Alex determined to lead an active life

ALEX Reimers has a beaming smile that lights up any room. The nine-year-old is one of thousands of young Victorians not allowing cerebral palsy to stand in the way of a fun and active life.

Go Alex! This is what ChooseAbility is about. via The Advertiser AU
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Welcome to the New ChooseAbility

Sorry for the downtime. Believe it or not, someone out there cracked and defaced the site. This is the second time. Am I missing something? Can it really be anything to be proud of to have cracked (I refuse to miss-use the word "hacked") a site dedicated to people with disabilities?

A1TS is the grafitti-like tag he/she/they left on the site.

Anyway, on a more positive note, we have decided to leverage the power of Google and will be managing our content with Blogger, at least for now. As much as we like all the great functionality in PostNuke, we found ourselves spending way to much time maintaining code and not enough time updating our content. PostNuke and all CMS's really are projects created by geeks and for geeks which makes it surprising that they are as useable and friendly as they are. That said, they are not that useable nor are they friendly. See: Adaptive Path making a better CMS. The main thing we learned is not to try to maintain the software. If you are going to use a CMS, go with a hosted CMS. Hence, our move to Blogger. Blogger is hosted and maintained by Google so the software and it's maintenance are no longer our problem. It's all content and presentation now.

You will find that Blogger is much simpler than PostNuke with fewer features, but I think that will actually end up enhancing the content we produce, and hopefully the discussions surrounding that content. Simpler is better.

We know there are a lot of you out there that had ChooseAbility accounts and some were even pitching in by contributing links and even personal stories. We're sorry that those accounts are now deleted, don't worry though, we will soon have the archives of all the stories that you contributed before up and running. You won't be able to log in to ChooseAbility they way you used to, but setting up a Blogger account is not difficult, and we would be more than happy to help you set one up.

The way we see this happening, is anyone who is an active commenter, or actively emails us stories and links will be invited to be an administrator. We also plan to use Blogger's ability to send out email notices of updated content.

That should be plenty to get us started.

So thanks for your patience, thanks for your support and thanks for Choosing Ability.


QUESTION: What would you like to see on ChooseAbilty? How can we improve the site?