Welcome to the D.C. Registry's first newsletter. I want to personally thank you for visiting the Registry and for signing up for this newsletter. Since I'm sure that you are already bombarded with lots of unsolicited junk mail, I will try to keep these mailings fairly infrequent. I don't have a regular schedule for mailing these, although eventually they may be a weekly occurence.

As you may know, my name is Philip Hagen, and I am the webmaster here at the D.C. Registry. There are other people who help with various projects, but I am primarily responsible for designing and maintaining the Registry. If you have any questions about or suggestions for the Registry, please feel free to send them to me at "webmaster@dcregistry.com". Thanks.

Recent developments at the Registry include the posting of the D.C. Power Brokers for March 1997. The D.C. Power Brokers page ("http://dcregistry. com/power.html") features some of the best home pages in the D.C. area. If you know of local home pages that are either technically advanced, informative, or just plain entertaining, please nominate them using the form on the Power Brokers page or just let me know by e-mail. The more nominations I get from you, the better the Power Brokers page will be. I certainly can't keep track of all of the excellent efforts by local webmasters by myself.

In addition to this newsletter, other recent developments at the Registry include the Free Home Pages program. It's still in alpha-testing stage, but you can test the script online. Now you can create your own home page without any knowledge of HTML or access to a server. If you know how to fill out a form on the web, you can create your own home page. The script is still buggy and we plan to add a number of features, such as visitor counters, forms, and the ability to upload your own graphics. More information is available online at "http://dcregistry.com/homes.html".

In addition to improving the free home pages script, our other projects for the next two months include working some of the bugs out of the new Classified Ads so that they are fully searchable on all fields, including location, keywords, and more; releasing a dramatically improved bulletin board with a number of discussion forums such as D.C. Dining, Entertainment, Sports, and more; and working on a database format for the entire Registry so that it will be searchable by many different criteria.

If you have any ideas for features that you would like to see implemented, please feel free to send them to me at "webmaster@dcregistry.com". Also, if you haven't already done so, I encourage you to download the D.C. Registry button and add it to your page. If you do so and let me know, I'll add a link to your site on the Registry's front page. My goal is for the Registry to be Washington's Online Community, the first and only place that you need to turn to to find local information. To reach this goal, I will need your help. If you enjoy the Registry or find it useful, please *tell people* about it! The Registry has thousands more links and resources than any other D.C.-oriented site, but we do not have the budget of a Microsoft or Yahoo to promote it. Therefore, we depend on the quality of the site and word of mouth to grow. It will be an exciting adventure, and I hope you will join us.

Philip A. Hagen, Webmaster
D.C. Registry
http://dcregistry.com
Washington's Online Community