The New Year.

Listeners of the World,

It has been some time since my last post for the holiday season is getting the better of the OurTown Team with constant work! We have just decided on a design team (Minimaal) to tackle the redesign of our site and bring it into the Web 2.o world. Minimaal IT is a company out of the UK with great design and UI skills that will properly showcase our new site with the new features. They will start working on different ideas after the new year and will have something up by the spring of next year. Our programming team is also making great progress showing that they are on track and on time to be able to launch the new site in the spring of 2010. As for marketing team and I we have been hard at work recruiting the "right" local editors to make this site a success. We have also been working hard on taking on the social media arena and making a competitive contest schedule for the new year. We hope that all of this change will spark a new interest in hyper-local news for it is great need to many people across the United States.

Your OurTown SuperHero,

Chris

Happy Holidays!

Listeners of the World,

We wanted to thank all of you for reading and for supporting OurTown.com this year as we went through a re-organization. We have worked really hard to set up the next phase of OurTown and we are certain that it will impress everyone. So for now we just want to wish everyone a happy holiday from the OurTown family!

Your OurTown SuperHero,

Chris

.NET

Listeners of the World,

Let me take a moment to go more in depth on how .NET is going to improve the Ourtown experience. First, .NET is going to speed up the Ourtown website. All the pages created are compiled unlike classic ASP, therefore they are able to run faster on the server. This also gives us the ability to trap more bugs during the development of Ourtown 3.0 so that we have a more stable environment. Next, .NET gives us the ability to seperate the business logic of the site from the interface which allows us to more easily "skin" the site. For the future this allows us to more easily update the look and feel of the site without needing to do a major overhaul. Finally, having the site written in a much newer and up to date language than Classic ASP allows us to implement better measures for security.

Overall, .NET gives us better speed, stability, flexibility, and security.

Your tech wizard,
Michael

Whats Coming...................................Continued!

Listeners of the World,

Today I am here to tell you about another feature that we will be unleashing with the new OurTown update, which will help all local editors. This feature is the new ad-bot/ad-network that will be put into place to help local editors make more money off advertising. We have focused a lot of time and effort into this because this is what makes OurTown worth it compared to other hyper-local news sites. On most sites you can post your stories, photos, comments, and events just like on OurTown.com, but with OurTown you can make money while doing what you love. We have upgraded this to be more user friendly and to be a self severing ad system as well. Now local editors will get much needed help from our new "corporate portal" which will help sell ads for local editor sites without the local editor doing anything! Without giving too much away all I have to say is that this will be an ad network/portal that no one has ever seen before!

Your OurTown SuperHero,

Chris

Check us out on Facebook!

Listeners of the World,

OurTown is now connected through Twitter, Facebook, blog spot, and soon to be with Digg and Linkedin. We are trying to connect our site with all social media to keep the freshest news and updates flowing to the people who need to hear about it. This will be a big part of our new site where you will be able to sign in and upload pictures from Facebook while updating your tweets from twitter at the same time. We believe this will make it the one stop shop with news, friends, and stories. If you enjoy this blog we invite to become out friend on Facebook to keep up with even more happenings from OurTown.com.

Your OurTown SuperHero,

Chris