The North Coast Journal reaches a milestone today. After months -- years -- of heartbreak, we are pleased to launch a new version of our website. The old site served us faithfully for just about 10 years, I believe, and it was long past time to let the old trooper enjoy its dotage.

Beneath its attractive chassis, the new northcoastjournal.com packs some serious horsepower under the hood. There's the full text of just about everything in the paper (everything coming soon). There's a customizable and searchable version of our calendar of events, which you can use to find out what's going on now or far into the future. There's a database of clubs, restaurants and local bands to keep you hip. There's an online classifieds system – Craigslist killer!, he said, derangedly -- that also makes it easy to put your ad into the paper. Nigerian puppy scammers not welcome.

Readers can comment on all articles or blog posts with an account. There's a quick and painless registration feature that should provide some level of comfort for the tinfoil hat anonymite crowd. When we first got this going, registration seemed to be the only way to avoid the ugly, frenetic, insane -- and, above all, boring and life-sapping -- troll-infested swamp that had overtaken every online forum in Humbolt County to that date. Nowadays we see that there's other ways to control this. Maybe we'll free things up in the future.

There's a few kinks in the system. For one, the North Coast Journal Blogthing is going to hang at Wordpress for hopefully just a week or so more whilst we swap in a more robust blogging engine. Expect to see some cross-posting at the new site. For another, the calendar of events -- what we hope will be one key cornerstone of the whole deal -- is still lagging a bit behind the newspaper. That will change. Also, we're going to be developing some new applications that will make planning your days and nights even more quick and fun. Also, the fact that our new platform is fairly easy to extend means that we're going to be bringing you some cool new news tools as well. Stay tuned.

Any bugs? File them here and they will be rapidly triaged according to their level of complexity and/or importance.

Many thanks and congratulations to the Journal's Holly Harvey, who ran point on this project from our side. Thanks also to the talented young Manxers at Tangerine Smash, who brought it all home with aplomb. Eureka's Carson Park Design provided key input early on and lent a hand throughout.

Colophon: Northcoastjournal.com runs on Django, the hot framework for cool web developers (especially those in the newspaper world). Accept no substitutes. The site uses JQuery, Tablesorter, Lightbox and Google Maps. It is hosted at Morse Media (+3) on a Red Hat server (-1).