First off, I'd like to thank all my readers for their continued patience. If all goes well, today will be the final "re-run" column in a long time. Because this weekend is going to be Upgrade Weekend here at ChrisWeigant.com. So allow me to present an Upgrade Weekend FAQ for you here.

What will this mean to you? The site may be down for extended periods this weekend. We may be unavailable from roughly Saturday afternoon until whenever we get everything working. That's kind of a vague estimate, I realize. Target is to get everything done by Sunday evening, at the absolute latest. But since this is our first upgrade ever, it is impossible to estimate the downtime better than that, sorry. If everything blows up, then at some point we will restore the whole site from backups, and regroup and try again later, so worst-case scenario (hopefully) is that Monday you'll see exactly the same site you saw Friday.

What will this mean for the site? The biggest changes won't even be visible. What we are doing is upgrading the core software which runs the site (WordPress) to a newer version that is more stable and has much better security. This involved upgrading all of the custom files which actually display the site as well, but if everything works perfectly then the site will look almost exactly the same as it did before. There are a few exceptions. The first is that the Login page and the "User Settings" page will both look different to you, as a site user. These pages come straight from WordPress itself, and they have a new look and feel to them, but are pretty easy to learn how to use. Your password will not change, if all goes well, so logging in should still work the same. Feel free to change it yourself, if you'd like (for good site security, you should change your password every so often, and make it as complicated as you can easily remember).

Isn't there anything new? Why, yes. Yes, indeedy! I'm glad you asked. The biggest new feature to the site will be (finally) giving the ObamaPollWatch.com and FridayTalkingPoints.com pages their own look-and-feel. These pages will have new headers, new sidebars, and new features, most of which were not even possible with the old WordPress software. So, when you check the site Monday, don't forget to check out the ObamaPollWatch.com and FridayTalkingPoints.com areas.

Will there be any future changes? Yes, but I can't swear when they will happen. What we are doing (especially with the OPW.com and TFP.com pages) is building a framework that we can add features to later. Right now, getting the framework up and running and bug-free is the main objective. So some of the features on these new pages will be rather basic, at first. But later, we hope to expand and improve these over time.

What should I do if I notice something that isn't working right? Send me an email. Drop me a note for any reason -- something's broken, something doesn't look or work right, or any other problems you notice. Also, let me know if there's something about the site that bugs you or you'd like to see improved in the future, as we're looking at ways to change things for the better.

Thanks again for all the patience and understanding. It's taken three or four weeks to get to the point where we're ready to begin the upgrade, but we're finally at the point of starting the process this weekend. Actually, if truth be told, we were pretty ready last weekend, but since the OPW column ran Monday, we thought it'd be a better idea to bump it back a week, since that is one of the highest-traffic columns of the month. Speaking of traffic, I'd like to end by thanking everyone for their support of the site, as even though we ran a lot of re-runs last month, it was our biggest traffic month ever, with over 100,000 page views. This wouldn't have been possible without you, so I thank you all for your continued support.

Because this Program Note was so long, we will run today's "from the archives" column as a separate post.

-- Chris Weigant