to participate without being attacked. I can see that the Golden Rule is not sufficient when someone is spoiling for a fight.  Here’s what I ask:

• Respect your opponents
• Stick to the facts
• Avoid labeling your opponent. The label "no-growther" is especially irritating. I’m not sure there’s an exact equivalent for the other side. If there is, avoid it too.
• Avoid ad hominem attacks (based on the identity of the person making the argument, and not the argument itself)
• Refer to people by name to clarify whom you’re talking to, not to be condescending (e.g. "Jane, you ignorant…")

I probably missed something, but this is a good start. It all boils down to respecting your opponents. I shouldn’t have to tell anyone this.

Despite the rain at around 6:00pm, Rock the Block is going strong downtown.  I’m logged on from our booth via Coastwave wireless. It’s not too late to come downtown, enjoy the music and meet us here on Main Street.

When the Half Moon Bay Review launched the redesign of their paper and website with a couple of snide, gratuitous remarks that seemed directed at Coastsider, I let it go. Why spoil their party?

What continues to set our newspaper and Web site apart from others is that all news content is collected and written by our editorial staff here at the Review. We don’t simply pull news stories from other sources over the hill and post them on our site.

One more thing: We promise to apply the same journalistic standards to our work on the Web that readers have become accustomed to in our news pages over our long history. Just as we don’t rush things into print, we will do our best to assure that what you read on our Web site is accurate.

Maybe they weren’t even talking about us. After all, Coastsider doesn’t "simply pull news stories from other sources and post them on our site."  We do link to interesting articles about the Coastside in the media, about once a week. But we’ve also earned our reputation for breaking hard news on the Coastside.

The wheel of karma has turned, as it always does. It’s time to return to the Review’s 108-year reputation for journalistic standards and not rushing things into print.  Tuesday night, the Review reported breaking news that Caltrans had announced a new left-turn lane on Highway 1. Caltrans had announced no such thing. And the Review only corrected their error after Coastsider posted an accurate report. 

I’m not busting the Review’s chops over a goof. We all make mistakes.  I’m asking that the Review acknowledge that they no longer have a monopoly on the facts.  Besides, it’s always a bad idea to be too full of yourself, especially if your mistakes are likely to wind up in the newspaper.

Yesterday’s coverage of the Coastside’s communications disruption would have been impossible without the contributions of the community.

Coincidentally, I spent Saturday night in Palo Alto.  When I woke in my hotel room, I had no idea what was happening on the Coastside. When I checked my mail in the morning, I found a posting from a reader about the outage and was able to get a story online by 10:00am.  I was able to supplement this by talking to the Sheriff’s Office. Another reader talked to the AT&T crew on the scene and emailed us photos from a Starbucks on the Bayside.  Other readers contributed important information about what services were disrupted and how they were affected.  We updated the story continuously until about 10:00pm.  Until Sunday evening, the only public information about the outage, besides a 9:00am story (projecting a 10:00am restoration of service) from Bay Cities News on KCBS.com, was the ongoing story on Coastsider.

The credit for that goes not to Coastsider, but to the community.  Without your attention and assistance, we couldn’t have done it.