MUNCIE, Ind. (patriotnews.com) We may in fact be a little faster. The new server is state of the art and very lightly burdened. But we won't be bigger.

The old Patriot web site, at the time of its final crash, was the expression of a personality flaw that causes me to approach life as a series of interesting projects, none of which are ever quite finished and all of which can be and should be further refined.

The result of that approach was an architectural nightmare constructed piece by piece over a period of ten years using different programs, scripts and tools. It was the original "house that Jack built," without a framework, each piece added as I learned something new. Just keeping it running required eighteen hours a day, every day, leaving me virtually no time to write and precious little time for rest and recreation.

Ultimately, my health broke first, with the server not far behind, worn out by multiple perl installations that over used the hard drive.

So we're not going to be bigger. We've completely discarded all the old bells and whistles like free web mail, free blogs, a huge juke box and multiple forums that over burdened our server at the same time they were breaking my back. Like the kid says in the McDonald's commercial, "I won't be doing that again." 

In fact, the "we" of The Patriot will now consist solely of your humble host, master raconteur Joe Klock, the honorable Jack Hebenstreit, artist and biermiester, and my alter egos The Old Sarge and his fictional cousin, The Old Reprobate.

"The Old Babe" is Bob's Babe, the 1970 Kingscraft River Houseboat I bought last fall in anticipation of down sizing my workload and diversifying my lifestyle. She's undergone extensive renovation over the winter and will be going back into the water in a few days. Most of what I write in the months ahead will be written in her main salon, anchored somewhere on the Mississippi, Missouri or Illinois Rivers.

To maintain the web site, I'll be using the latest version of Article Manager, by Interactive Tools. For readers who may have wanted to run their own web site but were reluctant to tackle the learning part, let me say that Article Manager is the way to actualize your ambitions. Their technicians will handle the installation and help you with customizing the look of your site. Updating the web site is a matter of filling in a couple of online forms, using a very good WYSIWYG editor. Headlines, summaries, date stamping and archiving are all automatic. I've personally installed and examined dozens of scripts for over a decade and can say authoritatively, from a user point of view, that for newspaper or magazine formats, and especially ease of use, Article Manager is the best.

Thanks to Eisenhower, Portage Des Sioux, hailing port for Bob's Babe, is only five hours from Muncie. I plan to make the drive back to Muncie a couple of times a month, each time staying for a day or so, updating this web site and uploading new photographs and copy. But my home base, at least until cold weather, will be the waters around St. Louis.

How to reach me:

Now it is not my intention to become an actual hermit, nor do I wish to put myself beyond the reach of public criticism. But in line with my new down sized management philosophy I don't want to waste my time in mindless (and endless) email arguments with folks unwilling to invest the time to support their contentions with a bit of scholarship or to press their points in public. So I have shut down the domain mail server and will not load up the site with aliases and mailers.

Readers may feel free to criticize or comment upon any aspect of our web site and to challenge any facts or figures used by your humble servant or any other writers on these pages. Such material may be sent to me at patrioteditor@comcast.net . All such materials will be considered for publication in our Letters to the Editor section. We will not refuse publication of any materials because of political considerations but we will refuse to publish materials that are hateful or lacking in objectivity or scholarship. If you just want to bitch at me, email won't cut it. I won't publish email that seeks to demean or humiliate ... would you?

If what you want is to lock horns in public debate with the consistently fearsome yet always kindly old doctor, you'll have to catch me at my leisure. The place to do that is at Faded Glory, a new web site and political forum run by the same D'Artagnon who won his rhetorical reputation in the now defunct Patriot's Forum. If I am not there in person you will always find someone ready to serve you in my stead.

If you're new to patriotnews.com, please allow me to welcome you in person. If you're one of the many regulars who have missed us, welcome back and glad to see you again. I hope to meet you all, new and old, in the Faded Glory Forum in the weeks to come. If I'm "rollin' on the river" when you stop in, leave me a private message.

What to expect from this site:

Yes, we will do politics! That's always been The Patriot's main fare and I don't see how I can avoid the subject. It's the first thing that springs to mind when I sit down at my keyboard, even if I sat down expressly for some other purpose.

I may, however, spend more time writing about what I'm going to be doing most of the time, learning about, and writing about, life on the big muddy. Already, reading through the trip logs of The Old Babe and learning about her old owners from folks who know them, I've encountered new and entertaining perspectives about subjects I previously thought I understood fairly well.

I'll call this next phase of my writing and publishing life, "The River Project."

Welcome aboard!

If you'd like to seriously address this article, please send email, subject, "Letter to the Editor," to patrioteditor@comcast.net. Your comments will be carefully considered and if meritorious will be published. We will not publish email that is hateful, disrespectful or otherwise inappropriate.

If you'd just like to  argue with the writer, between river trips you may catch him at Faded Glory Political Forum, where he is a regular.