Archive for August, 2007

Back in 1995 when I was first really learning how to build web sites, I was approached by Art Bolli, the late and former director of the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District to create a site that would somehow represent the organization. So, I did. It was really basic, but Art, as so often happens, had hopes of expanding the site, even providing dynamic data on water levels. However, as so often happens, no one in the organization had time to provide more information. So there it sat. For 12 years. With little change.

Finally, about a week ago, we unveiled a new site. It’s still quite simple in presentation. It’s not flashy, but it finally does offer a great deal of information about the water district, its services and its issues. Beyond that, we provided a Content Management System which allows the staff to update content easily. The system has a few special tools that allows the staff to gather information from site visitors and interact with them. We think it’s a great step toward transparency. Indeed, one of the great motivations for building the new site was to offer information to the public in an easy to find format and reduce the burden o the District’s small staff in answering questions. So if you want to know more about what the heck this organiztion does, visit the site.

Last week I discovered a nice little WordPress plug-in that promised to automate the upgrade process for the program. Upgrading WordPress is relatively simple, still there are a number of steps that you are supposed to follow to do it properly. So, I often put off upgrades out of pure laziness. Upgrades happen quite often, mostly plugging security holes, so they’re pretty important. I was currently due for an upgrade, so I downloaded and installed this plug-in built by Keith Dsouza, a programmer originally from Mumbai, India. Unfortunately, I got errors on running the program. But on the last screen there was a pleasant note from Mr. Dsouza himself offering help if anyone ran in to problems. I sent him the errors I was getting and he promptly got back to me indicating there appeared to be a bug that was causing errors in some hosting environments and that he would need to find an account that mirrored where my blog’s hosting environment. Easy to do! Since we run our own hosting service I quickly offered to give him an account on the same server as my blog. The next morning he had the bug tracked down, fixed and the new version of the plug-n posted. I updated to the latest version, ran the script and it went off perfectly.

So if you have your own hosted Wordpress blog and find it a pain to do the upgrades, I suggest you try this out. And if you like it, you might give Mr. Dsouza a vote in the Weblog Tools Collection plug-in competition. Just click the number of starts you’d give it.

Time-Standard Managing Editor Rich Somerville has announced that reporter and columnist James Faulk has been assigned to the new position of Web Editor. Rich’s column is pretty short on specifics leading some local blogsters and blog commenters to speculate what the heck may be in store for the site. Everybody hates the pop-ups (me included but I use a great Firefox plug-in so I don’t see them) and the design is a bit chaotic. But what exactly will James be doing to improve the site?

Well, as James Faulk comments on Fred’s Blog:

I’ll basically be managing the production of content for the Web — that is, more video, more audio, more Web-centric features. My job is to push everyone within the newsroom to put the Internet at the top of their list. Also, we’ll have Web updates posted throughout the day, so you should be able to find fresh headlines every few hours. The Bully Pulpit, for those interested, will become a blog.

So, he will be pushing more content to the web and trying to keep it current. Nothing in the way of technical improvements. That’s a shame.

One feature I’ve been bugging several local publications about is implementing RSS feeds. Especially if new stories are going to be pushed to the web throughout the day, news feeds would be much better than having to check the web site randomly. I did visit the T-S site and lo and behold they do have a feed. However, it’s a list of “Most Viewed” from the last 12 hours. Most viewed what? Stories on the web I assume. But that’s tautological. If you put only the most viewed in to your only feed, won’t those who use the feed add to the votes for the most viewed stories already in the “Most Viewed” list? Especially since the feed only provides the first few lines of each stories, so you have to click through to the site to read the full story. That’s not a bad strategy in itself, since for a commercial operation you want to have people go to the site itself so they can be subjected to the ads. Page views and click throughs are all important metrics.

But if you’re posting fresh content throughout the day, a feed that offers the most current sotries would of greatest interest to news junkies.

All in all though, the Times-Standard is working hard to find a place in this fast evolving networked world, experimenting with new modes and new content types. On the other hand the Eureka Reporter hasn’t changed it’s web site one iota since it went online several years ago. They still can’t even get their server set up right so that you don’t have to type www.eurekareporter.com instead of just eurekareporter.com. If you go to the latter, it STILL says:

“Under Construction

The site you were trying to reach does not currently have a default page. It may be in the process of being upgraded.”

What’s that about?

Living in Humboldt County has some advantages that certainly off set the drawbacks. One of them is the relative lack of traffic. I’ve lived in the Bay Area and in the Washington D.C. area. I don’t regret leaving either behind. One of the reasons is the time I need to spend in a car getting somewhere on a daily basis. If I have to spend more than 15 minutes in my car I must either be going to the airport or to some place really beautiful and  well worth the drive.

So, Google has added some drive time functionality to Google Maps for rush hour addicts. I will not be checking this one out (unless I happen to be going to a conference or something).

Google Maps Adds Rush-Hour Time Estimates for Driving Directions

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I admit it. I’m a list addict. I love lists of things people have compiled. I’m sure I’m not alone. There are tons of lists of things on the web. Bloggers love to make lists and they draw lots of traffic. Lists are a quick way of learning a bunch of things quickly about a subject or getting links to resources you hadn’t known about before. As a collector of lists, I thought why not make a list of lists! What could be more meta? So, here is a list of lists I’ve come across in the last few days for WordPress. As Heraldo points out, many local bloggers have seen the light and have moved from Blogger to WordPress. I’d like to think I’ve led the way on that, having been a Wordpress user from the beginning of this blog. But probably not. I’m sure they have all found there own way without my influence.

I will be doing othere Lists of Lists in the days ahead.

Caveat: I have not tried all this stuff, so I can’t vouch for it.

These lists, are mostly from Mashable (one of my favorite blogs for Web 2.0 news):

30+ Ajax Powered WordPress Plugins
50+ Multimedia Plugins for WordPress
50+ Admin Tools for WordPress
30+ Plugins for WordPress Comments
30+ WordPress Plugins for getting more blog readaers
83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen
A Big List of WordPress Plugins and Tutorials (lots of good stuff in the comments, too)

If you’re a WordPress fan and have your own favorite lists of resources, feel free to share them!