Dear Readers of Midrange Server Publications:

On September 20, Midrange Server will be changing the domain name from which it hosts its emails and will also change the name of the company behind them.

The Midrange Server name has served us well since we began publishing our newsletters in the summer of 2001. That company name, in fact, dates back to 1996 with the incarnation of my first online publishing company, which published a Windows and Unix newsletter of that same name along side our flagship letter at the time, The Four Hundred. When this company was reconstituted in the wake of the collapse of the former employer of many of this company's current employees, I had an existing corporation and set of domain names, so we grabbed the Midrange Server ball and ran with it.

Since that summer, a lot has happened. We have broadened and deepened our coverage in the OS/400 market, and we have moved steadily in the Windows, Linux, and Unix markets. Our plan is to replicate the success we have had in the OS/400 space by cutting into these other markets as well as by moving into other areas of the still-untamed jungle that is information technology.

And, because we have a sense of humor as well as a sense of the Darwinian nature of the modern IT market, we have decided to call the new domain where our newsletters will be located: IT Jungle.

So instead of going to www.itjungle.com to get your newsletters on September 20, you'll have to start pointing to www.itjungle.com. For those of you who use email filters (like I do), our emails will carry the same subject lines as they have for years, but the "From:" will now be "IT Jungle" instead of "Midrange Server." If you sort incoming emails by their incoming address, to change the email filter on your subscription to, say, The Four Hundred, you will have to switch your filter from looking for email from "tfh@itjungle.com" to "tfh@itjungle.com". This is all pretty straight forward.

All current content will be moved over from the existing site, and we will use a redirect hard-coded into the Web server so all existing itjungle.com links in emails or out there on the Web at large will point to the same pages, only now at the IT Jungle site.

We are excited about the domain change, and we plan to have some fun with it.

The name of the company that I preside over is now going to be Guild Companies, Inc, a name I chose because of my respect for Renaissance trade guilds. No matter what we call it, this publishing company has been more of a collection of professionals--working in unison but in a distributed fashion and with as little hierarchy as possible--than any top-down company I have ever seen.

I am not sure how to rectify the organization of a trade guild with a modern corporation, but I will be pondering this in the coming months. The name change is a start.

One more thing. To simplify the process of contacting our authors, we have created a new Contacts Page at http://www.itjungle.com/contactus.html that will allow our readers to send a message directly to our news editors, technical editors, and publishing staff rather than having to fish around for their emails. We hope you find this feature useful, and it is the only means by which you can contact our people from this point out. All existing itjungle.com emails will be turned off on September 20.

Welcome to the IT Jungle!