Archive for the ‘ Projects ’ Category

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29
Dec

Moving to a new CMS

In all of our ownership changes, I think this is actually just third time we’ve switched our entire website from back-end to front-end. We’ve gone through many iterations of the website itself, but the back-end hasn’t fluctuated much. And until now, we’ve always been sort of “stuck” on out-dated and clunky systems. Every time I have bemoaned Town News’ NewsSys software on Twitter I generally get a lot of sympathy.

At the end of 2011, we began working on a transition to Town News’ much improved BLOX system, complete with a fair bit of website revamping (but nothing too drastic that would freak out our readers.) But most of all, it required a fairly big change for the way we publish stories online. The copy desk had to alter their routines quite a bit, and while BLOX is much nicer and definitely more powerful, there’s a learning curve that we’re still traversing.

But gone are the days of having to publish the website every time we update the site. Gone too are the constant re-ordering of priorities to position stories where we want them. We still struggle with the new way of prioritizing, but we’ll catch on and get it flowing smoothly. And because we don’t have to publish the site when we add a story (once a story is added either manually or via .xml, it is live on the website) we now need to change the publish date or set a story as Do Not Publish if it’s not ready for public viewing. Learned that the hard way after some lifestyle stories went up on the site with our internal slug as the headline. Oops :)

Some of the things I really like:

  • Searching for articles, images – anything really in the back-end just became a whole lot easier. Love it.
  • The ability to move ‘blocks’ around easily according to our needs is fantastic.
  • The incorporation of ‘If you go’ boxes, bio boxes, youtube videos etc into a story is wonderful.
  • Not having to publish all the time is a timesaver.
  • It just *feels* refreshing, both the back-end and the redesign. I am a fan.

Some things I either don’t like or am still learning:

  • Prioritizing for the slider and the subsections is confusing. Still learning.
  • The whole caching issue Town News has is, well it’s irritating. I understand the reasons for it, I really do. But waiting anywhere from 1 to 30 to sometimes 60 minutes for a story pushed from InCopy/Falcon and never knowing which it’s going to be is agonizing in the news biz. And even cut & pasting a story manually yet still having to possibly wait 5 minutes before it’s live on the site is agonizing when you’re waiting to tweet the story. I understand they offer a preview function so you can check it before it goes live, but that doesn’t mean anything if you’ve got a breaking story, competition from other news outlets, and no way to send readers to the story as soon as it’s proofed for web. I hope this is something Town News will consider addressing in the future.

Other than that, I’m really pleased with BLOX as a whole. We have had a few readers complain about the new look, but I’ve never heard of a redesign that didn’t have people that simply dislike change. For my part, the transition was fairly smooth, with a few bumps, but I know it was rockier for my boss and the tech manager in my department as they worked with Town news to get everything we want. But I would like to say Town News has a great team and has made this normally painful process easier.

0
30
Aug

Freelancer

For the past 2 years, I’ve been lucky enough to get a growing number of freelance web gigs for local businesses in my town. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but I’m definitely grateful for the supplemental income to offset the past couple of paycuts we’ve had at the paper.

To that end, now that the number of sites I’ve helped with or rebuilt from the ground up has grown, I figured I’d better create a little portfolio of them. So here it is!

Yes, I primarily work with WordPress to power these websites. I do this for a few reasons:

  1. I’m a big advocate of Open Source where ever possible to save money for my clients. WordPress is reliable and powerful yet easy to learn.
  2. I prefer not to get into website maintenance once I’ve built a client’s website. WordPress allows me to train them to update and maintain their own website without incurring fees to pay me to do it. I know it sounds like I’m gypping myself out of money, but I have enough website maintenance to do at the paper. I don’t want to do it in my spare time as well.
  3. WordPress is just awesome.

I also try to work in some social media consulting whenever possible. Even if the business isn’t interested in it, at least I’ve put a bug in their ear for the future.

So it’s safe to say the freelance gigs are the reason I haven’t been very active here lately. Will attempt to rectify!

 

2
18
Aug

The giNetwork is getting noticed

I’m just going to say it. It’s really AWESOME to talk to people about The Independent‘s successful giNetwork program and then read a well-written post about it stemming from that discussion. Thank you Mark!

A couple of days ago, Mark gave us a call from his posh digs in Austin, TX to talk about the giNetwork for his post and I thought it went smashingly. We’ve been working so hard on fine-tuning this program for the past several months and I think we’ve got it down to a science now :) Over 30 businesses have jumped on board and we’ve only lost one.

The ad reps are able to sell it on their own without needing Jack to join them on the sales call (though of course he always will if he’s needed) and I’m getting faster at all the back-end stuff now that I’ve unwound all of Facebook’s quirks and discovered the best way to work with the businesses is to find out their comfort level with technology, find out whether they’re a cell phone user primarily, or if they are behind the computer most of the time, then recommend the best way to post their deals.

Behind a computer: Facebook is best bet. Cell user: Twitter.

It’s important to find that out because during the setup, you either need to link their fan page to Twitter, or use a Facebook app called ‘Smart Twitter for Pages’ to link their tweets to Facebook. If you turn both on, you get sucked into double-posting hell and you don’t want any part of that.

I’m beginning to ramble. I really just want to say that we’re pleased and excited with giNetwork’s success and while I’ve talked to a few other paper’s about it I’d love to talk to more. I’m sromanski [at] theindependent [dot] com if anyone’s interested in hearing more about this.

Thanks again to Mark Coddington for the wonderful write-up!