Rescue Humor The Entertaining Side of Police, Fire & EMS
Today for the fourth time I have re-launched the web site www.rescuehumor.com. Some of you have been with me from the early days. Many of you likely only found this page sometime recently. No matter how long you have been around thanks for the support.
RescueHumor 4.0 has me joining the First Arriving Network. What does that mean? It just means that I am part of an amazing network of blogs that share some technical resources. I will not bore you with the details but basically it allows me to stop worrying about web servers and concentrate on providing you content. As for content I will address that later in this article.
By now some of you are asking what this version 4.0 stuff means. It has to do with how RescueHumor has been operated and created as a web page. For any tech minded people some of the below history should be intresting…
RescueHumor 1.0
I first registered the domain name and launched RescueHumor back in December 2003. At that time it was created using a program called Dream Weaver and I was coding it all in HTML. I had originally started this web page due to an issue with employees at my agency getting into trouble using the Police Department email to share funny photos. So to keep the photos off the PD Email I had people send me the photos and I posted them to the web.
RescueHumor 2.0
By April 2005 I was getting traffic from all over the world. I did not know about search engine optimization but must have done something right as Google was sending me traffic like crazy. Coding everything by HTML was getting too much. So I found a simple free database and content management system called Drupal.
The page ran great but then social media like MySpace and Facebook came along. I found myself doing more an more on social media and less on the web page. In late February 2009 when doing an upgrade to the web page database it crashed and I lost everything.
Because I was spending so much time on social media I let the web page sit dormant.
RescueHumor 3.0
In January 2011 there had been a number of news stories about police and social media use. I knew many police officers and Fire/EMS employees who stopped using social media for a short time. I also was about to take a new job and move to a new city. It seemed like a good time to bring back the web page.
This time RescueHumor was created using Word Press blogging software. The web page was active for a while but again it seemed Facebook for more attention than the web page. Although with I found myself doing something I had not done before, posting blogs about topics I had feelings about, while still trying to be a bit funny.
RescueHumor 4.0
So that brings us to the latest version of RescueHumor as a web page. It is still running Word Press, but the servers and look are thanks to the folks at First Arriving Network.
The Content will change a bit. Don’t worry we will still be doing funny photos. But we are going to move away from just photos and try to provide a better-rounded “entertainment” side of public safety. As a matter of fact we changed the slogan to be “The Entertaining Side of Police/Fire/EMS”
With RescueHumor 4.0 I would like to publish more of the funny stories people send me. So if you have something funny happen on shift please let us know.
I will also be looking at starting a Pod Cast for RescueHumor. I already have a few guests lined up, so look for the first one to roll out real soon.
There are some other things I have wanted to cover in blog posts on RescueHumor. Until now I did not have a real reason to. But a re-launch with an new look, should give me that push to try some new ideas.
OK… I think I have said enough at this point. Thanks again for your support and how you keep coming back to see what is posted!
~RJ
