As an owner of Macer Media, publisher of The Sacramento Press, I have never made a political statement on this site. Today I will, out of self-preservation, and a concern for what is just and good for this site, and the people of this community in general. Wikipedia went black Wednesday due to its strong opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Google also voiced its opposition with a link on its homepage. Many other Interenet companies took similar steps. So the first question is: What is SOPA? SOPA is a piece of proposed legislation in the House of Representatives aimed at, you guessed it, stopping piracy. The main proponent of the bill is the Motion Picture Association of Ame

As of today The Sacramento Press has an official mobile site. The great thing about this mobile site is that it can be found at the same location as our regular site, it's way more readable on your average smartphone. Our great development team optimized most of the pages on our site for the mobile browsing experience and those pages include: Sign-up Log in Front Page and Tag Pages User Profiles Search The other big feature we are launching is a developer API. An API or Application Programming Interface is a way for someone to interact with our site programatically. So if someone wanted to make an application for a phone or the Web that used our publicly available data, now they c

You know who you are, but when you write for The Sacramento Press, our readers might not. That’s part of the impetus behind today’s site update concerning disclosures. We have added a new section to our “write article” page that pokes and prods everyone from staff to community contributors to disclose personal and professional affiliations to anything discussed in stories. This update goes hand-in-hand with an update to our terms of use policy, which now requires a disclosure in any circumstance where a contributor has a “personal or professional interest in the subject matter of such article.” The interface is clean and simple and is just a text area that allows you to add a short des

When 34-year-old Elizabeth Jackson was a first-time mom staying home alone to raise her son, she felt isolated and sometimes unsure of herself – but a creative outlet her mother never knew of when she was an infant helped her feel connected and confident – her blog. “The community was the best thing,” she said. “Being a mom is so isolating.” The isolation, she said, comes from not being able to have a conversation with an infant – who was the only one home. For Jackson, the isolation was made harder, as she was new to Sacramento, but her blog gave her a ready community of people going through the same things, and they were always just an email away. “You have all these questions,” she s

Men of all ages and shoe sizes gathered at the corner of 18th Street and Capitol Avenue, ready to walk one mile in women’s high heels to support WEAVE’s first “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” event. “There are so many men that are affected by sexual assault, and this is a way for men to show their support,” said Amber Stott, WEAVE director of communications relations. Stott estimated that since Friday WEAVE has raised over $63, 000. Stott said all proceeds will go to WEAVE and benefit the various services that WEAVE provides, including counseling, WEAVE safe house, legal assistance, prevention programs and 24-hour support and response teams to help survivors of sexual assault. In addition to

It’s been nearly two and half years since we launched The Sacramento Press, and today we released a few changes (more than just the temporary purple color), one of which is removing the beta stamp from our navigation. What is a beta stamp, you ask? Well, since you can no longer see it on our site, I grabbed this screenshot of what it used to look like. Beta generally indicates that a company is still working out the kinks in their core product. But we finally are happy to say we feel pretty happy with what we have, so no more beta! Does this mean we stop working on new features? Absolutely not. We will in fact bring new and increasingly cool features to The Sacramento Press over the co

Each day there are hundreds of individuals and families living without basic human needs, such as food and shelter right in our own Sacramento County. Using Sacramento Community Family Resources website statics which received over 97,000 page views since January 1st 2011 there were over: • 1,728 Unique page views from words such as “homeless shelters in Sacramento”. • 2,945 Unique page views from words such as “food closet locations in Sacramento”. The list can go on and on, but the most important thing to know is that each of these numbers is an individual or family that is in immediate need of food or shelter. The question is “do we really need research and statistics to tell us that t

Now you can add captions and credits to images that you upload to the site. Because we have added captions and credits, the interface has changed for adding pictures to the slide show at the top of each story. The interface will allow you to give yourself a photo credit and assign multiple captions at the same time. Captions are optional, but image credits are required. You can also rearrange your pictures by simply dragging and dropping the rows into the appropriate order. You drag a picture by clicking the gridded dot icon located just to the left of your picture. In order to display this new information, we had to change the look and feel of the article’s slide show gallery. Captions

A Wal-Mart Facebook campaign is helping to raise awareness of hunger in our communities while offering $1 million dollars to the fight. One in five Californians is food insecure and in the Sacramento area 17.7% of families (national average: 9.2%) cannot afford regular meals. Sacramento needs your help! Anyone with a Facebook can participate and support the fight against hunger by visiting the website and “liking” Sacramento. Wal-Mart will donate $1 million to the community with the most support and $100,000 each to the next five communities. The Sacramento area is currently in 7th place. The deadline is December 31, 2010, 4pm PST. Spread the word Once you've “Liked” Sacramento, there'

The Department of Human Assistance (DHA), in conjunction with its partners, Volunteers of America and Sacramento Area Emergency Housing Center (SAEHC) will provide winter housing and shelter to homeless families from December 1, 2010, through March 31, 2011. DHA will provide $150,000 in funding. With half of this funding Volunteers of America will be able to provide up to 25 beds for families at 3547 Myrtle Avenue, and with the other half SAEHC will be able to provide up to 25 beds for families at 3671 5th Avenue. “Sacramento County is committed to helping the homeless in our community,” said Paul Lake, DHA Interim Director. “While the funding amount is less than in previous years, it wil