Happy New Year and welcome to BlueNC. Those of you who have been here a while will notice some changes we're implementing. You should still be able to do everything you were able to do before. We are still using Drupal, but we've added a new look and a few new features. There are some changes we will continue to work on and we will certainly take any suggestions under advisement. Be nice. I'm new at this and I'm tired! :)

The first thing we will fix is the new comment layout. I'm embarrassed to say that when I was trying this layout on for size, I did it at my site and never once checked to see what the comments would look like. I should have that fixed by later today.

Some of the colors we are using might not come across well on older computers or on every monitor. Please let me know if you are having really bad problems with the colors.

We have added two new horizontal panels with each having three content areas. The top panel has a section where we can feature original content and highlight it for a longer period of time than is normal on the front page. At first most of this content will come from the front page team, but we will also invite others to submit articles and as usual will pull from posts submitted by our awesome community. The top panel also is home to our own announcement page as well as the latest live-blog session.

The lower panel is home to BlueNCtv, the BlueNC Events list with a link to the calendar and the people's think tank. In the think tank we can highlight great comments from active threads. Like the recommended list, this section should help bring folks into the conversation that's going on away from the front page.

Please do leave constructive comments even if it's something you think we might already know about. We want the site to be easy to use and pleasing to the eye for as many as possible.