The Independent Blog

Posted by The Independent on April 25th, 2008 in How-To, Website

You can replay the live chat we held to help answer questions about our new website redesign, but if you don’t want to sift through that, I’m going to post some of the Big Questions people had.

Archives: Our full archives will be down for a while as the company tackles getting 10 years of stories and content transferred and rebuilt. In the meantime, we have a temporary archive set up that goes back to June 21, 2007. It can be found on the front page of the website by looking at the navigation across the top and finding the link in the sub-navigation underneath called ‘News Archive,’ or you can click here. I do not have an ETA on when our full archives will be back online, but they will be.

Text Size: Some folks have commented that the font size in the stories is too small and hard to read. I hate to break it to you guys, but we didn’t change the font size at all. It’s the same as before. It occurred to me though, that occasionally - and seemingly out of the blue - my browser will arbitrarily shrink that page’s font size. If this happened to you, try clicking on ‘View’ in your browser, and from there you can enlarge the font size.

AP Sections: Currently we only have State and National feeds from the AP up and running, but we are working at bringing back the rest of the sections.

Spotted Galleries: We’ve had a couple of calls from folks looking for our Spotted Galleries. They are still up and running at http://spotted.theindependent.com, or by clicking the link under the ‘Photos’ tab across the top of the page.

Twitter: Our Twitter feed is now functioning again. Follow us at http://twitter.com/theindependent

Get the Picture: Another feature that we run in Classifieds was missing in the new design. Readers can now get to the “Get the Picture” entry form by clicking the ‘Photos” tab on our main page. The form link is under that.

Weather Radar: One reader wanted to know if we would have a closer local radar on the weather page and the answer to that is yes. That is coming within the next month.

That’s pretty much what we covered in the chat and through phone calls and emails. If you have a question we haven’t covered yet, please email me and I’ll help you out.

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Posted by The Independent on April 23rd, 2008 in Website

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Posted by The Independent on April 22nd, 2008 in New Design, Website

I’ve got a lot of things to report on this, our Redesign day.

First, The Independent won an award for Best Website this past weekend. Woohoo! And three days later the website underwent a complete redesign from the ground up. Time will tell if the new look helps us win again next year.

But speaking of the redesign, It’s nearly ready for the Big Switch later this evening. It’s a really big change. Really, really big. It might annoy some of our regular readers. Or, it might make them over the moon. It’s up in the air and that’s what makes something like this so exciting. it could go either way I’m laying odds that the new website will make our readers happy as long as everyone understands that there will be a bit of a learning curve.

The Online team at the Independent is available from 8am to 5pm CST if you have questions or need help. You can also, contact me via email with questions. You can also check out the reader’s guide that will be in tomorrow’s paper and use it as a reference. I will also set up a live chat here on Wednesday and you can come in and ask me your questions.

I think you’ll like the new site though.

One last change for those of you who participate in our daily poll question on the Editorial page: The poll question has moved to this blog. You can check it each day over there on the right and submit your vote. Please be patient if the question hasn’t changed for the day yet. I will need to find a routine that works with the Editorial folks for getting the question updated so there may be some kinks at first.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Come back tomorrow and jump in the live chat with me if you have a question about the site. Thanks!

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Posted by The Independent on April 17th, 2008 in Blogs, Features

I kinda love how creepily misleading the title of The Independent’s latest blogger’s blog is. “Scenes from the Morgue” is aptly titled in so many ways.

First: it’s creepy and vaguely disturbing in a morbid kind of way. You read that title and think, “Oh man. I’m not clicking on that.” Images of dissected bodies, aniseptic smells, creepy little doctors in their blood-spattered whites dance through your head.

Second: Unless you’re in the newspaper biz, you might not realize that most newspapers refer to their archive as “The Morgue.” It’s where every copy of the paper ever printed is kept, and these archives usually end up in the basement.

Third: The blog is actually about old B-Movie adverts that appeared in The Independent back in the days when movie ads were fun and interesting (and creepy!).

Chad Plambeck, a B-Movie buff and afficionado of all things horror has taken the time to scan and showcase these gems and give his expert opinion on the movies themselves. This blog is well-worth a visit!

UPDATE: Scenes from the Morgue has also been featured on popular pop culture blog Neatorama!

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Posted by The Independent on April 9th, 2008 in Promotions

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Posted by The Independent on April 7th, 2008 in Newsroom, Video

Last Friday we posted our last Newslink. We’re looking for new ways to enhance the news and we would love to hear from you. After all, this whole news thing is for you. So you tell us how you’d like us to deliver it to you. An idea we’re working on is to create a couple of news packages each day based on coverage we;re working on for print and/or breaking news stuff. With our new site coming in a couple of weeks we are also going to have a new tool for our videos that should make it simple to find stories that interest you.

We also have a goal of getting some public figures into our studio for in-depth interviews and discussion as well as having our reporters go on camera to talk about stories they cover on their beats.

But those are our ideas. Tell us yours. Contact Adam Maser or Denton Cushing and let them know your ideas!

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Posted by The Independent on April 2nd, 2008 in New Design

We were scheduled to launch our new website on April 8th, but things have come up, as they tend to do, and we have had to push it back to April 22nd.

Again, I just want to give a heads up that the website is going to be pretty different. Not different ‘bad’ mind you but it may take some getting used to and I’m sure there will be a ’settling in’ period where some things may still have the old look or may appear to be missing. It will be a bit of a process for us to get everything back up to speed as we move away from software we’ve been using for years and learn/implement software that’s new to us.

We will be publishing a guide to the new website in the paper right before we launch and I will be available to answer any questions you might have. I could do a live chat or something if there’s enough response. And there’s alway email My contact info is in the upper right corner of this page.

Thanks and keep checking back for updates!

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Posted by The Independent on March 31st, 2008 in General News

I came across some spiffy software last week called Cover It Live. It’s a liveblogging thing that would allow journos to give a unique perspective to certain events such as state basketball, or political debates, or maybe even fiery city council meetings. I’m hoping to introduce the tool to the newsroom at some point because it’s too good of a feature not to use.

You can see an example of it in this post. I was testing it out last week and man, it rocks. You, our readers can head over to our site and maybe meet up with George Ayoub as he does his annual coverage of state basketball. Or maybe we can get a local figure in town to come in for a live chat with you guys and you could ask your questions, get some answers, participate in polls and all kinds of cool stuff.

I have big plans for it

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Posted by The Independent on March 27th, 2008 in Newsroom

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Posted by The Independent on March 26th, 2008 in Features, Website

In all the hoopla surrounding our site redesign, I completely forgot to point out a new feature we have in our classifieds section - PETS! What’s that you say? Pets aren’t new. What are you talking about?

We’ve partnered with a company called Gadzoo in order to bring you, dear readers, a feature-rich section full of great content all about pets. You easily search all pet classified ads, view the featured pet, place an ad to sell your pet, or read articles on choosing the right pet for you. We have advice from pet experts, videos, even a cute little sudoku game. It’s really something else.

Check it out!

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