It's been a long time coming, but we're excited to announce that a new and improved TPMCafe is going to be launched in the next day or so.

Let me tell you a little about what to expect.

The site has been streamlined to accomplish three things:

1. make the content more readable by pulling all of the sub-blogs into one column,

2. make the look of the site gel with the new crisp design of the main site, TPMmuckraker, and TPM Election Central,

3. and give you the power through your account to recommend, comment and blog not only at TPMCafe, but across all of our sites. Just like at TPMCafe now, your comments on all of the TPM sites will be listed on your new and improved TPM profile.

On this third point, an exciting note. One of the most important parts of a community site like TPMCafe is your participation. We encourage our authors to interact with you and we encourage you to become authors.

The new community tools will take this to a new level. Reader posts will be listed in the sidebar of the main page of TPMCafe (not just on a sub-page), and those most recommended by fellow readers will float to the top. And if a reader is posting on something that TPMmuckraker or TPM Election Central has been covering, they can choose to have their post listed on the sidebar of those sites as well.

Our hope is that readers will use these tools to collectively promote new voices and push them to readers not only of TPMCafe but throughout the TPM network. The posts you put up, or you recommend, will now be see by a much bigger audience.

If this is all seems confusing right now, worry not. The new site will be up in the next few days and all will become clear. And once the site is up, I'm sure there will be lots of questions. Of course, at that point we'll have open threads to kill glitches and bugs and make sure you all know exactly how to enjoy the new and improved TPM.

We're really looking forward to it. Until then, I'm getting back to work to make sure we get it just right.