I'm writing this to address some of the obvious questions and concerns about the new look for American Antigravity. What does it mean? Why did this happen? What can we look forward to now, and why wait until now to make the changes? These are some of the basics that I'd like to cover in the next few paragraphs, so please bear with me...

About the New Look: As you may have noticed, we've made some real modifications to both the color-scheme and the site-layout for American Antigravity.Com. Some of the reasons for this are altruistic, and others a bit more selfish...

We started with a tool called "ArticleLive" from Interspire, a great little Australian company that builds a nice database-driven "Content Management System". I'd like to say that I customized their tool a lot for our needs, but in all honesty, it was love at first 'site'...the layout in their online demo did everything that we need, and had a simplistic Windows-like look and feel.

Our signature colors are shades of blue, and I wanted to keep this for the new website....but I wanted something more pleasing to the eye, and a bit more optimistic than the heavy blue-tones from the classic site. After all, we're presenting an optimistic vision of the future, which meant switching over to brighter, more friendly tones.The selfish part of this is my own eyes simply being burned out on seeing dark-blue all of the time....

Features, Enhancements, and Advantages: White pages for readability, faster load-times, a new popup-menu (no java), a more consistent look & feel, and writer contributions. Oh yeah, the code's a lot cleaner on the back-end, also, which should help with the page-load times. These are some of the many enhancements to the website....my hope is that they become self-evident as you browse through our pages online.

American Antigravity "Classic": For the time being, we're not changing our old website. The traditional "American Antigravity" site will remain online and functional for at least another year, and possibly indefinitely. This depends in part on how well our new site is received, as well as whether or not the new tool can really replace the tried-and-true formula that's made us #1. However, we're not going to be updating the site, as it would require republishing our articles in two different formats.

Our Motivation: As I mentioned in the earlier blog, I helped Richard C. Hoagland build a blog last month after a marathon 4-hour web-publishing process for Iapetus Part 6 on his website for Coast to Coast AM. We got Hoagland's page built, but the process was long & tedious....the blog was a workaround to let him publish without being a webmaster.

Is alt-science about being a web-guru, or is it about putting up stories on breakthrough research & technologies? Back when I started American Antigravity, it was easy to publish a weekly update for every new Lifter-experiment that I did, but there's a large enough community now to warrant a more substantial approach.

Our classic page really helped us reach the public, but at the same time, after 3 years of updates, modifications, and workarounds, it was becoming a bit dated in both look, feel, and coding. Everything was a bolt-on feature, and making changes to the site meant logging into a maze of files on the server to update code.

I love American Antigravity, and I loved our original site. I'd never meant it to withstand the traffic that it did -- when I originally built the site, it was meant for a few friends only, in a fit of depression after my dot-telecom layoff. At that time, I hadn't even tested it with Netscape, thinking that only my former-coworkers using IE would visit it! It's amazing to think that it was a durable as it ended up being, and I think that after the mileage I got from the experience it's time to try a new approach.

In the Short Term: There's going to be a substantial transition period from our classic website to our new website. In the meantime, you can continue to use the classic site with all of it's original features by selecting the "Classic Page" option from the "main" dropdown menu on the front page.

In the Long Term: In addition to loading our existing pages into the site, we're going to add several new features. One of those -- our community messageboard -- has already been online since June, and it's creating a wonderful online science & technology dialogue. Another great feature is actually going to be the contributing writers that we've added to the site.

In the meantime, if you have comments, feedback, or concerns, send me email!

Some Links & Notes:

 Click here for American Antigravity Classic: We're not going to continue updating this page, but it will be available indefinitely for reference use. In it's 3-year lifespan, this site saw over 100-million visitors from around the world...

 Click here for Hoagland's Iapetus Part 6: This is an example of a static web-page, which means that you build it in advance and then load it onto the server. It works great for small sites, but becomes unmanageable for larger venues, especially with lots of breaking news & contributing writers.

 Click here for Hoagland's 'Captain's Blog': Clean lines, nice formatting, and more importantly: an easy to update backend to ensure that Richard can post what he wants, when he wants to! This tool took 2 hours to setup, so if you have questions about implementing this for your own website, send me an email.

 Click here for ArticleLive: Interspire is a neat little company, and for the price we paid for this tool, we really can't complain. It's fast to install, feature-rich, and seems to work pretty consistently. It's based on PHP & MySQL, which is the most popular dynamic site-combination on the web.

 Click here for our MessageBoard: Since we put this up, it's had thousands of visitors, and hundreds of postings & users. Yahoo Groups have been a great online forum for newsgroup postings, but the messageboard seems to really have a better focus on the tech-centric aspects of AG research, without the confusion often found on the Yahoo Boards.