Hello and welcome to the Bay County Portal (BayCoPort.com). My name is Charles Buchanan, JR (folks call me Chuck) and I am the system operations manager for BayCoPort.com. That is to say that I am the guy that is responsible for creating and maintaining the website.

Let me first thank you for coming by the site and allow me to give you a little information on why I created this site, how I would like for users to be involved in the site, and how I hope for the site to grow.

Being the son of an Air Force Sergeant, I first moved here to Bay County, FL in 1980 when the family was transferred to Tyndall AFB. I went on to graduate Gulf Coast Community College then moved to Atlanta, GA a few years later as a software developer for a major telecom corporation. As beautiful as the Atlanta area is, I have to admit my heart had remained here.

Being involved in computer technology since the early 80’s I have seen computers go from stand alone machines that required programs to be typed in from boot up, to sharing information on local dial up bulletin board systems, and eventually as gateways to the World Wide Web. Who I am in short is a technology geek from PC-Fla.

So, I have witnessed the world wide web help make the world smaller, as the cliché goes, but one of the things that has bothered me is that, as the Internet technology has grown it has not necessarily given better insight to what is going on right outside one’s own front door. We live in a world with a currently estimated population of over six billion people. So, it’s not hard to find a group website; with that many people; who are interested in the same things you are. But on a local scale, what is happening in our own housing area, our own town, and in our own community; this new media has been slow to make headway in communication and relaying information to us. And, in an age of 24 hour global news networks we have a tendency to know more about a police chase in Los Angeles, then the sirens we hear just down the street.
This then, is my current effort in the BayCoPort.com; a means of communication, of organization, of community in the Internet age. I hope you will join in, have fun, and help contribute to the site. We have a great deal of resource at our finger tips to help us along. First we have the discussion boards, this is a place where any member of the site can post information or make comments, and expand upon ideas and information of others in an open forum.
For more formal posts by individuals to the public we offer what is known as a blog. The idea of a blog has been expanded somewhat over the last couple of years, but in this environment it can be your personnel commentary section to post to the community or anyone one in the world for that matter on what matters to you or what you think others should know about. If you would like to maintain a blog on the site please let us know and we will set it up and provide you the information on how it all works.

We also have community calendars of each town in Bay County and all the events for each section are shown as a total in the Bay County Calendar. If your town, community, or group is sponsoring an event you would like the public to know about please either leave feedback or post the event to the events forum on the website and we will see to it that it is posted in the events calendar.
We will also provide organization operated sections. If your interest group, community group, church, or hobby club would like a section on BayCoPort.com we can provide that for you. These sections can have all the neat gadgets and resources of the main site but will be managed by authorized people in your group. Let us know today if you are interested and we will provide the site setup for the section and the information on how to maintain it. For all local, non commercial, non political election based groups this service will be provided for free.

The Local business directory, we would like to build and maintain a local business directory. If you run a local business please go to the business directory section of the site and register your business. This directory will soon be available to the public users of the site regarding business services and products with contact information.

The Local Group Register, in the same interface as the Local Business Directory you can register your local community group, church, or club with a group description and contact information. This information too will soon be provided to the public users of the site regarding your organization’s details and contact information.

I hope I have given you a good general idea of what this site is intended to be and the inspiration to make it as much as it can be. The technology here is the tool, we can cover any number of mediums from written text, to streaming video but it means nothing without user participation, directive, and feedback. I hope to provide you with the technology through BayCoPort.com and have you provide a great, growing community here on the Internet and in right outside your own front door.
I will continue to update this blog as new items and sections come online so please check back for further updates.

I am Chuck Buchanan,
Thank you for visiting, reading , registering, and contributing to the Bay County Portal.
And I hope to see you online and out there in the Bay County Area.