Andy Ekstrom's Facebook profile includes his favorite quote: "If everyone likes you, you aren't doing your job. However, if no one likes you, you can't do your job." Sounds good, even wise. But in fact, nearly everyone seemed to like Andy. So as the news of his death at the age of 35 circulated Tuesday afternoon and evening, the outpouring of emotion through Facebook, texts and Twitters soon became a flood. Ekstrom, who worked as a project manager for Heller Pacific, was instrumental in launching and filling developer Mike Heller, Jr.'s game-changing MARRS building on 20th Street between J and K, and his two-building Retro Lodge complex downtown at 11th and H. Ekstrom was a constant pre

Have you ever noticed yourself straining to make out someone's profile picture? Perhaps you've had trouble seeing detail in an article photo. If so, you'll be pleased to know that tonight we've rolled out an update to The Sacramento Press that should make your pictures clearer and smoother than they've been before. Initially, you'll only see the difference in pictures uploaded after today, but in a few days we'll go back and fix everything uploaded to the site since day one. In addition, article images now appear in the order in which they were uploaded, and we're now accepting a few more image file types (although we recommend sticking with JPEG or PNG files). We also added a few new cap

The Sacramento Press was updated tonight with a grab bag of wish-list items, tweaks, and bug fixes that have been accumulating over the last two months. Recently, we've been using email as a tool to pass on news and workshop event details to you. Now, with this new release, we've started verifying  email addresses on our site. So, for all new signups (or if you're already signed up and you change your email address) you'll get an email that contains a link to visit that lets us know your email address is in good working order. This will help us better communicate with you. We run a lot of free, fun workshops here in our downtown office, and having a working email is really important for u

It remains to be seen what will become of Mike Heller and Paul Thiebaud's lauded Tribute Building, a monument to their fathers soon to be erected at the corner of 20th and Capitol Avenue, according to Bob Shallit's column in The Bee. But before we stride forward into the future, he's a photo of the old "livery stable" (its actual use is more familiar to us as home of Steve Rex Cycles) that once sat on the site, before Heller's crew got to it.   Then there's the question of the old trees that potentially stand in the way of views of the new building...

Another Sacramento Press update just went live. Among the two dozen changes we made to the site tonight are a few that concern storylines. We've noticed that it may take an article or two to get a sense for the common thread in your subject. Perhaps you intended to write about one thing but ended up writing about another. If this has happened to you, you'll be glad to know that you can now rename your storylines. Other changes we pushed out include some icon fixes, tweaks to our RSS feeds, making profile edits more forgiving, and many more tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements.

Hello again. Last I wrote we had made our first few changes to the Sacramento Press website. Time does fly, I suppose, because we're just about done with another update. If all goes well, you'll probably be seeing it in action sometime next week. And like last time, this isn't revolutionary stuff; we're still fine-tuning the engine to make sure everything's solid before we roll out the shiny new features. So, what's in this update? Right now we have fifteen additions, tweaks, and squashed bugs coded up and ready to go, including fixes to an RSS feed that broke last week, the ability to rename your storyline, and a few graphics changes throughout the site (ever notice that the thumbs down

Tonight I'm starting a new storyline (yes, this one). Here I'll be giving you a look at the Sacramento Press from a nuts-and-bolts point of view. Whenever we roll out a sparkly, new feature for you to use or fix a bug that's been causing you trouble, I'll try to let you know about it here. If you ever want to discuss the site or have any questions about something we've added, let me know in a comment! And to christen this storyline, let me tell you about the release we pushed out tonight. It may not seem like a big change, and that's because it's mostly a collection of odds and ends we only discovered we needed after going live two weeks ago. Have you ever uploaded an image when writing a