A few weeks ago, a friend and fellow member of Twitter Geeks of Monticello, Jeff Noble, asked me what I thought about taking over the technical side of Monticello Live (ML), a WordPress blog reporting on local news around Monticello, Ark. and Drew County. After a few weeks of doubting and pondering and vacation, I decided to take him up on the offer. It seems like God had his hand in this endeavor, as Jeff and his family are moving to Virginia next month.
History of Monticello Live
Jeff started the blog in September 2006 as an online source of news and community information. Since then, the site has expanded to a center for the community to communicate online. Jeff became absorbed with Journey Church, and Joe Burgess took over operations of ML, with Jeff helping out with the technical aspects.
The site receives an average of nearly 1,000 daily visitors—an accomplishment, considering Monticello has a population of under 10,000—and has seen peaks of up to 16,000 visitors in a single day.
The Challenge Ahead
I don’t take the task at hand lightly. ML has grown tremendously over the years, and I only hope I can help it continue. Taking over Jeff’s responsibilities will be a challenge I look forward to. My first project at hand will be an overhaul of the layout of the site. ML’s content causes it to burst at the seams from time to time—the severe storms that rolled through the area on May 6, 2009 stressed ML’s server and the site was taken offline for several hours. That situation has been remedied and we now recede on our own dedicated server, allowing us stretching room for the growth spurts.
Over the next few weeks, I will be working on re-designing the layout to be more user-friendly and accessible. If anyone wants to be in-the-know, comment and I will let you see the progress from time to time. It won’t be a drastic overhaul—a new masthead, a different perspective on the three-column layout, more refined typography, integration with Facebook Connect (to allow you to tie your ML activity with Facebook), and a few other things.