Monday, January 31, 2005

The Northside Neighborhood Survey

We’ve got it!

David Cockrell, the city’s Senior Neighborhood Planner, has passed me a limited number of copies of the finished survey.

We’ve asked him for the document in PDF format so we could pass it to anyone who wanted it electronically. If we have to, we’ll scan the document in and generate something that way. However, it would be best if we could have that done via Acrobat, just to make it easy to search it for words and terms.

We’ll keep you apprised.

Sunday, January 30, 2005

We’ve Got Stats

The Statistics button!

It works, now.

We’ll try to expand its capabiltiies in the future. But at least now you can watch what’s happening, in terms of visits, postings, etc., etc., etc.

Looking for a Few Good Images

Need things to put into the banner.

Looking for some sharp images to add to the banner at the top of the page. The idea is to represent many of the good things of this town in the banner.

If you’ve got a great image of a building or car or locomotive or some such thing and you’re willing to share it, please contact the Administration. We’ll take the image and, using PhotoShop, do something like we did with the Rosemount mansion. We plan to turn the banner into something of a collage.

Saturday, January 29, 2005

We’ve Got Mail

E-Mail available via Puetown.

For those in need of e-mail capabilities, we’ve established an e-mail server to support you. This will likely be used mostly for administrative capabiltiies and inter/intra-agency communications as necessary.

If you’re group needs to have an e-mail network and your group is associated with Puetown Views we can likely accomodate your needs. Please contact the Administration for arrangements.

Registration On-Line

Now accepting new members!

Okay. We have the registration system operational.

You only need to register if you are intent upon making comments or, even better, becoming a contributor to the entries published here.

Just click on the REGISTER button at the top of the screen. If you are a registered member, click on the LOG-IN button to make a comment or, better still, publish an entry.

Enjoy….

Friday, January 28, 2005

Limitations

Some of this stuff….

...isn’t working quite right just yet.

We’re still trying to stand this thing up properly. Not to mention the almost austere appearance of the page; some of the buttons along the top of the page do not work, just yet. Particularly, REGISTER, LOG-IN and STATISTICS are not available.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we hope to bring the rest of it on-line.

One item of importance, Guests are not going to be allowed to make COMMENTS on this system. We had some interesting experiences with spammers of the most nefarious form in the last few days of OHNO Pueblo. We do not intend to let THAT happen again. Therefore, if you wish to make comments here, to express yourself, you will need to register with the system. This is nothing personal. Indeed, we’ll keep personal information completely confidential. You can use a nom des blogs to identify yourself in comments or even in entries, if you are a co-author. However, we will need to know who you are as part of registration. And that information will be kept very close hold. The only way anyone will get it out of us is with a valid search warrant.

[Note: Those spammers ARE pernicious and of a most distasteful demeanor. This is the only way we can think of to prevent them from doing what they did there, here.]

OHNO Victories

The Night of January 24th.

It’s an Ayn Rand classic, come to life!

Last Monday night, at the regularly scheduled meeting of the City Council, the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) and Old Historic Northside Organization (OHNO), inadvertantly combined forces in order to give the City Fathers an opportunity to do the proverbial ‘right thing’, vis a vis a proposed modification to the city ordinance regarding historic landmarks and the establishment of Mineral Palace Park as an historic district.

It’s rather interesting that the two items came up together like this and the story is certainly worth telling of how that happened. But we’ve got a lot of other things to do before this day is over; so maybe another time. Suffice it to say that these two matters were related. The fun part is trying to understand the why’s and wherefore’s. But, as I said, that’s another, rather long and ‘paranoid’ story. And one better described over fine scotch and tobacco.

So, back on track. The people won a good fight last Monday night. The City Fathers wisely chose to amend the proposed ordinance so that the City Council would not be ‘above the law’, vis-a-vis other private and/or corporate entities. It also agreed to declare Mineral Palace Park an historic district. Both of these decisions will go far in maintaining a quality of life for the general population, well above that realized on Gedi Prime (see classic science ficition series by Frank Herbert).

A round of applause and drinks for all those who participated, either by communicating to the City Fathers via phone or e-mail, attending the meeting itself, and testifying on the matters.

THIS is what makes this land and this community a great place to live.

Artists Wanted

Looking for a few good kids. Age is not an issue.

Last Monday night, while waiting for the opening of the regularly scheduled City Council meeting, we were regaled with the introduction of a group of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed eager beavers, i.e., kids. These were members of the Pueblo Teen Council. We’re not exactly sure what their charter is but it looked to us like they were primed and ready to sink their collective teeth into something juicy.

I remember those days myself; the heady days of youth when I discovered that adults might actually listen to me, if I made sense and was focused on something outside of my own nihilistic benefit. We need more kids like that. Actually, we probably shouldn’t call them ‘kids’. They’re acting more like adults than all too many adults actually act.

But, getting to a point, if we had some people like that, particularly of the artistic persuasion, we could do some interesting things here. But we shouldn’t limit it to artistic pursuits either. We could benefit from the talents of any ‘adults’ who think they could do something for Pueblo. This being either visual, audio, written or other talents.

So, if you know someone hankering for an opportunity to ‘express’ themselves for the benefit of not only their own development, but the rest of us denizens of Pueblo….please….direct them here.

The Old OHNO Pueblo Entries

What’s become of all those entries of time gone by.

We’ve managed to save the main entries from OHNO Pueblo. In due time, we’ll resurrect them and have them available for future reference. This will be particularly useful when we start looking at what happens with regards to water and transportation issues in the county. But that will take some time to implement.

In the meantime, the old blog side, www. ohnopueblo.org, is still accessible. We’re not sure what is going to happen with the domain name, but we’ll see. And, if you REALLY need to have some information from the old site made available, please contact the Adminstration and they’ll see what they can do.

Puetown Views

A new start.

A funny thing happened the other week. I tried to get into do some work in my favorite blog, OHNO Pueblo and found I was locked out. After some investigation, it seems that the outfit that was providing the hosting services went out of business. And to add injury to insult, the guy who had founded the business seems to have got himself in a whole heap o’ trouble; he had registered all the domain names in his own name.

Being faced with a dilemma, I decided to continue the blog, but rename it and expand its operational area. So now, we’re opening under new (mis)management. We’ve got a new domain name, we’ve got a more powerful version of the software, a new mission, a larger audience and a new format to assist with all of this.

Over the last year, we’ve built up an audience that was resulting in about a thousand ‘hits’ a day. That will drop off for a while with the new domain name, until people become aware of the move. But, in due time, we’ll have them back and more. We’ll have more contributors as well. We’re looking at the whole town now. In support of that, we invite every neighborhood association and any public-service-oriented citizens’ association to participate in this activity. If you’ve got something to share with the members of your community or the citizens of Pueblo relating to the quality of life here, please contact the Administration.

We’ll be setting up categories to assist in looking for what it is that you want to find out about.