“Work as if you were to live 100 Years, Pray as if you were to die tomorrow.” –Benjamin Franklin

Fellow Patriots, we made some significant changes this week at The Patriot Post.

When I launched The Patriot as The Federalist back in August of ‘96, I did so with the mission of advocating for individual liberty, restoring constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values.

That is a formidable mission.

My objective was to provide grassroots conservatives across the nation with a brief, informative and entertaining analysis of relevant news and policy matters from reputable research, advocacy and media organizations.

That is an equally formidable objective.

Obviously, if we were to have any success with our mission and objectives, we would need an outstanding group of Patriots to manage every aspect of the organization. In addition, we would need an abundance of sound advice.

Today, The Patriot employs remarkably talented editors and staff, and we are blessed with a National Advisory Committee that exceeds the expertise of any publishing organization in the world.

Consequently, The Patriot is now the Internet’s leading voice of Essential Liberty, and we have remained true to our mission every day of operation since our inception.

Each day, our staff receives an assortment of gracious e-mail praising “Mark Alexander” for one thing or another. Let me assure you, however, that while those messages are humbling and appreciated, they are misdirected. The Patriot is a team effort. Coaches and colonels may get the credit, but it is the guys on the scrimmage line, and on the front lines, who make it all happen.

This week, as I contemplated Ben Franklin’s words, “Work as if you were to live 100 years,” one member of our team comes to mind.

Our IT director, Jonathan Connor, has spent the last 10 months working with other staff members – primarily Creative Director Ron Locke – in order to completely (and I do mean completely) rebuild the technical architecture of The Patriot. The result is a publication that is no longer bound by the technological limits that had constrained our mission for several years.

This has been a major undertaking – one that has taken Jonathan away from his young family on more than a few nights and weekends.

Last fall, we launched an interim Web site to get us through this transition.

On Tuesday, Jonathan launched our new Web site, and while most of our users will note the considerable aesthetic changes to the site, it is the custom built architecture holding it all together that will allow us to offer many more features that benefit our readers, further our mission, and carry us well into the future.

Our readers will now have the ability to leave comments on all featured content and opinion. The site navigation has also been made more intuitive. Finally, the ability to share content with others via social networks is greatly improved, and Patriot Post content will be adaptable to more platforms.

In the coming days, we will be adding hundreds of additional resources to our Historic Documents section and a comprehensive site search feature for all content.

Coming soon will be added features like content delivery by RSS/XML and other methods for delivery to iPhone and Kindle. We will also be adding a section for additional essays submitted by members of our National Advisory Committee and other readers who are very knowledgeable in their respective professions.

In short, what the IT team has created is a highly dynamic custom framework – one that will allow us to rapidly build out new features, and one that will serve as a catalyst for a vibrant Patriot online community.

Managing Editor Nate Jackson adds, “The content on the site is second to none, and all with no third-party advertising. That also means no pagination simply to create more ad 'impressions’ like commercial news sites on the Net.”

In addition to a lineup of the nation’s leading conservative columnists, one of the more significant features we now offer our readers is our Patriot Headlines service.

Your Patriot Post editors and staff review countless news, policy and opinion releases around the clock, evaluating them for reader interest and relevance to our mission, and we post essential news reports to Patriot Headlines. Unlike “Drudge Report” and other news aggregators, we exclude entertainment, lifestyle, weather and other headings irrelevant to liberty.

Our readers are occupied with more important tasks than searching through news headlines, so leave that to us. We will keep it brief and will not distract you with advertising.

Last, but certainly not least, our new Web site will enable us to do a much more effective job of promoting the most important venture we have ever undertaken, the Essential Liberty Project.

On behalf of our staff and National Advisory Committee, I’d like to thank you, our hundreds of thousands of Patriot readers, for supporting our mission, and for remaining so steadfast in support of liberty. It is indeed an honor and a privilege to serve you and we remain steadfast in our commitment to our original mission.