Seeing as not that many people know exactly what I do, in addition to my embarrassingly stark technology posts, I’ve decided to add a little personal Sagebrush touch. I’ll be posting exactly what I’ve been updating, what we’re thinking about for the near future of NevadaSagebrush.com, and perhaps even what we’re thinking about for the far future of NevadaSagebrush.com.

The past few days of updates includes:

• A new and improved user subscription service - We previously used the Subscribe2 plugin for Wordpress. User management’s a little shaky, and, while HTML format notifications are available, they didn’t allow for excerpts and story titles, only a static message every time the site was updated. The new system, provided by the ever-loving Feedburner, lets use send notifications that are both pretty and informational. In actuality, users are subscribing to an RSS feed that then sends out email notifications, but seeing as almost no one really knows how to take advantage of the convenience of RSS feeds, an email subscription is an easier concept to understand.
• Graphic Subscription Images - I got rid of the text links to our subscription services and Facebook groups and replaced them with more noticeable graphics. They’re small and simple, but they’re much more drawing than the previous list with tiny icons. Subscriptions and sharing options are important, they get us straight to people, who may get us to more people and so on and so forth.
• Front page PDF - Our Sports Editor, Scott Oxarart, had talked to me about having our front page available to download as PDF. I liked it, I think it gets across our designer’s (Mike Higdon) design skills to those who might not have access to our print version, and may compel people browsing the site to pick up a print version. Kudos, Scott.
• Author pages - Another request by Scott. When browsing stories and such, if you click on the writer’s name, it will take you to an archive of all the stories they’ve written, along with a list of all the other authors. Writers can put in bios and links to resumes to be displayed on the sidebar (though nobody has yet). Some dilemmas: Stories with multiple authors (double bylines) are made into separate users, therefore they have their own author pages, instead of including the stories on their respective author’s pages; Garrett had two users for some reason, so I had to manually re-edit the author on all his posts. Boo, Garrett (even though it wasn’t your fault at all).
• Reworking thumbnails - I had CSS’d all the photos in excerpts to appear as a maximum of 100px, instead of using the thumbnails Wordpress generated. This means that even though the thumbnails were small, they were still loading full sized photos. Dumb move, no idea why I did it. I’ve been obsessed with cutting down load time, so I went in and edited every post with a photo in the excerpt to use the thumbnail instead. I’d say it cut load time by at least 5-8 seconds. That may sound trivial, but its important.
• Switched media players - I switched from the Anarchy Media Player plugin for Wordpress to another, again, for the sake of load time. I used the Firebug plugin for Firefox to pinpoint the sources of the loading lag. Anarchy was the biggest, sometimes taking as much as 20 extra seconds to load its script.
• Updating categories - There have been some new sections this semester, notably in A&E. It’s really important to me to keep everything organized, which can be really difficult with the volume of stories. I’m still sorting through Sports to get all the stories assigned to the right, specific, sport. I started doing this in November, go figure.
• Switched from a monthly archive system to a weekly archive system - It seemed to make more sense, as we ARE a weekly paper. ‘Nuff said.

We’ve discussed possibly creating a Ning community for the Sagebrush, to promote deeper discussion of stories, which can be limiting in purely comment format. We’d have to organize some sort of moderation, which I’m not sure we have the time or manpower for right now, but we’ll see.

My weekend project is to make the entire site W3C compliant, though I think its a pretty ambitious goal, not in difficulty, but in time management. For those who aren’t familiar with the World Wide Web Consortium, it is an international standards organization for web coding and development. They have certain standards for HTML, XHTML, CSS, and other kinds of code that make up most web pages. While the things required for ‘valid’ code are often trivial, they often make the code cleaner and more compatible with multiple browsers.

For anyone still reading this: what would you like to see on the Sagebrush site? I’ll see what I can do.

PS. Things I most definitely can’t do:

• provide porn,
• provide access to porn,
• ask the Sagebrush to print porn,
• help you install Windows Vista

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Internet, NevadaSagebrush.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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