Nuclear is Our Future was founded in 2005, originally as a CafePress store (June 12, 2005) attached to a blog (July 6, 2005). We expanded to include a discussion board (July 13, 2005) and started an informational website (August 19, 2005), before getting up to speed in December, when we were able to post news at the intended rate. On January 1, 2006, we moved the blog onto the main site, and created a news service for items that only included simple links, without analysis. During 2006 and early 2007, we were able to post news at a steady, but reduced, rate, while trying to provide more reader services and consolidating those we already provided, taking the one-year anniversary as an opportunity to review our effectiveness. Reorganizing the site somewhat, we created a new section for regulatory reform-related blog posts, called NRCWatch (July 2, 2006), and reformatted the main site to appear consistent with the blog/news page and news service (July 9, 2006). On January 5, 2007, we moved NRCWatch to the front page of the Regulatory Reform section of the main site, in order to operate on a task-by-task basis instead of a tool-by-tool basis, and we moved the discussion board onto the main site the next day. We were then able to increase the posting rate until May 2007, when the amount of news and the task of maintaining the existing services overwhelmed our trained team of dutiful elves Stewart.
From June 2007 to August 2007, we tried to reorganize using the tools we had while attempting to outwork the problem. “The problem,” it of course turned out, was not a low posting rate, but rather a lack of proper consideration at the beginning of what we were trying to do. Since then, we’ve been overhauling the entire site, changing some platforms (InvisionFree to phpBB for the forums, Blogger to WordPress for the blog/news page, introducing WordPress for what was once static content), and thinking in terms of task management rather than tool management. We’re still trying to overhaul the site, and that’s still underway.
Task management will work much better with one access point, and we’re currently working on our own content management system. If you’re pro-nuclear and a PHP programmer, and want to help out, we would love to hear from you!
This page was written by Stewart Peterson on May 17, 2009
