Life, food, events, and community in Albuquerque, NM

Why we moved to a new Duke City Fix

Well, You Asked For It

First things first. In our annual reader survey, you asked for:

The ability to edit comments
The ability to contribute stories to the site
A more cohesive relationship between blog posts and forum posts
A way to contact each other (without revealing private info)
More ways to build community in Albuquerque

I think this new site offers all that (and more), so I hope you like it.

Making It Sustainable

For the past 2.5 years, Duke City Fix has been maintained by a cadre of unpaid volunteers. These good people support the website in the following ways:

Designing, developing, and troubleshooting the web publishing system and server
Writing content on a regular basis
Adding comments and forum posts (yep, that's you, our readers!)

Moving to this new system allows us to reduce the overhead on the first 2 items, while leveraging the 3rd. Yep, I said "leverage." How very middle-manager of me.

Basically, this new system lowers the maintenance of Duke City Fix to the point where it truly can be a long-term player in the Albuquerque web scene.

Why We're Taking Ads

We're taking ads so that the site will pay for itself. This is different than getting rich by becoming advertising moguls which we have no interest in doing.

Here's our model:

Projected income from Google Ads is $20-$40/mo initially.
Hosting and maintenance costs are currently $60/mo.

Obviously, we're still under-funded but we hope to reduce this gap over time to make the site self-supporting.

Here We Go

You may have noticed by now that this new site is a lot more fun, isn't it?

From the mini-feed of activity (oh so addicting) to the reader profiles, this new system feels a lot more engaging and community-oriented which has been the goal of Duke City Fix all along.

Thanks for joining us in the evolution!

Learn More

Learn more about our mission and how this site works.

Here's where you can find the old DCF

Comment by Benny the Icepick on November 12, 2007 at 4:24pm: From the comments in today's Morning Fix:
http://www.dukecityfix.com/index.php?itemid=3386

//DCF is a community-run website free from advertising, which does a decent job of seriously discussing both local, state and national issues, in an easy to read format. There ar lots of very good writers and posters on DCF. It is also well designed and easy to navigate.//

I worry that the new format, with its subtle gray boxes nearly indistinguishable from one another, might draw fire from people like this who are concerned about visual order and unambiguity.

To be honest, it's taking some serious getting used to. Ning arranges its content in columns, which essentially forces the user to scroll up and down a number of times to see all the content on the page. There's also lots and lots of fluidity between blog posts and forum posts, to the point where I'm not entirely sure what distinguishes them.

But not to be overly negative, here are things I DO like:
- larger profile photos
- the ability for all users to speak at length about who they are and what they do
- All users can write their own posts. Those who want to see them can. Those who don't can stay away. Moderators determine which posts make it to the front page.
- Text supports HTML
- SOME of the text entry features (Forum posts) have a GUI formatting toolbar... although I can't get that to show up in blog composition.

I dunno. It's a big change. I think we'll have to give users time to explore it and react to it. Keep an eye on traffic numbers. If it nosedives and doesn't recover after a month or so, maybe think about reverting to the old format.

Comment by chantal on November 12, 2007 at 10:10pm: Thanks for the feedback, Benny! Here's hoping the transition is smooth because there's no turning back to the old system that requires far too much of my time to maintain. How's that for unambiguity ;-)

Cheers! chantal

Comment by Benny the Icepick on November 13, 2007 at 12:34am: The Boss says it best: "No retreat, baby, no surrender"

I'm all for total commitment. No more wishy-washy ambivalence for me.

But will we still be able to access the old site to search through old posts both on the blog and in the forum? There's a wealth of information there.

Comment by chantal on November 13, 2007 at 7:07am: Yeah, I'll be paying to keep the old server up as well with our old content. Not sure what the domain will be yet, maybe archives.dukecityfix.com...

Also want to integrate search so that it indexes both sites together.

Comment by LP on November 16, 2007 at 2:52pm: Another good thing about this: no more anonymous posters pretending to be someone else.

And I love the community blog aspect of it.

Comment by Nora on November 17, 2007 at 12:51am: If anyone's wondering what other ning communities are out there, I found one for one of my favorite comics: http://scottpilgrim.ning.com/

It seems to be working out pretty well for O'Malley and his fans.

Comment by chantal on November 17, 2007 at 8:55am: What Nora, no mention of AskaNinja.com? Surely that's among your daily reads ;-)

http://fans.askaninja.com/

Comment by Nora on November 17, 2007 at 10:09am: I save Ask a Ninja and watch all the videos at once when I'm having a bad day, so I didn't actually know about that one since I haven't watched in a long time :)

Comment by Angela on November 17, 2007 at 10:22am: This is really nice..
A little lost though.
Have to work my way around to figure this out.

Really do love the sense of community that I'm seeing.

Thank you Chantal.

Comment by Jackson on November 17, 2007 at 3:06pm: As someone who has read Duke City Fix since the Journal wrote a story about it (2 years ago?) this is going to take awhile to get used to.