The company that handles our mail server – different from the one handling our website server – has been having trouble off and on for a few days. So far today, the service has been far more off than on, so if you are trying to send us something, particularly if it’s time-sensitive like a lost/found pet, please use our alternate address: westseattleblog@gmail.com – thank you, and sorry!

If you read the Sunday Seattle Times, you might have seen the cover story for this week’s Pacific NW Magazine section, Ron Judd‘s overview of our city’s local-media scene, nine years after the region was rocked by news of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer scrapping its print edition. We’re honored to have been included in the coverage, with Mike Siegel‘s photo of WSB’s living-room newsroom and a mention of independent-local-online-only news leaders/survivors, including us. The story starts on page 10 of the print magazine in today’s Times, and you can also read it online.

It’s now been more than 10 years since WSB went commercial in fall 2007, covering West Seattle 24/7, and we’ve been so busy covering the news that there wasn’t time for an anniversary party, but we do want to say “thank you” – to everyone who comes here to find out what’s up, and to everyone who sends tips and photos and lost/found pet notices and calendar listings and more. “Community collaboration” is and continues to be what WSB is all about. And huge thanks to the local businesses who advertise on WSB – reaching local customers and making it possible for us to continue comprehensive local-news coverage 24/7.

Two site notes:

MAINTENANCE DOWNTIME: Our server-management company tells us we’ll be down for a while at some point at/after 11 pm tonight, while they do some semi-urgent maintenance for multiple customers including us. Could be anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours. If there’s breaking news and we’re down, we’ll report it in the WSB social media channels.

COMMENTING GLITCH FIXED: Some who use one of our mobile modes have had trouble commenting – it even happened to us: If you tapped the comment window, the keyboard wouldn’t come up unless you hit a formatting key first (bold, yellow highlight, italic, etc.). This has now been fixed. Thanks again to the people who reported this – glitches don’t always affect everyone, because of the differences between the way browsers, operating systems, devices interact, so we don’t always know about problems until they’re reported (editor@wsb.blackfin.biz).

In the spirit of “it’s not over until it’s over,” we usually wait until the last day of the year to look back on what’s happened. So, with hours remaining in 2017, here are the top 10 (11 again this year because of a tie) most-commented-on WSB stories of the year:

#10 – MAYOR MURRAY’S STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS
February 21, 2017 – 127 comments
This was more than a month before first word of sex-abuse allegations against the then-mayor; the uproar was over taxes, especially a $55 million property tax proposed to fight homelessness. (He dropped the idea a month and a half later.)

#9 – FE-BRRRRR-UARY SNOWSTORM
February 6, 2017 – 133 comments
This was no mere snowstorm. Though just a few inches fell, the storm also included a big power outage and school closures, so there was lots of info for commenters to share with each other.

#8 – GREAT AMERICAN DINER & BAR COMING TO WEST SEATTLE
May 7, 2017 – 139 comments
Four months after Shelby’s Bistro and Ice Creamery closed at 4752 California SW, we learned the Great American Diner & Bar would become the sixth establishment in 10 years to inhabit the space. We had few details when we published this – a few days later, we interviewed the co-proprietors.

#7 (tie) – ADMIRAL STABBING SUSPECT CHARGED, BAIL QUADRUPLED
October 12, 2017 – 141 comments
The second half of 2017 brought two particularly shocking street attacks, including the one involved in this case. Kierra Ward, who had been living on the streets in Admiral, was charged with stabbing a woman out for a walk with her baby, and also charged with a second crime for threatening a man who tried to intervene. (Ward remains in the King County Jail, in lieu of $400,000 bail, as the case proceeds through the system, with her next case-scheduling hearing set for January 4th.)

#7 (tie) – BICYCLIST ESCAPES ATTACKER ALONG PATH; CITY PLANS ACTION
March 24, 2017 – 141 comments
Campers underneath the western half of the West Seattle Bridge escaped much official notice until this incident, in which a bicyclist riding home from work escaped someone who tried to grab her on the path under/alongside the bridge. The incident brought light to problems including non-functioning lighting, and various city departments sprang into action.

#6 – RYAN COX ARRESTED AGAIN, AFTER GATEWOOD STABBING
August 8, 2017 – 151 comments
Ryan Cox, a repeat offender who had been something of a fixture in recent years in the Morgan Junction, Fauntleroy, and Gatewood areas, was arrested and charged with stabbing a man. He remains in jail in lieu of $150,000, awaiting trial; we published this update on his case December 22nd.

Read More

10:53 AM: Thanks to Cami for flagging us to this – which we’ve since discovered is affecting service here at HQ too: Comcast acknowledges its internet service is having trouble:

Via Twitter, among other places, the problem appears to be affecting people in multiple states.

12:27 PM: Comcast describes the problem, via Twitter, as “an external network issue.” Cami, meantime, says her service (in the Alki area) is better now.

1:38 PM: Comcast says the problem should be fixed. If yours still isn’t working, be sure to let them know. (If you use Twitter, you can DM @comcastcares.)

10:38 PM: CNN reports that, believe it or not, CenturyLink had something to do with the Comcast problems.

Heads up in case you’re going to be awake in the very early morning hours tomorrow (aka, very late tonight) – WSB will be down for a while, likely somewhere in the 2-4 am vicinity, for some technical work. It’s totally under-the-hood stuff so you shouldn’t notice anything different once we’re back up, but if you do, please contact us so we can troubleshoot (e-mail is best – editor@wsb.blackfin.biz). And if any breaking news happens during that time (we’ve had two big early-early-morning stories in the past week, so you never know), we’ll get you the info via our social-media channels (here and here). Thanks for your patience!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tonight the city’s Technology Matching Fund celebrates its 20th anniversary with a 5:30 pm gathering at El Centro de la Raza (2524 16th Ave. S.). While the party’s not in West Seattle, the latest round of recipients included two local nonprofits – and this story takes a closer look at what the money means for one of them.

(City of Seattle photo from gathering of matching-fund grant recipients)

By Marika Lee
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

For some, tasks such as uploading a resume or printing important documents seem simple. But not when everything is in an unfamiliar language and computers are not yet an everyday part of your life.

“A lot of things get lost in translation and having someone who speaks your language when you are trying to navigate a new email account, for example, is much easier,” said Ahmed Rodol of the East African West Seattleites he helps.

Rodol is the development director for South Delridge-headquartered Education for All, one of the most-recent grantees for the city’s Technology Matching Fund.

“(Education for All) was intended to be a bridge between immigrants that are here and the resources that are available. Also, to help them compete in the work environment and help them be confident enough to seek the American dream and be self-sufficient,” Rodol said.

Read More

Thanks to Justin for the photo from the first meeting of the new West Seattle Linux User Group. When we heard about the group, since it’s new, we invited them to send an announcement for the news section as well as a calendar listing:

The West Seattle LUG (Linux User Group) is a new group of people from the community who meet biweekly to discuss Linux, Open Source software, and technology. Anyone who has an interest in learning more about or discussing technology is welcome to join. Meetings are coordinated through their Meetup page and are generally held on Saturday mornings upstairs at the Fauntleroy YMCA. Common discussion topics are security, privacy, networking, building software, and sharing knowledge.

You can contact any of the members through Meetup.com: meetup.com/wsealug, GitHub: github.com/wsealug or feel free to join us on Slack: wsealug-slack-signup.herokuapp.com

The group’s next meeting is tomorrow morning (July 8th), 9 am.

Thank you so much for your patience. We’ll be starting to publish new stories again, now that our technical project is complete. For the first time in almost nine years, we have moved server companies, to address various issues that have worsened in recent months and weren’t being resolved. If you’re seeing this message, you’re seeing WSB at its new “home”; most ISPs take just a few hours to recognize such changes for websites, but some take longer, so if for example you check WSB at work tomorrow and don’t see updates beyond a “site note” post timestamped this morning, that’s what’s going on. Or if you see any other type of problem on the site right now, please let us know – we’ve tested and tweaked but you might notice something we didn’t – editor@wsb.blackfin.biz – also try clearing your browser cache/history if you can (or refresh the page while holding down the shift or control key, depending on your browser). Thank you, and now on with the news (it’s been a quiet day so far in West Seattle, we’re happy to say).

Before everyone starts moving into weekend mode, we just want to warn you that WSB will be offline for a while very early Sunday (after midnight Saturday night) – we have some technical work to do. If breaking news happens and we’re not able to publish it here, we’ll get the info out via our social-media channels (Twitter and Facebook primarily). If, later Sunday and Monday, you check WSB and notice anything awry – such as, you’re still seeing Saturday stories atop the page – please let us know (editor@wsb.blackfin.biz would be the best way but whatever else is convenient for you, including 206-293-6302 voice or text, is fine too). Thank you!

Though it’s entirely, maddeningly out of our direct control, we want to apologize for trouble that some people have had, intermittently, getting to WSB the past few days – and might be having today. Once in a while, WSB, like any website, might experience the classic problem of “the server’s down and nobody can get in.” The server manager fixes it, and everything is OK again.

This is something different.

Apparently there’s some kind of intermittent routing problem between Comcast and our longtime server-management company, WiredTree (now owned by LiquidWeb), and so some – but not all – Comcast users have had trouble reaching our server, some – but not all – of the time. It’s affecting some other websites too, we’ve learned. But as far as we have heard, it’s only Comcast – so if you have some other way of seeing us (CenturyLink, phone, etc.), that should be OK. Again, we apologize, and are working to figure out our options if this isn’t fully resolved very soon.

Since our technical overhaul last year, some have lamented the loss of the comment-editing function. As noted in responses to those laments, the software “plug-in” we were able to use in the old format is no longer supported by its developers, so we weren’t able to bring it along. But we’ve finally been able to install something similar. If you write a comment, after you send it, you should see a line appear in the window with the invitation “click to edit” and a 4-minute countdown during which you can do that. If you click that line, it should show your comment above while opening a window in which you can make changes and then save, delete, or cancel. It’s an optional function – if there’s nothing you want to fix/change, you can ignore it. Please let us know if you have any trouble (editor@wsb.blackfin.biz – please include what device/browser you’re using). Thanks for your patience.

Please accept our apologies for WSB being inaccessible for three-plus hours – if you missed our explanation on social-media channels, our server-management company WiredTree suffered some kind of catastrophic outage. It affected many sites as well as ours – we were able to see by monitoring Twitter mentions that we were far from alone. WiredTree hasn’t fully explained it yet, but the company is usually spectacularly reliable and responsive, and has been for the 8+ years we have been with them. We do have backup sites that we would have deployed if this had gone on any longer, or if there had been a major breaking story (luckily it was a quiet afternoon aside from the downpours) – including our White Center site, whitecenternow.com, whose server is with a different company, and the westseattleblog.wordpress.com backup site we used during our technical transition last winter. But now we’re back, so we’ll be publishing the stories we were working on when the site became inaccessible, soon as they’re ready – thanks again for your patience.

You’re probably here because you appreciate being informed. You probably have other favorite stops around the web, too. And if you are in the “there’s no such thing as too much information” category … you might be interested in this city post we just happened onto by browsing news.seattle.gov: It’s a long list of ways to get information from and about specific city departments, resulting from a recent “civic tech lunch hour” at which attendees were asked what kind of information they want from the city.