The Archives

The eighth annual Halloween Ghost Story Contest winning entries have now all been posted. This year featured a couple of winners from the same high school in New Jersey, and continues the trend of having more and more winners from out of state. Congratulations to all the winners; we'll be trying to contact you all soon.

We've now started to post the winners in our eighth annual Halloween Ghost Story Contest. We'll be continuing to post them throughout the night, category by category.

Because it's so popular this time of year, we've made a link to the Saugus Election "Questions to the Candidates" on the sidebar for easy access. Although it's only been available for less than a week, some candidates have already responded.

The deadline for this year's Halloween Ghost Story Contest has now passed. We've acknowledged all submissions that included a valid e-mail address (and we've sent out requests for additional information like age category when necessary). If you submitted a story and did not get a confirmation from us, please write ASAP. On a related note, if you're interested in a little more background about the contest, Saugus.net founder and contest originator Eric Brown has written a brief Saugus.net Ghost Story Contest history on the Saugus blog.

Tonight's the deadline for this year's Halloween Ghost Story Contest. If you're still working on an entry, you don't have much time left. Anything that comes in after midnight will be kept for next year...

This is just a reminder that tomorrow night is the deadline for this year's Saugus.net Ghost Story Contest, so if you're planning on entering this year, you'll need to get your story into us quickly (and please don't forget to include your age category: elementary school, middle school, high school, or adult along with your entry).

As we've done with past Saugus elections, we've set up a "Questions to the Candidates" section where all the candidates for positions in town (not just candidates for Selectman or School Committee) can answer an assortment of questions you sent us (via e-mail, FAX, or in person at Founders' Day). As always, candidate participation is voluntary, and candidates will probably continue to submit responses until just prior to the election itself.

This weekend coming up is the final weekend prior to the deadline for this year's Saugus.net Halloween Ghost Story Contest, so if you're one of those people who can only write on the weekends this is your last chance. Also, please don't forget to include your age category (elementary school, middle school, high school, or adult) along with your entry.

The SHS Alumni Assocation site was updated today.

The Saugus Lynnhurst Elementary School site got numerous updates today.

Over the past week or so we've made a couple mentions about some of the syndicated online resources available in Saugus. There has been a little confusion because not all browsers support such resources directly. Modern browsers like Safari and Firefox usually have built-in support for RSS and are free upgrades if you don't already have one installed; iCalendar however usually requires a special application (like iCal, Sunbird, Chandler, Microsoft Works, Novell Evolution, or any one of a number of others) or plug-in (for applications like Firefox and Thunderbird. With the proper software, you'll be able to freely subscribe to the various syndicated resources on your desktop computer, PDA, or even iPod.

Since the yard sales season is basically over for the year, we've removed the Yard Sales Calendar from the sidebar. However, we've also directly syndicated them via iCalendar, so people interested in just yard sales can subscribe to the Saugus Yard Sales Calendar without having to pull in all the events from the main Saugus Calendar.

Just a reminder to include your age category (elementary school, middle school, high school, or adult) along with your Halloween Ghost Story Writing Contest entry, and don't forget to provide some valid contact information so we can confirm that we received it. At this point we've already confirmed every entry we've received by e-mail or U.S. Mail (as of today); we're still sending out confirmations for entries that have been FAXed in. Please use e-mail as your primary means of submitting entries; FAXing and the Post Office should only be tried if you cannot use e-mail for some reason or another.

The Computer Terms Glossary was updated today.

We finished up a few improvements to some of Saugus' syndicated data sources today.

The most noticeable and useful will probably be the fact that in addition to subscribing to the whole Saugus calendar (subscribe via iCalendar) or select subsets (including the SHS Alumni Association Calendar and the Saugus Rotary Calendar), it's now also possible to subscribe to just the Saugus Town Government and Saugus Public Schools portions.

Less importantly we've added styling for the admittedly small group who views the RSS feeds of Saugus newsgroups (like saugus.soc.talk and saugus.forsale) directly in browsers that can handle XML styling but not RSS. For others not in this small category there will be no obvious changes.

Since the mention of the Places Neighboring Saugus page made last week, we've had a few reports of various other communities' sites being shut down. We've looked into them all and removed those that no longer belong.

The office will be closed today for the holiday. However, the Community Events Calendar, Yard Sales Calendar, and other like pages will continue to be updated. Likewise, we'll still happily receive Ghost Story Contest entries today.

The Guide to Free Software was updated today.

The Places Neighboring Saugus page was updated today.

The Saugus Historical Society site was updated today.

The Saugus Public Schools site has seen numerous recent updates both major and minor. Of especial note is all the recent work done as part of the Teaching American History Grant project; it is pretty much finished and is now being coordinated with other sites out of state.

October is here, so now's the time to start thinking about your entry for this year's Halloween Ghost Story Writing Contest (if you haven't already). Remember, the deadline is the 26^th of this month.