Letter From The Editor: Forward

It's now official. Food Safety News has celebrated its third birthday and officially moved into its fourth year of publication. When we began this venture back in 2009, we thought it might be a good idea to keep a communications channel open to our dear readers. We knew there were at least a couple of them out there. That's why we came up with this weekly "Letter from the Editor." And while there has been an occasional technical issue we needed to address or our desire to douse the occasional flame war among our readers commenting on stories,  your humble editor has had little to do but to share his experiences and opinions with you. Today, however, I must return to our original purpose and talk shop. As we've grown from a handful to millions of readers around the globe, we've been running up against some growth limits. I do not wish to bore everyone with too many of the technical details, but we've outgrown our publishing platform. We've been using something called Moveable Type.  It was working fine until, a few months back, the timing system became unreliable. That meant we had to do everything with the equivalent of a hand crank. Each time new words and pictures showed up on the site someone was doing it manually. It was all just a sign of how much content we were piling up. We asked our techies if they could get the MT machine to work right again, and like Scotty on Star Trek, they basically came back and said if they pushed it any harder the whole thing would blow.  It actually might not have been that dramatic, but that's the way I shall remember it. Our move to another publishing platform called Wordpress, said to have more bells and whistles and the capacity to handle this big boy.  Since Sept. 11, we been using both MT and WP. It's a little bit like rolling two logs at once, something that takes a lot of fancy footwork. We expect this week we've pull the switch and go live on WP.  What does this mean for you, the loyal reader?  We hope there won't be anything you will notice.   You can help us, however, in a couple of ways: 1) There may be a few glitches in the first couple of weeks. We'll try to address them as quickly as possible.  Readers should feel free to point them out.  My email is dflynn@foodsafetynews.com 2) The Food Safety News  iPhone app will be updated along with the Website.  Anyone experiencing issues after the site is moved to the new platform should download the most current version of the app from iTunes. We have not exactly picked a slow moment to make this change, so we are all hoping it goes quickly and smoothly.  We want to get 100 percent of our focus back on just practicing quality journalism and being served by a publishing platform that can keep up with us. © Food Safety News More Headlines from Opinion & Contributed Articles »