Welcome in. Wait, what's Bellingham Today?

Good question. Bellingham Today is essentially an open press site. A place where anyone in town can publish, for free. You get the tools, your own page, and your own byline. If something's happening where you live and you want to write about it, you can, and it shows up in the feed next to everything else. No gatekeeping, no editor deciding whether your story is worth telling.

The whole thing is built from scratch too. No WordPress, no site builder, no template bought off a shelf. Every feature was made by hand, which means when something needs to change, it actually changes instead of me fighting some plugin.

Who's "we," exactly?

Fair warning: when I say "we" throughout this, it's really just me. One person. So if something feels a little rough around the edges here and there, that's why, and I'm working on it.

The idea's been in my head for a few years. I finally started building in May, and soft launched the site in late June. It went out barebones on purpose. You could post a story, upvote or downvote it, and the feed ranked things by what was hot. That was about it. The point wasn't to launch something finished, it was to get a real thing in front of real people and figure out what it actually needed from there.

Where it's at now

Turns out it needed a lot, and most of it's been built since. Anonymous voting so you don't need an account just to weigh in. A proper editor so writing doesn't feel like typing into a plain box. A trust system, comments with threaded replies and likes, tags, verification, user profiles and avatars, a media library, a full weather and air quality page, autosave and drafts so you never lose a story, a writer's dashboard, and this blog. Among a lot of smaller stuff in between.

And it's still in active development. This isn't the finished site. It's the version that's live while I keep building toward the real launch. Updates are happening all the time, and this blog is where I'll write about them as they land, so if you want to keep up with what's new or what's coming, this is the place to check.

Anyway. Thanks for being here early. More soon.