Keeping Our Heads Above Water

Whew, what a first two months it has been! Lots of stuff happening, lots of things changing, plenty going on behind the scenes here at the site. I’d like to start by apologizing to our visitors—we are behind on a number of things and we are doing our best to get caught up.

We are still maintaining our “update at least every three days” policy we’ve had for some time now, and I do think we’ve had some great coverage of some of this winter’s events thus far. But some things aren’t getting as much attention as they deserve, and we are working to get caught up.

Here’s an update on some of the items folks are waiting to see here on the site:

- 2007 Picture of the Year / Picture of the Week – We will have a 2007 POY and we should be announcing the winner soon. We have been regularly behind with the Picture of the Week contest in announcing winners for the last few months and honestly, I believe the site is starting to outgrow this feature. Time constraints are making it difficult to give the contest the attention it deserves and so we are looking at phasing it out. I am looking into a new Fan Forum server that would allow everyone to share their photos as part of our little community, if the price is right, we’ll try to add that feature as a replacement.

- 2007 Industry Awards – The awards are decided, the trophies have been handed out and the feature article is very near completion. The intention was to initially run it on New Year’s Day, which became the end of January, and it has still yet to run. We just need to sit down and wrap it up, and it will be out.

- The Insider Blog – Since launching this new feature, a lot has come up and we have yet to be able to update it. So we’re making up for it today by posting all of the updates we had planned for it over the past week. We’ll keep up with it better going forward, and hopefully everyone will enjoy this new feature. Kyle Doyle’s “Exhaust Fumes” feature article is also being converted to a blog, so that he will be able update it as often as he likes as well.

Our web design service has gained two new clients, and both have new sites online for your viewing pleasure:

http://www.straightupracing.com/ – Bill Payne’s new site is up and running, and we are gradually adding more and more to it, keep checking back as the site construction is completed.
http://www.extremeteam4x4.com/ – The new home for Mac and Liz Plecker’s Extreme Team, including the HPI-Savage monster ride truck and the Ballistic race truck. A small temp site is online and we are working on completing the final version of the site, keep watching for that.

One of our very first clients also has a newly re-designed site up, check out our good friends at http://www.wgasmotorsports.com/ to see the new setup.

As if all that wasn’t enough to keep us busy, our first edition of the MTRA Newsletter will be out next week, keep watching over at http://www.mtra.us/ to see that.

The St. Louis Monster Jam event marked the final outing for my trusty Nikon D50 after two years of service. It decided to start acting up about halfway through freestyle, so thankfully Kyle Doyle was there to provide the photo gallery for the site. We’ve got a loaner for use in the interim while the old warhorse is in the shop and we’ll be upgrading to a sparkling new D300 shortly. That camera was an important step forward for the site as it allowed us to bring our coverage to a higher level. Hopefully this next upgrade will do the same!

We’re also working on another project or two that everyone should like, and in the meantime, we’re still keeping up with all the latest news in the industry and covering every event we can. Stay tuned folks, we’ll get caught up on everything!