At long last, the Blogthing has made the jump from Wordpress to the mothership! Huzzah! Update your bookmarks!

The move lets us do all kinds of things we've been a-achin' to do. And with that, allow me to introduce the newest member of the staff: NCJ Robot, the cybernetic blogger (right)! The robot -- who, incidentally, wishes some clever reader would come along and give him a more interesting name -- has a plateful of tasks, as you can see below. He watches a list of local blogs and informs us when they are updated. He peeks in on Sacramento to see what Sen. Pat Wiggins and Assm. Wes Chesbro have been up to. Every morning, while we all sleep, he condenses and clarifies the Times-Standard homepage to allow for pain-free browsing. And already he's asking for more!

The idea, if I can come down to Earth for a moment, is to automate and publish the old-school newspaper tip sheet. The Internet is full of story ideas; we can set the robot to bring them on home to us (and to you) on a every-five-minutely basis. We can scour them over together. Much more of this is coming soon. And, of course, there'll still be regular posts by the human members of the staff -- more regular than ever, we hope.

The launch of the new Blogthing has been hurried along, and, actually, is somewhat premature. It probably looks like hell in most versions of Internet Explorer. The design is skeletal. The calendar navigation box, halfway down the right-hand bar, is a big joke. To Hell with it, though -- we'll fix it as we go along. In the meantime, please file your bug reports and feature requests below.