Over the last several weeks I’ve been receiving many requests to update some broken links on my blog. As you may remember, the EPN Blog morphed from the El Paso News Blog after some Russian hackers crashed my site in 2017. The change in the domain name caused many links to break.

Fixing the broken links is a labor intensive, time consuming process. I make the updates as I can. However, sometimes older posts suddenly get attention and readers send me requests to get documents I previously shared.

As some readers may remember, I broke the story of why former County Manager Steve Norwood was fired after I received documents from an open records request, I had filed. Last month I started receiving many requests for the documents I had posted in my 2015 blog post about Norwood.

Steve Norwood was recently appointed the Town Manager for the Town of Trophy Club, Texas.

More requests have started coming in as the result of the upcoming political races.

One of the issues I have dealt with over the years is not having control over the platforms many of us use. As readers may know, I have had a policy of not linking to documents and websites that I refer to on my blog posts. The reason for this is because URLs get picked up by cyber-squatters and they end up leading to websites of dubious nature or outright dangerous. It makes policing URLs, especially with a blog that has been online since 2000 very difficult.

Instead of linking source documents, I have been posting as much information about the source document to make it easy for the reader to Google it.

But the open records documents have been harder to keep up with. Platforms that I have tried using before come and go, or suddenly change their terms of use that make them untenable. Facebook or Twitter are unreliable for many reasons.

I thought I had resolved the issue by posting them directly on my blog, but the Russian hackers proved that I had not fixed the problem. I simple change of my blog’s URL broke many links.

I am using WordPress for my blog, and, unfortunately, because it is open source it gives the hackers many ways of breaking into the system.

Over the last few years I have been working on my own proprietary content management system (CMS)/social media platform. Being proprietary it makes it more difficult for the hackers to penetrate because my source code is not published.

I created a QWKSHR.com channel where I can share my documents. It being based on my Groupware IO platform, I believe it gives me better control over my documents.

I am now using QWKSHR.com to archive in a shareable format my shared documents. I have been posting the ones that have been requested recently. I’ll be adding the others as I have time, or are requested.

If you want a document that I have not posted, please let me know in the comments below and I will add it as time permits.

If you have documents to share, feel free to use QWKSHR.com. It is free.