Give it a test drive – the city’s just taken the wraps off on My.Seattle.Gov, a customizable way to access everything they’ve put online. Click ahead for the official announcement:Read More

In case you aren’t on Facebook or Twitter, where we have been talking about this for going on four hours now: Our server-management company WiredTree, historically wonderfully reliable for the years we’ve used them, has been dealing with a “denial of service attack” that took down many of the sites who run on its servers. For at least an hour, that meant no one could get into our site; then at some point, we noticed some people were starting to get in, and finally figured out that access had been restored for everyone but Comcast users. We switched immediately to our Qwest access and got right in. Not sure why that happened – the folks at WiredTree have been working frantically to figure out how to get around the attack; perhaps they had to block Comcast. Checking the logs again, it appears Comcast users ARE now starting to get through, so hopefully this means everyone’s access is restored.

Though we had no direct technical control over this, we of course apologize – as a 24/7/365 news service, we are committed to absolute reliability, and have taken many other steps toward achieving that, but this is a new one, so we’re exploring how to set up redundancy that would kick in immediately if anything like this (or another server problem) happened again. Thanks for your patience and support! We’ve got a few more stories in the hopper that had been waiting for things to normalize, so back to the news …

Will the Young Evils play that tonight during their gig at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard? Maybe not, considering it’s being hailed as a potential West Seattle anthem. Seattle Weekly commissioned it to celebrate the issue that’s currently on the stands. We’re mentioning it tonight just in case you haven’t seen it yet, online or offline: It’s their one-week conversion to West Seattle Weekly, perhaps not coincidentally, shortly after West Seattleite Mike Seely was promoted to editor-in-chief. In an espresso-steam-filled room a few weeks before publishing the special edition, Seely sat down with your WSB co-publishers and asked if we’d help with one section – the section that resembles our main focus, top news stories – since the Weekly usually pulls that section’s content from stories covered by its Daily Weekly online operation, and needed the top West Seattle stories of the week instead. Here’s the link to the one story featured online, regarding the Steve Bushaw murder-case trial; if you have the print version, our West Seattle news roundup starts on page 9, and includes three additional stories, including the Charlestown/47th crash and power outage, the police/dogs shooting incident on 44th, and the West Seattle Chamber of Commerce‘s annual meeting. If you have some time to sit down and read this weekend, many great Weekly staff-reported stories too, including a closer look at the photo history book the Southwest Seattle Historical Society has just co-published, a review of West Seattle’s political clout, and a chat with the founder of Morgan Junction’s rockin’ Feedback Lounge (WSB sponsor), Jeff Gilbert, and editor Seely’s scene-setter.

(Photo by Cathy Jaramillo)
That photo of the stairs to Solstice Park (site of tomorrow night’s winter-solstice-sunset watch) is courtesy of Jake and Cathy Jaramillo, who e-mailed to share the news that their Seattle Stairway Walks website just got a mention in Sunset Magazine. Though Jake and Cathy live on Genesee Hill, they have been writing about and photographing stairways all around the city (here are the West Seattle-specific entries), “discovering and exploring the neighborhoods of Seattle through its often-hidden, always-picturesque stairways.” Though the story’s not online (so far), Jake says their mention is “at the bottom of page 36 as part of a Sunset story on L.A. stairways.”

SIDE NOTE: If this story reminded you of a tale told here earlier this year – Bob Estep and his mission to map West Seattle’s staircases – this is the perfect opportunity for us to mention that WSB contributor Keri DeTore turned more than 30 of his entries into a clickable Google Map (with number of stairs per staircase) – you can see it here.

If you haven’t been to the WSB Forums (open round-the-clock for WSB’er-to-WSB’er discussion, 100,000+ posts in less than 3 years) lately, a couple things to point out this afternoon: First, member DP suggests night two of White Center’s Dia de los Muertos celebration as a creative activity for tonight, 5-8 pm (maybe to “kill” time waiting for that big round of election returns?) He went to night one and has posted a report with photos and info. Second, the Forums get a few lost/found posts (aside from pets, which have their own page) each week, but this one is unusual – a mom who left a stroller outside a Junction eatery the other night came back out to find it gone, with a similar one left in its place, and is hoping to get hers back (read more here).

One month ago, we shared the news that we – and you – were in the final running for a national Online Journalism Award. Tonight, your editor here is at the awards banquet in Washington, D.C., the final event in the Online News Association‘s annual conference – and we won! We’ve just had the thrill of accepting that award on behalf of not just the WSB team but all of West Seattle. (Tough competition – the other three finalists were projects by CNN, CBC, and the LA Times.) Too dark in here to add a photo of the trophy yet but we will later. Trophy at right. Most importantly, THANK YOU for your collaboration in sharing West Seattle news, information, and discussion 24/7 … collaboration that has drawn national attention and now, formal recognition of its extraordinary nature. We are honored to be working with you and for you, 24/7.

9:18 PM: The archived video of the awards banquet is online now – if you’re interested in the WSB announcement and acceptance, it’s about 22:30 in.

ORIGINAL 10:33 AM REPORT: The mayor and city tech boss Bill Schrier (a West Seattleite) have just started a briefing on the new look of seattle.gov – you can watch live above. Notes as we go. Key points: This is the result of a usability study; it streamlines “the interface to five portals instead of nine.” The search feature is stronger, Schrier explains. Also, the right-side links to elected officials, on the home page’s right side, will include their Facebook and Twitter links. There’s a dropdown toward the middle of the page to get you to the relatively new “My Neighborhood” maps, which include layers for 911 calls (not all “live” – there’s a few hours’ lag for police reports) and police reports.

(10:44 am) The mayor is noting that the new look does NOT run throughout all seattle.gov pages yet. Schrier says Knowledge As Power is the firm that has conducted a usability study that helped pave the way for some of the changes they made. He also notes there are 100,000 pages on the city website at the moment so “it will take a long time for us to circulate through (all the pages) to upgrade its look and feel.” The mayor says ask.seattle.gov will be launched in the future for people to post questions – and he says his office will monitor and forward questions to appropriate departments. He says he intends the web to be used more for engagement than to just “push information out to people.”

(10:49 am) Questions/answers now. We asked about personalization. Not yet, but my.seattle.gov is still in the works. Another question: Mobile “light” version of the site? Answer: Not yet. Question: Cost of this redesign? Answer: Less than $5,000 in outside resources (Knowledge As Power says their usability study cost the city less than $1K – their report’s been published online, reps from KAP just said).

(11:01 am) The mayoral media availability has now moved on to other Q/A which so far have included Fire Department staffing, the Viaduct questionnaire to be discussed by WSDOT this afternoon, and two City Council bills the mayor opposed.

(11:28 am) The briefing’s now completely concluded. When the video we streamed live earlier is available in archive, we’ll bring back the link. In the meantime, we had a few post-briefing chats: One reason the redesign didn’t include mobile is the cost, Schrier says – they’d made a budget request but it would have been more than $150,000.

Everyone who’s part of WSB – as a reader, commenter, tipster, writer, photo-sharer, Forums member, sponsor, events-calendar-item-sender, ANYTHING – is a finalist for a national award! Before today’s river of news sweeps us away, we wanted to share the details: WSB is a finalist for the Online News Association‘s “Community Collaboration” award. This is only the second year the national group of online journalists will be presenting this, as part of the annual national awards (full nominees list here); the first one last year went to our friends across the bay at My Ballard, so, inspired by their achievement, this year we decided to enter the competition on behalf of you and everybody else in the 27,000 local homes, businesses, and institutions who are part of this great news-covering/news-sharing/news-discussing adventure every week. Tough competition – the other finalists are projects of CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and north-of-the-border CBC – but we’ll find out who wins at the Online News Association’s convention in D.C. on October 30th. WSB isn’t the only Seattle finalist this year – our partners at the Seattle Times are also up for Breaking News, Large Site, for their Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Lakewood Police murders last fall. Anyway, we wanted to let you know, and once again, to say: THANK YOU. Your collaboration in turn helps inform thousands of your neighbors – often a story begins with just one tip, question, photo, e-mail, or a call to 206-293-6302, which is answered 24/7 – we may not always do your contributions justice, but we continue to try our best each day. Now back to the news!

Now that the news seems to have slowed down a bit, on the final day of this holiday weekend, we are writing this note to thank you, and to let you know about two WSB milestones.

Thank you for continuing to be part of WSB – whether you “just read,” or have contributed anything from a comment to a news tip to a photo (or more – e-mail with questions, for example, often leads to the best followup stories!). The number of people who are part of WSB keeps growing – 27,000 homes/businesses currently visit the site at least once a week (more than a third of them, at least once daily) – and as a result, a longstanding WSB record just got broken. The monthly-pageview record had stood since the who-can-forget “Snowpocalypse“ month of December 2008. So many people were here that month, getting and giving information about roads, buses, snowfall, and more, that WSB pages were read 829,588 times in December 2008. (Photo above was courtesy Sage K, from our 12/20/08 coverage.)

While continued growth brought us close this year, the record stood until last month – the August 2010 traffic for WSB (per Google Analytics, the industry standard) was 834,935 pageviews. We had long since eclipsed other numbers from December ’08, such as visits and visitors, but pageviews are a point of pride; since the “blog” format has few “jumps” – unlike newspaper or TV websites, which usually require you to click to another page to get the full story – pageviews are more difficult to stack up.

Part of the August record is because of August 17th, the day of what some dubbed “Obooma!” – the startling sonic booms from jet fighters scrambled out of Oregon when a floatplane violated airspace restrictions during President Obama‘s brief Seattle visit. (Photo at left, as Air Force One departed Boeing Field, courtesy of David DeSiga)

A moment after the booms rocked WSB HQ, we published one line – headlined “Yes, we heard it too,” to let people know we were checking to find out what it was – and that was our last website update for 10+ minutes. So many people came to WSB to seek information, it briefly crashed our previously-beefed-up server; thanks to our server-management firm WiredTree for boosting capacity immediately (and permanently, now that we know what might happen in case of a sudden big event), while we continued updating Twitter and Facebook (which we would have done anyway – we do breaking news on all three major “channels”).

But there were other big days and events. The sonic-boom report wasn’t even August’s most popular (shared/linked) WSB story – here’s what was: The hot new band Fistful of Mercy performing at Easy Street on August 26th. We didn’t realize how big it was till we started getting word from people at the show that the crowd was spilling out into the street (as shown in Christopher Boffoli‘s photo). After that, and the sonic booms, the third biggest story of the month was the “musical protest” video shot inside West Seattle’s Target store and publicized nationwide – thanks to a note from WSB’er Amy, we got, and shared, word of the “local angle” before most of the rest of the region.

Second milestone: Since we’ve been running WSB as a 24/7, multiple-channel news service for three years (our unofficial anniversary was August 28th, the date in 2007 of our first and only “Pledge Day” to raise $ to formalize this as a business) – we haven’t really taken time off, out of 24/7 broadband range. Not that we’ve particularly wanted to, really – we are privileged to be able to make a living doing this, and we chose to do it full time. But people often seem to have a note of concern in their voice when they ask, “Don’t you ever take a vacation?” Well, guess what – we did. Your co-publishers here were out of town for a week recently. We weren’t completely unplugged from WSB, but unplugged enough to relax a bit, and that’s only thanks to some INCREDIBLE people who covered the news 24/7 in our absence:

First and foremost, we want to thank Christopher Boffoli, who has worked with WSB for three years – originally as a volunteer (till we started paying professional contributors in 2008). Christopher is a vital part of Team WSB, a talented photojournalist, thorough writer, and so quick to spot breaking news, he’s often on the scene before we’ve heard about it back here at HQ. While we were away, in addition to stories ranging from a car fire to a concert to the Southwest District Council, Christopher handled the 24/7 news-tips-and-business-calls line, which rings a LOT (thanks to everyone who calls – we really do answer round the clock!).

We also want to thank Jason Grotelueschen, a relatively new contributor to Team WSB, but an experienced online editor/writer who handled “the desk” most days we were gone – including a very busy mailbox – as well as some in-person coverage. And big thanks also go to Katie Meyer, who kept watch on the scanners, to ensure that our vacation didn’t affect fulfillment of the WSB commitment to timely, accurate coverage of breaking news, around the clock; Katie also went downtown to check on some big court cases too. Important stories in West Seattle also were covered while we were on the road by Keri DeTore, Edgar Riebe, and Cliff DesPeaux, and for our White Center site White Center Now, contributor Deanie Schwarz reported on the week’s biggest WC events.

This was a milestone for more than the fact your co-publishers took a bit of a breather before what could be another intense fall/winter: It meant this has grown beyond something that critics insisted was teetering precariously on the shoulders of two overworked people. WSB is a news service – a growing, sustainable business, dedicated to serving the community, in partnership with the community as well as with professional contributors. We were deeply honored to have those attributes recognized and celebrated within the community, when the West Seattle Chamber of Commerce named WSB “Business of the Year” this past spring, and when American Legion Post 160 presented WSB with the West Seattle Grand Parade‘s Orville Rummel Trophy for Outstanding Service to the Community. We want to hear from you about how WSB can better serve you and all of West Seattle – and you’ll hear soon about a new way we will be inviting that feedback, beyond all the ways you can reach us 24/7/365.

P.S. Another milestone is imminent for participants in the WSB Forums – sometime this week, the number of posts in the Forums, which became part of WSB in December 2007, will surpass 100,000. This is a standalone area of WSB where people interact directly with each other and launch their own topics beyond home-page news stories; it has grown from its original mission, meant first to be a place for recommendations like “where’s the best Thai restaurant?” or “who sharpens knives?”, to add free listings for jobs, as well as yard sales and freebies, as well as conversations about politics, schools, and more.

Again, thank you for being part of WSB, and part of the incredible community we are thrilled to call home: West Seattle.

-Tracy Record and Patrick Sand, WSB co-publishers

Though the City of Seattle’s nationally renowned Chief Technology Officer Bill Schrier is a West Seattleite, it seems WS is not yet well-represented in an independent study to help the city website get better! So says a note we just received, asking if we’d share the request for help – and yes, there’s something in it for you besides the warm fuzzy feeling that maybe you helped guide a vital online resource into its future. They’re running a usability study and need help ASAP – click ahead for the pitch!Read More

In case you don’t regularly check the WSB Forums – which are close to the 100,000-post mark after 2 1/2 years in existence – we like to mention what’s going on in there from time to time – they’ve been particularly busy lately, and you’re welcome to join the discussion OR start one of your own. Today, for example, the Target political-donation controversy has sparked talk of a boycott, and longtime WSB Forums member JoB declared she would deliver her boycott notice to Westwood Village Target today. Also, you are also welcome to publish yard/garage-sale notices for free in the Freebies/Deals/Sales section, and a quick check reveals more than a few in the works for this weekend. Lots more going on – like the rest of WSB, the Forums are in business 24/7/365 – start here.

(Photo via Facebook, used by permission – thanks, Carrie Ann!)
That’s the “thank you” sign on the back of the electric car we drove in Saturday’s West Seattle Grand Parade, in case you missed it. We do try to say thanks as often as we can, on the site, in e-mail, etc., because this is truly a collaboration. And one that continues to grow – which is part of the reason why WSB has gotten a few cool mentions lately … We hadn’t written about them here on the news page because, as we were telling one of the people who kindly wrote with congratulations, “WSB isn’t about us, it’s about West Seattle.” They e-mailed back, “Yes, but you’re part of WS too” and suggested we share the good news. So here we are. Most recently, if you read TIME Magazine, there’s a story about online neighborhood news, featuring WSB, on page 49 of the current (8/2/10) issue:

(Photo via Facebook, used by permission – thanks, Erik!)
You can read it online here. (Note a couple corrections: Our association with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies is as an advisor, not a teacher, and – you know this if you’re a longtime WSB’er – we didn’t have “years of donation drives” – only one, a “Pledge Day” three years ago). Meantime, the folks at Seattle Woman Magazine also included your editor here in the current issue’s cover story “Masters of Social Media,” along with West Seattleite Shauna Causey, Biznik’s Lara Feltin, and Monica Guzman of Intersect (formerly of seattlepi.com). That story is online here; the paper version, which is free, is available in boxes and offices all over the place. One other recent honor – two awards at the Seattle Weekly‘s first-ever “Best of the Web.” (Although the coolest awards we’ve been honored to receive remain the West Seattle Grand Parade Orville Rummel Trophy from the American Legion Post 160 parade team, and West Seattle Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year.) We have to stress, none of this is because we’re doing anything fancy or amazing. Somehow you have come to trust that this is a place to get, and share, news, and we try our best to mediate, facilitate, research, report, respond, process, whatever it takes to help get the word out. We hope to keep finding ways to do an even better job of that, with your continued collaboration. Thanks again. (Here’s how to reach WSB, any time, 24/7/365.)