Submit your stories, photos, announcements, letters, and more to: [email protected]

I’m sure it came as a surprise when the Italy Neotribune suddenly changed on September 6. One person wrote that they were worried we were bought out or taken over. Of course that hasn’t happened. It’s just a long over due change. When we started the Neotribune six years ago, we wanted it to be an online newspaper for the community. Over 4000 stories and nearly 25,000 photographs later, we’ve built something powerful and useful. But not the software it runs on.

Honestly, I’m surprised it still works. The program has more holes in it than a colander. The server is eight years old. We can’t make any changes or improvements without breaking the system entirely. And loading stories is a time consuming, laborious process. It’s losing stability and has gone down six times in recent memory. I don’t know how much longer it will last.

For years we searched the Internet for a content management system that will do what we needed. The highest priority is the ability to upload lots of photographs and automatically pair them with a story. We never found a program that would do it. Oh sure, there are some that will take one or two photographs per story. We wanted a dozen or more.

So we wrote the program ourselves.

A solid base

You are looking at the first version. What you can’t see is the massive time saved in loading stories. What used to take hours and a lot of steps is now a few steps and only minutes. We can load more stories, faster than ever before.

This is only the first step. There are a lot of features missing: commenting directly to stories, story submissions, a calendar, search.

With this new program we have a solid base to build on and can start adding these features. It’ll take time. One of our largest projects is moving all of the old Neotribune over to the new system (before the old server fails). If we convert 10 stories a day, it’ll still take 400 days to do it. So a program needs to be written to convert the data.

We are working every day to improve the program, add more features, and make the Italy Neotribune into what we’ve always dreamed it could be.

Comments and submissions

There is no reason to stay silent just because stories lack little boxes for comments. Send comments by email. We’ll load them for you. Send an email with the title of the story and what you want to say. It’s super easy and no registration is required.

Stories are the same way. Submit stories and photos directly to us by email. We welcome everyone’s input: letters to the editor, announcements, features, calendars, photographs (lots and lots of large photographs), anything. Send them in.

The email to use is: [email protected]