Welcome!… Again!… to Slowtwitch.com.

We’ve launched ourselves… again. Those who’ve followed our little portal over the 8 years of our existence know our construction has kicked up much debris these past few months.

Our first step was to – how can I write this in the least crude terms – properly monetize our reader forum. Monetize is this business generation’s shorthand for, “we found a way to stick more ads on our page.” This action was not entirely self-serving. Steps two, three, four and five required cash, and we revved up our forum to generate it.

What occurred yesterday was step-two, and that was to take our old, depression-era hard-coded site and bring it forward with current technology. We built a new architecture from scratch, and you’re reading the result.

Step three is to populate the new site with all our old – but still frequently referenced – archives, and that’s basically a lot factory work. We’re in the beginning steps of that, and don’t intend to be finished until year’s end.

Step four was to endeavor to become one-stop shopping for our readers, giving them a place to reliably find current news and features. We’ve taken a big leap in that direction through a significant hire I’ll write about just below.

Step five I’m not ready to reveal yet. I’ll simply say that there are “community” related utilities and functions that I think are pretty exciting and also probably not seen anywhere on the web. If what I hope works in fact works, it’ll be evident by next Spring.

The most exciting part of this process was not the functionality we deployed, but who we deployed. As was the case when I was busy building Quintana Roo, the best thing that happened to me was the group of quality people around which I was surrounded. That’s happening here at Slowtwitch as well.

The most obvious example of this can be seen in all of our technical elements, largely the work of Jordan Rapp (Rappstar on our Forum). He’s as expert behind his computer as he is atop his bike. He’s our Digital Janitor, sprucing the place up and making it proper. He’s also our Digital Wizard, making miracles out of 1s and 0s.

Herbert Krabel (pic adjacent) is our News Editor. We again hit it out of the park when we got Herbert, ex of American Bicycle Group. He will continue serving his private clients at Guerrilla Communications as he serves you up the day’s news.

We have also contracted, and are continuing to form relationships, with new photographers, illustrators, developers, and writers. You’ll see some new faces here over the next couple of months.

You’ll also see a lot of dust over the Fall and Winter as we continue our construction. We apologize in advance. You’ll see a lot of article abstracts showing up on our front page that you’ve seen before. It’s a function of automation. As we migrate an archived article from the “old” site to the “new” our front page will carry the abstract.

You’ll also see new functionality appear from time to time as we make live utilities and helps that we’ve got planned but have not yet launched.

I thank you for your loyalty to us, and I hope we can continue to improve the service we provide to the greater multisport community.

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