- by Anne Finay-Stewart, Editor
I use a mid-2012 MacBook Pro, drive a 2008 Honda FIT with manual transmission, and have a 1953 brain and body. They're all running on mostly original parts, hardware and firmware.
Software, however, does not have nearly the longevity.
The OwenSoundHub was built on a Joomla platform which, I was once told, is like Wordpress on steroids. Since 2015 we've never had anyone with any Joomla expertise, although our “IT department” was happy to mess around at the back end and figure out enough to keep us going all this time.
I once knew how to get my first car going by hitting the solenoid with a hammer or replacing the ballast resistor, but now I need the $95 computer analysis to explain why the Check Engine light is on. It could be the gas cap was not tightened, or that my catalytic convertor has failed. There's a big difference.
So when these warnings started appearing on the back end of the Hub, we knew we were over our heads. 
Back to the car analogy. You know when you have to decide whether or not to have that head gasket replaced or junk the car? Is this the worst of its problems, or the first in its road to the wrecker? Will the Hub last until October (or spring) if we do nothing?
A very kind reader built me a new site – one he believed would save me work by allowing self-publishing by contributors. It was a humbling and generous gift.
I'll explain in a future newsletter what it is a publisher and editor do all day, and why replacing them with a set of voluntaeditorial standards and some software is not the path to a healthy media climate, and would be unlikely to meet the expectations of our readership.
The best solution seems to be to build a Wordpress site and transfer all the content over to it before the platform collapses. No one is exactly clear on the cost of this, and as many organizations before ours have discovered, something done without the proper investment can often cost more in the long run.
More importantly, any new site should be designed to meet the needs and standards of a future owner – whether an individual, or ideally, a community - including details like the searchability of past articles.
So you see the dilemma.
Thank you to those generous people who have trusted me with support to pay my staff for another month or two. More than the money, I deeply appreciate the extraordinary words I have received about the value of an alternative independent, local media voice in our community.
The conversation is not over.
