Testing 2 new WSB features; need your feedback!
As of right now, we’re testing two new features – both in hopes of better fulfilling the WSB mission of serving you with West Seattle news, information, and discussion, 24/7/365.
MORE DISCUSSION: We have finally launched “forums” — another HUGE thanks to the fabulous STUART MAXWELL for making this happen (same guy who got WSB onto a better server earlier this morth) — but before we build them out with a slew of categories and other enhancements, we would like you to try them and then let us know how you would want to use them. You will find them by clicking the FORUM tab at the right side of the row of navigation tabs under the sunset header (or click here). We’ve started with two general areas — we’d like to see if forums are the best, well, forum for Reader Recommendation Requests — start a new topic when you have one, and see what happens — this means RRRs won’t have to wait for us to get to them amid all the other West Seattle news of the day. Also, there’s an OPEN DISCUSSION area where you can post a topic you’d like to talk about. Sometimes the main page is the right place for that — like the “walk all ways” opinion sent to us that resulted in this well-discussed post — but again, maybe there’s something you just want to say NOW – go to the forums and say it. One note, you will have to register to post in the forums (but anyone can read them). And right now, since we’re considering this a “beta” test before possibly tying it into more of the site, that registration does NOT link to the comment feature on WSB posts, so you will still have to enter your name and e-mail address separately if you want to comment on those. Try out the forums, let us know what you think, with comments on this post OR by e-mailing WSB. Thanks!
MORE NEWS/INFORMATION: With the help of the fine folks at the Southwest Precinct, we are now able to bring you lots more information about West Seattle crime reports, safety concerns, and crime-prevention advice. Starting right now – with police-report highlights from the past several days:Read More
Tuesday night notes
First, a great photo:
Larry says it was about 4 pm today when he got that shot of a VERY busy afternoon on Elliott Bay. Thanks for sending it to WSB!
Second – congrats to Jeff from Soundproof Suite 1850, one of the 116 sites listed on our Other Blogs in West Seattle page – he won The Stranger‘s auction for a week of posting rights on the paper’s ever-spectacular Slog, coming up in January, and according to Slog, Jeff “looks forward to defending the honor of West Seattle and the Alaskan Way Viaduct.” (Hat tip to our pals at Capitol Hill Seattle for catching first word of Jeff’s Slog score.)
Third – on the holiday front: Not enough for a complete update of our West Seattle Christmas tree price check, but while out this afternoon, we noticed the Rite-Aids are out of trees, and West Seattle Nursery has marked down some of its Douglas firs (some nice ones for as low as $11!) – they’re open till 8 pm. Also, we’ve added many more West Seattle Christmas Eve and Christmas Day church services to the WSB Holidays page – as many as we’ve found online so far – will be making phone calls to fill out the list; we’re working on the list of Christmas Eve/Day grocery-store hours too.
Welcome to the newest WSB sponsor: Curious Kidstuff
It’s a WSB tradition to let you know when a new sponsor comes aboard. This morning, we’re welcoming Curious Kidstuff, whose team invites you to “come on down to The Junction’s fun place to play and shop.” Next year, Curious Kidstuff celebrates its 10th anniversary – how time flies – in the meantime, your time for Christmas shopping is flying, and Curious Kidstuff is offering 20% off any purchase through 12/24/07, except for sale and clearance items; gift wrapping not included. Thanks to Curious Kidstuff for supporting WSB; all our current sponsors are listed on our “Advertise” page, along with information on how your business can join them!
JuNO gets a place of its own
Online, that is. Junction Neighborhood Organization president Erica Karlovits has set up a blog-style site for the group; check it out here. And as you’ll see on the website, the next JuNO meeting is set for 6:30 pm January 8 — for everybody who lives in and around The Junction and wants to get connected with ways to keep it a great place to be.
Another WSB milestone: Dropping the veil
That’s the sign that started it all.
One year ago this week, we were going about the business of WSB being a standard-issue little hobby blog, a little info here, a little opinion there. Only a few hundred people knew we were here.
Then: Windstorm ’06.
We lost power for four days. Many people in West Seattle went without it for even longer. Almost as bad as the power outage – the information outage. West Seattle-specific updates were virtually impossible to come by.
We happened to be off work that week. So we decided to start roaming WS and trying to gather and share some of that info. We received, and answered, e-mails from people stuck at work or out of town and wondering if their lights were back on yet.
From there, even after the power came back on, with the phenomenal help of reader e-mail, tips, photos, and other contributions, WSB started morphing into a community-news site. “Hyperlocal,” as the buzzword goes. The more news and information we put up, the more came in, and more people kept finding the site, by Googling for something specific that we happened to have reported, or by word-of-mouth.
For months, we’ve been doing this in our spare time, early morning, late night, lunch break. But now it’s time to make a real commitment. So your editor here just quit her day job.Read More
Mars Hill money trouble?
So suggests the fifth bullet point in this entry on “Pastors’ Prayers,” one of the many official Mars Hill Church blogs. Quoting here:
Multiple pastors request prayers for our financial state. With the deep deficit, it is a test for all the staff to choose Jesus over anxiety when ministry funds are cut short and the possibility of lay-offs and additional budget cuts is on the horizon. Please pray for repentance by those who are disobeying God in their giving …
Now, before the Mars Hill critics fire up their typing fingers to snark, we also did want to note there is a sad West Seattle-related item in the same long Mars Hill blog entry: Jeanne Clem, wife of Bill Clem, the pastor who led Doxa in the building that became MH-West Seattle, is described as “slipping away” in her battle with cancer. (She is interviewed starting about 3 minutes into this recent Mars Hill video clip we found on YouTube.) TUESDAY MORNING ADDENDUM: Thanks to Adam on Alki, who points out in the comments below that Mars Hill has gone back and edited out the “disobeying God in their giving” line. We briefly cursed ourselves for not getting a screen grab, then remembered the miracle of Google caching, where it had already been captured. So just in case you didn’t believe us (full cached version here):
Sorry for the downtime
Our hosting company had an outage this morning that, judging by our logs, rendered WSB inaccessible for about an hour and a half. Please forgive us. It’s normal for any website to have the occasional flutters but if we ever intentionally plan on something long like that, we will forewarn you; thanks to the people who e-mailed to be sure we knew WSB was out of commission. Now, on with the day; sounds like other areas got some snow but so far we’ve been spared – here’s the newest forecast. 1:36 PM ADDENDUM: The hosting company says there may be intermittent problems for a while. So if you wander by and see the Internet equivalent of this … know we’ll be back soon (here’s hoping).
TGIF and other reasons for thankfulness
We’re starting the day in a thankful mood — so first we want to post a public thank-you of our own. WSB may not look any different than it did a week ago, but it is running a lot more smoothly “under the hood,” thanks to a whole lot of time, energy, creativity, and sheer determination expended by STUART MAXWELL. We’ve known for months WSB simply had to move to a new “host” server because the old one was on the brink of doing what it did back in June, and worse — publishing a simple update or change took extra time just to wait for the server to deal with it (or not) — but because we needed to make the move without losing any of the thousands of posts, comments, and photos published on WSB in the past two years, and for some other reasons Stuart discovered along the way, it was way too complicated for us to handle (despite some bleary all-nighters during which we tried). We asked technically oriented crosstown friends for advice on a tech adviser — and the inquiries blazed a trail straight back to West Seattle (of course!), and, in fact, to someone who happened to have a site linked from our Other Blogs page (one of Stuart’s many projects is The New Big). So again, HUGE thanks to Stuart – his tireless, creative, good-natured, patient work has saved the site and our sanity, and is paving the way for more improvements. … Also on the thankfulness front – an unusual tale landed in the WSB inbox – someone who pulled off a last-minute wedding with a lot of West Seattle help:Read More
New WSB page, new WSB sponsor
This morning, we launched a new WSB page to help you enjoy the holiday season — our Holidays page (it has its own tab in the navigation under the header throughout the site, or you can bookmark it here). Right now, it features West Seattle holiday events through New Year’s, plus our ongoing West Seattle Christmas lights map and a link to our West Seattle Christmas tree price check; at the top of the page each day, you will also see highlighted holiday events for that day/night. 
This page is presented by a brand-new WSB sponsor, West Seattle Christian Church (on the north side of The Junction, at the SE corner of 42nd/Genesee). West Seattle Christian Church is a growing church offering a lot more than worship services — it also is parent to the Ginomai artists’ studio facility right across the street at the SW corner of 42nd/Genesee — which among other things is a must-visit stop during the monthly West Seattle Art Walk; the next one is coming up Thursday 12/13 — we stopped at Ginomai during last month’s Art Walk and met several artists, then browsed the merchandise others were selling in the Ginomai community room. In addition, WSCC is home to West Seattle Christian Preschool, which is currently enrolling (find out more here). We thank WSCC for supporting WSB, along with our other sponsors, who are listed on this page along with info on how prospective advertisers can join them. (And if you have suggestions for additional features to add to the Holidays page, please let us know – we’ll be tweaking it at least once daily as the season rolls on!)
Comments closed for a while
As mentioned below, we have a little upgrading to do – so till we tell you it’s done, comments are temporarily closed – anything you try to post in the meantime may get lost in the techno-ether. Stand by for an update later tonight, and thank you; if anything urgent comes up, you can of course reach us via e-mail.
WSB tech alert: Good news and bad news
The bad news — starting around 5 pm tonight, we have to close WSB to new comments for a few hours, to facilitate some tech-upgrade work. The good news — if all goes well (cross your fingers), that work should take care of problems that have caused the site to load slowly for some people at some times, including us (meaning that sometimes it takes us a lot longer to publish something than it should), and it also should pave the way for more new features in the works, so that WSB can better serve you. But comment away for now … we’ll let you know when the PEOPLE AT WORK sign has to go up; just wanted to give you advance warning.
Followup on a past RRR
When we post your Reader Recommendation Requests, we don’t always hear how things worked out — with so many people in the WSB community willing to take time to answer RRRs with their suggestions and experiences, we are confident that connections are made. But this morning, Francine posted an update to her RRR from 2 weeks ago, and we thought you would want to know, so we are highlighting it here on the main page:
Thanks to one of the recommendations from a WSB reader, I hired two incredibly compassionate and helpful caregivers from an agency called Family Resource Center. But I have a sad update. My dear, sweet, courageous husband Mike lost his battle to brain cancer on Wednesday 11/28/07. It all happened so fast. He died peacefully at home surrounded by his family, friends and our devoted kitty, Adam (who never left his bed). Thanks to all for the recommendations and kind offers. I now know of two other people in West Seattle with brain tumors. We must work to find a cure for this horribly devastating disease. (see abta.org) Thanks again.
Our condolences to Francine … both of us lost parents to cancer, so we’ve “been there.” We hope she will let us all know if there is anything more we can do.
WSB sponsor welcome: Square 1 Books
This morning, we welcome another new WSB sponsor – Square 1 Books, which is the place in West Seattle 
to buy new books from an independent bookseller. Square 1 is in Jefferson Square, steps from the rest of The Junction, and part of the heart of the West Seattle community — this weekend, as we mentioned yesterday, Square 1 is offering the chance to buy new children’s books at 15% off and have them given to local families through WestSide Baby. This past September, Square 1 sponsored an event for West Seattle readers to meet West Seattle authors, “Words from the West Side,” held at ArtsWest. And it’s got its own book club – you can keep up with its happenings via the Square 1 blog. Thanks to Square 1 and our other sponsors, who are listed on this page along with information on how other prospective advertisers can join them.
Today we welcome West Seattle Realtor 
Joining the WSB sponsor lineup this morning:
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