Over the last week, biginamerica.net has gone through a significant upgrade of the underlying technical system. From a user perspective, the most obvious change is the visual design of the site, which is now much cleaner and easier on the eye. The anti-spam e-mail protection has changed: e-mail addresses posted on the site are now visible and clickable, yet are also encoded to prevent them from being harvested by automated 'spam bots'. For the time being, the "wysiwyg" text editor has been disabled as it was slow and did not provide reliable formatting. The default text editor now uses the "Textile" mark-up system, which means most text, web-links and e-mail addresses are simply typed as plain text. Behind the scenes, the upgrade should provide significant improvement in the speed of the site.