It’s a pleasure today to inaugurate a new section in the Independent, “Mooolelo Hawaii,” dedicated to recounting Hawaii’s long history, stretching back over perhaps 20 centuries.

The author, ‘Umi Perkins, is a scholar in Hawaiian history and political science, and I’m excited to share his research with the community.

A note about the name of this section: it’s an homage to Ka Mooolelo Hawaii, written and published in 1838 by students at Lahainaluna, including Davida Malo, and edited by Rev. Sheldon Dibble. In his introduction to the 2005 reprint of the original text, Puakea Nogelmeier notes that it “holds a distinguished position in Hawaiian history as the first book credited to Hawaiian writers, the first history of the islands published in the native language, and the first concerted effort to bring Hawaiian oral tradition into writing.”

It’s a pleasure to introduce some changes to the Independent.

First, we’ve moved to a dedicated virtual private server at Rackspace. You should see improved performance on our new server, which allows us to accommodate growing traffic.

Second, I’ve been watching with interest what our colleagues at the Boston Globe have been doing with web design. Led by the Filament Group and Ethan Marcotte, the Globe has unveiled a ‘responsive design.’  What that means is that with a single codebase, bostonglobe.com responds automatically to various web browsers, window sizes, and devices.

I’ve assiduously copied and mimicked the work of Ethan Marcotte and others, albeit with a humbler talent and skill set. Now, the Independent will adjust its layout automatically based on the browser window. And I’ve taken a ‘mobile first’ approach, in which the primary code is optimized for a small mobile screen. Using media queries, then, the layout adjusts upwards for larger canvases.

So this technique is based squarely on wonderful web projects out there, like the HTML5 Boilerplate, the Less Framework, an others.

And like all things, this is a work in progress, and I welcome your feedback.  Mahalo.

I’m writing this post from the Block by Block Community News Summit 2011, at Loyola University in Chicago. It’s the second year of this conference, bringing together 200 hyperlocal, local, and regional digital news publishers from throughout the U.S. It’s a pleasure to be here in Chicagoland, with such a talented and passionate group of news innovators.

Our server problems gave me an excuse to work on CSS and HTML this evening. I’d appreciate your feedback; my goals were to open things up a bit by taking out the background gray, and to de-emphasize our branding colors. “#991324” is a pretty intense color, and can easily conflict with photography or advertisements. Let me know what you think.

For everyone tuning in between 4 and 7, I apologize for the downtime. Turns out that an image handling plugin was overconsuming resources, leading to rendering problems. I’ve basically re-written most of our site to avoid using the plugin, and I’ll be looking for an alternative tomorrow.

At any rate, we’re back.

Also: Some good news. Our “Add an Event” page is fixed. It had an incompatibility with the latest version of ExpressionEngine, which I just took care of. Add away.

Thanks everyone!

Today is our 2nd anniversary!

I’d like to pause for a minute and say thanks to all of our readers, contributors, writers, friends, and most importantly, our families. You’ve made the last two years a success. Mahalo nui.

Your responses will help us to recruit quality advertisers which support the Independent.

Mahalo!

For those tuning in around mid-day today, you would have encountered a very different HI site; no styling, no background, etc. (Think World Wide Web circa 1995.) That was my fault! I blame it on a bug in our cascading style sheet, which I should not have been editing on the live site. Sorry folks, it’s fixed now.

We’re re-opening the Masthead, our company blog. Stay tuned.

Congrats to our friends at Honuguide ? they’ve done a great job with their second edition. Kudos to Tyler and Jason for their great work!

Gov. Lingle presented her annual State of the State address today at the Capitol. The Hawaii Independent is inviting our readers and friends to broaden the discussion, in a section titled “The state of Hawaii.” This new section will feature essays from, and interviews with, a broad cross-section of Hawaii: parents, clergy, fishermen, hunters, businessowners, teachers, academics, poliicians, students, military, hotel workers, and others. The common question that the new section will answer is simply, “What is it like to live in Hawaii? How are we really doing?”

I believe that we, together, can paint a more thorough picture of the true state of Hawaii, through the words of our residents.

I’d like to invite you to respond to these questions. Send it to news@thehawaiiindependent.com.

We reserve the right to edit and publish any submissions.

Happy Holidays!

In a week marked with setbacks on furloughs, the state deficit, and a resolution to the B&B debate, we’ve made some progress. We’ve launched a Masthead page, with contact info and biographies for most of our writers, plus an ongoing blog where I’ll be documenting the growth of our paper. Travis Quezon is writing about our editorial process on our Facebook page. Be sure to check out Barb Forsyth’s piece on localcentric holiday shopping. Indigenous Pacific voices have been represented in Copenhagen. And finally, we’re building a slate of in-depth reports for the new year, and would like your input on stories you’d like covered. Mahalo for your feedback and your support!

Michele McLellan provides rough categories for new journalism business models in a recent piece for the Knight Digital Media Center. I’d say that we’re working in the space between #2 (“The local news entrepreneurs”) and #3 (“The community lovers”). Our strength is certainly our grounding in local communities. And we certainly do need caffeine, which is why I’m thankful for the constellation of coffee shops around our downtown office ? Downtown Coffee, BadAss, the Mix, Satura, et al. We couldn’t do it without all of you:)

A unique aspect of our work here at the Independent is our community-supported business model. Our HI Value program of discounts and deals gives a reason for readers to subscribe, above and beyond supporting local journalism. I’m hoping that it’s a model that can be applied to other hyperlocal news sites.

From across the Pacific, I tuned into the video feed from UC Berkeley’s Future of the Forum. It was an excellent series of discussions, interrupted only by slow broadband and the UH-Wisconsin game. You can find the archive here.

We’ve finally managed to get most of our staff bios online. Enjoy.

Mahalo to Nella Media Group, the team behind Honu Guide and the new Go! in-flight magazine, innov8. Their monthly Chinatown News will publish content from The Hawaii Independent in their pages. Please support their advertisers, and pick up the Chinatown News every First Friday. See you Friday!

We’ve updated our “Contact” and “About” pages. The links have been fixed, and the content is current. Sorry to inconvenience those who have been curious about The Hawaii Independent. Thanks for your interest!