I have been doing this site, westportonlakechampain.com for a little over a year now and it has received a very warm reception. I have been thinking for a while about directions for expansion and recently decided to make my move.
Yesterday, I got up way too early in the morning and registered three new domain names: www.artswestport.com, www.westporteducation.com, and www.smartgrowthwestport.com. These new registrations are wending their way through the Internet DNS system and should be hooked up to actual (though rudimentary) websites within a few days.
The one I am most excited about is artswestport.com which can feature local arts events and promote local artists in all mediums. If you are a local artist and would like to be included with a profile page, links (at no charge), let me know.
The site that's the closest to launching is westporteducation.com. It has seem to me that there has been a need for a site about educational opportunities in Westport for a while, but the project has taken on a certain urgency because of recent distribution of misinformation about local educational spending via email lists.
I hope the new site will serve both to make people aware of educational opportunities in time to take advantage of them; and to provide detailed factual, verifiable information to voters when they are deciding whether or not to fund educational opportunities in our community. A preliminary draft of this site can be seen at www.kathryncramer.com/westport_education/. So far I have posted the past 3 years of school district budgets as context for the upcoming district budgeting meetings. I am expecting to be able to post more hard information in the weeks to come.

Once I have covered the basics, a point I hope to be able to explore on that site is that our school district is not educating hypothetical children, but rather each child has his or her strengths and weaknesses.
Because our educational population tends to run between 10 to 25 kids per grade, the learning differences of individual kids can make large diffrences in the cost of education. In a larger district, these things average themselves out, but our district is so small that what would be statistical noise in someone else's budget can cause financial volatility in our local budget. These are not spherical children of uniform density; they are our kids, and the community must do right by them.
The third site, smartgrowthwestport.com, will provide a venue for ideas about how to grow our community and its tax base while keeping what we love about Westport and this area. I view it as a form of newspaper OP-ED page. I get manifestos via email and hear impassioned speeches on the street, but there is no central place to go to read frustrated visions of how much better our local economy could function If Only . . . Like my commercial anthologies, I will solicit some of the material for the site; I will also read essays for consideration up to 3,000 words in length. (This will not be a paying market.) My own personal hobby horse which I may ride there from time to time is that Chazy Westport needs to get fiber-optics though to Westport as soon as possible; I believe the economic impact will be substantial.
As these sites come on line, I will post more information and links.