Another Winter Storm

Well, we're bracing for another major ice storm. This one has the potential to be worse than the storm we experienced a few weeks ago. Already, over half an inch of ice has fallen. The trees are coated and I can hear limbs breaking outside. The precipitation is actually coming down as rain, but it is freezing on contact. Roads are clear, but even that is expected to deteriorate as the night goes on.

I put wood on the deck in the event power is lost and we have to resort to heating with the fireplace. The ground was soft and wet which made it tough to push the wheelbarrow, and the icy rain soaked my jacket and shirt. Plus, the gutter was overflowing from a leaf jam so I had to pull out the ladder and clean that mess. Very difficult to find a place where the ladder did not sink in and when I did get up to the gutter, my hands froze almost instantly from trying to clear the jams. All is well now, though.

Tomorrow and Sunday are threatening to be even worse than today for ice accumulation along with snow accumulations on Sunday. Could be an interesting weekend. I was planning to work on the web site design improvements, and will if the power holds out.

Site Changes Coming

It's time to take the YourPanorama site and give it a major makeover. It has served its purpose well for a couple of months, but the time has come to pretty it up and add some new features while we're at it. In fact, we're even going to change the name of the site to give it a jazzier sound and shorten the number of syllables it takes to accomplish that.

Most of the site re-design work will occur over the weekend, but if you would like to check the progress, just go to: www.yourpanorama.com/newsite/index to see how we're doing. In fact, I would really appreciate any input, comments or advice you would like to post here at Abbozzare about the YourPanorama update.

Designing the Future

We took some time last week, in between the holidays, to lay out plans for YourPanorama. Up until now it seems we were making decisions daily as to what sounded like the right thing to do, which direction to pursue and which means appeared the best way to achieve our goals. The result was that it felt more like we were floundering than setting sail in a prescribed path.

I should have learned a long time ago that a vision and a written plan to realize that vision works best. Did that all the time in my previous life as a manufacturing manager. No reason I can't apply the same technique to this new venture.

Our plans fell into three categories: 1) Improve financial conditions: which includes reducing costs where it makes sense to do so as well as finding and implementing new revenue streams. 2) Increase the number of contributors and visitors to the site: two different, but related activities. Thus far, a small handful of contributors supply all the content to the site. Our plans are to expand this number so that the site is truly participatory. 3) Improve the overall look and feel of the site. By design, we started with a simple layout and a few things we thought were necessary to include. We knew that we would learn and discover what else needed inclusion, what need to go and what design features we wanted to apply. YourPanorama will be constantly changing, so this is an on-going process.

Beginning tomorrow, we will be putting these plans into action and I can't wait. It would be wonderful to see results immediately, but I think we are more likely to see things evolve a little bit every day, then take off rapidly at some future point. We'll see and we'll keep you posted.