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Submitted by Anstr Davidson on September 1, 2009 - 8:21am
Comments
Banner
The banner across the top of this page was contributed by Aaron Schwartzbard.
Banner
The top banner is very cool. Skinny legs, but cool nonethe less. In fact the entire new News Page is quite nice, user friendly, and obviously well thought out. Thanks Anstr!
Ya, the skinny legs don't,
Ya, the skinny legs don't, unfortunately, represent the "old-slow" wing of the club. Maybe we can have the Pillsbury Doughboy on a picture for me!
Looking good! Thanks for all
Looking good! Thanks for all your hard work on this, Anstr.
See you somewhere out there this weekend at the Ring.
SS
Looks great! Great work
Looks great! Great work Anstr!
New News Page
Well done, Anstr. Glad to see you're putting your journalistic skills to good use.
new vhtrc page
gr8 job! vhtrc enters the blogosphere! love it.
Thanks, but...
I should probably clarify what I am responsible for and not. This new page is created and maintained by a content management system called Drupal. It does all the heavy lifting. It comes with various themes that dictate the look and feel -- colors, fonts, etc. That is what I did. I took a very basic theme and made the colors, fonts, boxes, etc. The good news about that is that it can be easily changed.
The other items, like the birthday thing and the weather widget, are from elsewhere.
miscellaneous
On some of the comments, the name, date, and "reply" stretch vertically down the right side, but on others the info is placed normally (horizontally) and takes up much less "page space." Of course, I have no idea what causes this. I see from the preview that mine is going to be stretched down the side. I tried both with and without a final return (enter) and the effect did not change.
I miss the webmaster's mailbox link.
And Furbutt certainly needs to be here somewhere.
Carolyn
format problem went away
Okay, so tonight it isn't doing the weird format thing. Must have been sunspots or something. No, I wasn't imagining it. I saw this strange design on the edge of the box and was very pleased when I broke the code.
No it was a real problem...
But I think I fixed it. Dobies saw it too. It was showing up in IE 7. But he says it is gone and Carolyn does too.
[Going into typical IT, blame the victim mode.] You guys need to quit drinking the Micro$oft Koolaid and use Firefox!
Thoughts on the new news page
OK. Overall, I think I like it. I believe I even suggested some sort of wiki option might be a good idea at one point a year or so ago, and this is what I think it should probably be like.
I am getting to be old and behind the times now, and I have always been uncomfortable having what I say "casually" becoming a public printed record of my thoughts. Normally, I would just fire off an email to Anstr; but in the spirit of this open communication forum, I will try to offer feedback publicly so that others may also add their comments to anything I have to say.
I do like the ease with which one can provide comments. This interface is very easy and intuitive to use.
Now comments seem to be kind of spread all over the place and are associated with each article. There is no one central place to read all the comments. That place used to be the list serve, but I doubt folks will enter a comment here and then repost it to the list serve. Is there some centrally located way that we could see all of the comments, or all of the new comments since our last login?
Along these lines, I wonder if this new format will lead to the eventual demise of the list serve? Will this become the new community where everyone interacts and exchanges info? In many ways, I have thought that the VHTRC's list serve was really the glue that holds this trail community together. Garret Graubins (sp?) has posted to the list serve before and commented how our club has really had something special in its community's postings that no other trail running club seems to have and he attributed "this uniqueness" to our list serve and the community that posts to it. So, my worries along these lines are that this forum will change the nature of the club's online interaction, perhaps diluting out the inputs and losing some of the bantering back and forth that is such a great part of it.
Is there any way to navigate to the old news? One used to be able to navigate back to old news articles, but now you can only go back to old news that has been provided in this current format. Everything in the "old" format seems to be unavailable.
These comments are all meant to be constructive feedback. I do think it is a positive that folks can offer input directly to posted articles. At the same time, I worry about tinkering too much with the dynamics of how club members interact online - because I think what has been in place has served so excellently. Just keep some of these thoughts in mind as you gauge the effect these changes have on your constituency.
archives
I found the archives by selecting Site Map on the Home page. On the Site Map, only years 2004 and prior are listed specifically. But when I selected the News category header, I got the old News page with the other archive years (including earlier 2009). When I just selected News directly from the Home page, I got the new News page.
The New Site
Russ,
Thanks for the comments. A few responses.
I put a new link at the top to the "old news page." That is just a short term fix. I am not sure what I will do with all those old links to the old news page. Also, not sure where to put additional links that need to go on this page. We will see.
I am not sure where this will go. But I don't see it as replacing the listserv. First, the listserv is open to all, this will be only for members. Also, at least at first, the comments will have to be comments on a story. So the discussion will not be as free flowing. But we will see.
As to the comments being all together, I think I can build something that would list the most recent comments. (They are on the what's new list at left now, but they are not that obvious.) I will try to do that. But putting the comments together does not seem logical. They won't relate to each other very well.
I guess we will see where this all takes us.
BTW: I have figured out that this text editor messes up carriage returns. In the editing box, it looks like there is space between paragraphs. But in fact, there is not. You need to hit ENTER twice at the end of a paragraph. I need to see if I can fix that.
Regarding the comments being
Regarding the comments being all together...
I realized after my post that the "What's New" section does highlight when new comments have been added to the various articles since your last login. Now that I have figured that out, I think that works fine and works well as a central location to see all the new comments, as well as other new posts. Having figured that out, I don't think anything else is needed for centrally locating comment updates.