Welcome to our new site! I was adding yet another story to the database a few weeks ago when I noticed that I had passed the 5,000 story threshold. Its an arbitrary milestone but its been a while since I’ve taken time to reflect on what I’m trying to do here or celebrate what I’ve accomplished. I started this project back in the Fall of 2000 as a way of practicing my web development skills by creating a research tool. I developed this site from scratch, creating my own blog platform that allowed me to relate stories across categories, keywords, and frameworks (kind of a crude version of the 'tags' concept).

Since then, I’ve only made minor improvements to this site (adding RSS, an email-list newsletter, upgrading search, fighting off the hordes of comment spammers) but have largely neglected it. I devoted my energies to other projects (ex. the open debate engine) and finishing my Masters degree. I continued to blog stories I found interesting, mostly out of habit but have managed to keep the site relatively up to date even while travelling overseas.

For the new site, I converted the entire database and site over to the Drupal platform. This made it very easy to import the content from the old custom system and retain the same keywords and categories taxonomies. Drupal's powerful taxonomy tools also make it easier to clean up or merge outdated keywords and add custom images to each new term, a task I intent to waste countless hours on ;)

I have many more plans for this site, including taking advantage of Drupal's powerful bibliography and citation tools to build out more sophisticated research tools and libraries. I'm opening up the comment and interactivity features again and will be working on building up community discussion around the issues cataloged on the site. Finally, I'm looking to start posting more of my original research in progress here on this blog, fully taking advantage of the research database I've built up to explore these concepts in depth. 

Let me know what you think and thanks as always for your interest!