Another day, another batch of updates to the software behind the SBP, and these are hopefully the last round of major changes for a while -- today's update brings us up to the cutting edge of Drupal 4.4.0 release candidate one ... which in English means we've stopped adding new and dangerous things and we're reasonably sure what we have is going to work.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean the end of those annoying max_user_connections errors --- those are caused by our squeezing 3 big sites and 7 busy blogs into just one low-budget account on a machine we share with 200 other customers ... someday, when we're rich and famous, we'll rent our very own machine and really load it up, but for now, sadly, just say "Hiya Max, long time no see" ... and reload your webpage (ditto for the chatbox).

And that chatbox, that's just one of a host of amusements I'll be rolling out over the coming year with this new software.

And remember, SBP is our story, you and me, I lend my time to tinker it together and a bit of website to hold it, you lend your time to make it worth the visit, make it something we can tell our friends and family "You want to know where I live? Just go to sbp.teledyn.com"

A few other things I'd like to try with you ...

• Our own tourism handbook, written by you and me, edited by anyone who's a member of the SBP, a place where we can do what we do over and over again every year, tell the tourists the very best places that they just gotta see, and what to know when they get there.
• Memory lane -- unlike a community newspaper, the Peninsular never throws anything away, it just gets added to the mix, there for Google to find. That means your stories are kept here as long as there's a Peninsular to keep them, and you'd be surprised what you can collect on a website like this. Each SBP member has their own personal blog space to post their own stories about South Bruce Peninsula, announce their events, write poems, tell tall tales or just vent at local politicians (a favourite pastime around here ... outside of Wild Turkey Season).
• Forums, Forums, Forums! Sometimes you don't want to lead the parade, you just want to ask some questions and see where the conversation goes. That's a job for forums and we got forums. We just haven't turned them on yet.
• Federated Beach Bloggers -- actually this is a bit of a personal crusade of mine, but we have all these websites around here where people post their thoughts and ideas on their very own website and that's how it should be, but unfortunately, nobody finds them. Sure, you could form a webring but trust me, been there, done that, nobody clicks on a link that says nothing, they click on links that say what they mean, and to do that _I need to get our local news and views writers to syndicate their stuff_ -- that's that little orange chicklet for 'XML' on our homepage -- and if they can learn to do that, then we can put their latest headlines right there in that right-side sidebar. Pretty darn cool, and it works too.
• Buddy-lists --- want to know if Bub posts to his blog? You'd add him to your list and get a note when he's posted those pictures of you from his barbeque, then you can send him a short personal note to ask if the stains came out.
• A real event calendar where you can download the events and put them into your own calendar software right there on your computer, and where you can add something to your calendar and then just click something to inject them up here for all to see. Now that's community news!

I've got some other ideas too -- SBP is a little bit my personal research laboratory (after all, I am supposed to be the big-shot internationally famous social-computing guru guy) -- and you folks are my guinea pigs, so just hold still, joining the membership will only take a sec and it won't hardly hurt at all!