News-Record.com

I'm about to walk out of the office for the weekend, but as it stands right now, we will be launching our redesigned site sometime Monday morning -- early enough to catch a lot of people still at home, we hope, but late enough that we can have plenty of staff here to deal with any significant problems.

The URL will be the same: http://www.news-record.com

This will be what is called a "soft launch," meaning we expect some ragged edges and not everything that's supposed to be up will be at first.

In particular -- and this obviously is a big disappointment -- before we can enable comments on all stories, we're going to have to figure out a permanent policy on whether and how we're going to require users to register. As JR has mentioned, the problem of abusive and/or obscene comments, particularly at our Letters blog, might require a more forceful solution. That problem relates to the redesign because the company that created our new system has never created a registration system, the tech folks tell me.

In the meantime, stories will be accompanied by links to our existing online discussion forums for news, sports and other subjects.

Once the new site goes live -- and for any newbies, you'll know because our banner across the top will be red instead of green -- please e-mail any comments, concerns or questions here.

And cross your fingers.