It's come time for us to do a major upgrade here. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy path to go up to the next version of our underlying package that powers the website. Unlike our previous upgrade about six years ago, there have been substantial changes in the architecture that make a straight and pretty easy upgrade impossible. I'll try to do a lot of the conversion prior to switching the site but some of it is just going to take time and it will be easier to go with a crappy version under the new architecture than court disaster by sticking with the old.

I expect that we'll start transitioning in the next month or so depending on my mood and how windy it is (ie available time).

It would be nice if we could continue using the current package but it's about to be End of Life and, thus, unsupported for both security patches and updates in the underlying languages (e.g. php) that power the website. We could limp along for a while but that's courting absolute disaster. I did that about eleven years ago and it ended badly.

The good news is that all of the content will survive - including stories, pics, forum posts etc that span more than two decades. There's a wealth of knowledge and memories here and they are fun to have. Of course, we continue to look at the future so we need to be able to embrace newer ways of communicating and sharing. The more troublesome parts of the upgrade will be appearance, certain smaller features and maybe we will need to do some conversions of our older photo albums.

Nonetheless, this prepares us for the next decade on the web and that's a good thing.