Image by the author.

When I started Greater Greater Washington in 2008, I just modified some code I’d written to share my personal photos (this was before Instagram, Facebook, etc.) This weekend, we’re taking a major step to move Greater Greater Washington to a real content system and giving it a significant visual facelift at the same time.

To make that switch, on Friday morning we are freezing all content on the old site. There will be no new posts (except this one) on Friday, and you won’t be able to post any comments on any posts on the old site.

During the weekend, the DNS will switch over to the new site. DNS is the system that tells your computer that http://greatergreaterwashington.org is actually 72.249.45.118 (or was) — basically, a phone directory of the Internet. Sometime over the weekend, depending on your internet provider, http://greatergreaterwashington.org/ will start directing you to the new site. (And, we’re going to make the main URL the much shorter http://ggwash.org/).

If you’re looking at this post on the new site, congrats! The switch has finished for you. You now CAN post comments, and we’d welcome hearing your feedback on the site either as a comment here or via email at newsite@ggwash.org.

Moving wholesale to a new system will mean some bumps. There will be things that don’t work quite right, and we’ll be working to fix those (particularly our amazing designer and coder, Derek Hogue). If you run into bugs, please don’t assume we know about them — let us know at newsite@ggwash.org.

We also realize the design will be a big change in some ways, and not everyone will like it. We’re trying to strike a balance between keeping our frequent readers happy (such as by having a clear listing of recent posts in reverse chronological order, like a classic blog) and ensuring that the home page is relevant to occasional and new readers (such as by having more posts higher up the page, so something from earlier in the day isn’t pushed as far down).

Pardon our dust this weekend as we switch over and beyond. And thank you for reading Greater Greater Washington!

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.