Archived News Item

A final salute, and our parting notes

Fifty-nine posts.

One hunded and five user comments. 58270 pages viewed during 20198 visits. One full school year.

As the creator, webmaster, writer, maintainer, and general keeper of this site, I consider it a pleasant success. And upon completing its first active year, I have both rosy pleasures and some quiet dissatisfactions.

I’m wholeheartedly glad that the site has had the reception that it did; I’ve received a healthy number of emails congratulating me on the concept or implementation (the fact that both seem to be commendable, not just one or the other, is a major sign of achievement to me), and I’m glad to say that I’ve had almost no hate mail — this on the Internet, where hate flows like water. Teachers seem to like it, parents are my main customers, and morbidly curious outsiders drift by. Students are perhaps less interested than I’d like, and I can’t imagine what the administration thinks, though I know a few of them are readers.

I’m happy with the resources the site offers. The Contact page is very, very useful, primarily because nothing similar exists. I use it myself, which is always a good indicator of function. Things like the graduation requirements aren’t glamorous, but because there simply isn’t anywhere else that such information is compiled, I’m glad I was able to create a permanent home for them — somewhere you can pop into late at night when you need to know something, and be reliably assured that it will be there.

Lastly, it’s my pleasure that I managed to fulfill, in a small way, the main and original purpose of BerkeleyHigh.org. As I said on the About page, and have tried to follow, the site’s here to provide the loudspeaker that doesn’t exist elsewhere. It disseminates information, whether it be news, opinions, things you need to know, or a voice that wouldn’t be heard.

What am I less happy about?

For the most part, it’s that with most of the good things I’ve done, I haven’t done any of them as well as I wanted.

Front-page news, the mainstay of the site, declined in frequency from every couple of days to once a week to biweekly to whenever-I-had-a-chance. There’s no reason for that except for the lack of time on my part; as the year progressed, I became more and more busy, and updates suffered in quantity and quality.

The static resources are good, but largely outdated — the contact page is quickly becoming a dinosaur, with the number of layoffs and structural changes we’ve experienced — and not as plentiful as I’d prefer. Some obvious things, like a compilation of general BHS information, never got made.

The Features page is cold and lonely. I did in fact have a multitude of other stories to keep the series company, but for a variety of reasons, none of them ever got finished.

The Forum took far too long to be introduced, and since it’s now the end of the year, will probably not “take off” until next school year. This is unfortunate mainly because a public forum would be dead-center in line with the goals of the site, fostering discussion and communication.

Apropos of that, the community aspect of this site never reached the level that I would like. While it was centered around community issues, far too often it was dominated by myself alone ranting into the wind. I want to hear other people. When we go live again next year, you might see a system in place to allow anybody to post news (directly, not just mailing it in to me) or other thoughts. In addition to the forum, that should help socialize things.

The Events page was a great idea, but took too long to implement, and didn’t become as valuable as I wanted.

All of that being the case in retrospect, it’s done, and on the whole I’m glad it happened.

Since the school year is over, and most of the daily excitement finished along with it, we’re going on hiatus for the summer. Expect the site to be relaunched, perhaps with some racy new features, on the first day of the next year. You can check back before then, but there probably won’t be anything happening, and wonky stuff might be going on due to construction.

Before I clock out, I want to thank the people who made this both possible and successful; everybody who ever supported it, generally by letting me know that I wasn’t wasting my time, has done wonders. It’s the little things, like hearing that a middle schooler I’ve never known reads the site religiously, or getting a one-line email from a person I admire. If people don’t take the time to tip their virtual hats at you once in a while, it’s easy to think that you’re talking to yourself.

Nathan Hinchey was a great help by maintaining the Events page for a seasonable amount of time (he’s also stepped down from that role, so if anybody out there wants to pick up the slack for next year, drop me a note). The bloggers who linked to me and everyone who passed around the word of the site’s existence are responsible for making it known. My parents are enthusiastic and tireless supporters. Tal Atid takes the prize as the best fan, and has been great to bounce discussion off and in helping with the forum.

Finally, it’s my pride and my pleasure to have had the privilege of maintaining a site for Berkeley High School. BHS is a pain in the ass, dirty, ugly, slow, and dumb; but it’s also one of the most fascinating places in the world, and one of the few schools that could provide the rich basis for a site such as this.

So get some rest — lots of it — and be back when school restarts, for yet another year of everything that identifies the place. You can be sure we’ll be here to catalogue it.

Have a great summer.

— Brandon