Tip of the Hat to Progress: B Shifter Unveils New Landing Page to Support Expanding Content.
Tip of the Hat to Progress
B Shifter Unveils New Landing Page to Support Expanding Content
By Nick Brunacini
B Shifter Buckslip, March 4, 2025
Parade hats were all the rage in the fire service during the late 18th century. They began life as stovepipe hats that firefighters decorated with images representing their fire company. Recently, parade hats from the 18th and 19th centuries have sold for tens of thousands of dollars at the foofiest auctions in the free world. Everything old is cool again.
As much as we love fire service tradition, progress is how we grow and thrive. This year, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of bshifter.com, our home base for the Blue Card landing page and the central hub for the entire B Shifter franchise.
Throughout our history, we’ve targeted our efforts to develop our training programs, improve our infrastructure, and, in recent years, provide an unrivaled repository of value-added content. As we reflect on these positive changes, we realize our current setup can’t support our rapidly expanding catalog.
To address this, we created a dynamic new landing page that serves as a portal to everything we offer—including B Shifter articles and podcasts, free downloads, the B Shifter store, and other content that doesn’t belong in college credit/certification-based training corner of our website. Here is the current landing page:
And here is the new landing page:
Rest assured, the Blue Card web pages you rely on remain unchanged. To access Blue Card programs, training, events, conferences, workshops and CE, simply click on the Blue Card icon at the top of the new landing page to be redirected.
The new design better supports features like the weekly B Shifter Buckslip and enhances accessibility across our growing platform. And because everything we do is built on the foundation of Alan V. Brunacini’s vision and his drive to improve everything he touched, you can look forward to continual improvement as we expand the content in both areas of the website for the remainder of our lives.
This brings us back to parade hats. To mark the 20th year of bshifter.com, we have commissioned an artisan to create the modern firefighter’s parade hat. Being a B Shifter never goes out of style.
Nick Brunacini joined the Phoenix Fire Department (PFD) in 1980. He served seven years as a firefighter on different engine companies before being promoted to captain and working nine years on a ladder company. Nick served as a battalion chief for five years before promoting to shift commander in 2001. He then spent the next five years developing and teaching the Blue Card curriculum at the PFD’s Command Training Center. His last assignment with the PFD was South Shift commander. Nick retired from the PFD in 2009 after spending the first 26 years of his fire-department career as a B-shifter and the last three on C Shift. Nick is the author of “B-Shifter—A Firefighter’s Memoir.”He also co-wrote “Command Safety.” Today, he is the publisher of B Shifter and a Blue Card instructor.