It’s been a while since the American Spark has produced its usual, up-to-the minute articles. And it’s true — we have been kept from publishing such articles for a while now.
The reason is a simple one. Since 2006, this online publication has been published through Yahoo! Services. Around 2021, the Yahoo! brand was purchased by the Verizon corporation.
A few months ago, Verizon revitalized and updated the Yahoo! brand publishing software. The Verizon web publishing software produces an improvement over our old website, to be fair. It looks better, is more pleasant and easy on the eye and allows the Spark a real chance to compete with the biggest in the ‘Web marketplace’. We hope you enjoy the improvements.
The only problem? For all its improvements, the Verizon software does not allow a long-time publisher to automatically convert old postings or articles into the new format. So the entire backlog of the American Spark — over 15 years of hard work and publication — had to be converted to the new format before we could publish a single new article. Otherwise, the Spark’s entire backlog of old articles would be lost and gone forever.
In one action, the Spark would lose over 15 years of hard work and almost all of its links from other sites — in effect, forcing our web-based publication to start over from scratch.
A large number of our readers come to our website via links found on other sites. They see older articles before they see our most recent ones.
So we had little choice but to go through every previously published Spark article, and convert it to the new web publishing format. And there were hundreds of past articles to convert — each one was re- formatted “by hand…”
This is the result. We hope you like the improvements and enjoy the changes. But our website has the same dedication, the same focus — and the same individuals working behind the scenes — it has always possessed.
Now let’s get back into the thick of things …
