The North Coast Journal reaches a milestone today. After months — years — of heartbreak, we are pleased to launch a new version of our website. The old site served us faithfully for just about 10 years, I believe, and it was long past time to let the old trooper enjoy its dotage.
Beneath its attractive chassis, the new northcoastjournal.com packs some serious horsepower under the hood. There’s the full text of just about everything in the paper (everything coming soon). There’s a customizable and searchable version of our calendar of events, which you can use to find out what’s going on now or far into the future. There’s a database of clubs, restaurants and local bands to keep you hip. There’s an online classifieds system – Craigslist killer!, he said, derangedly — that also makes it easy to put your ad into the paper. Nigerian puppy scammers not welcome.
Readers can comment on all articles or blog posts with an account. There’s a quick and painless registration feature that should provide some level of comfort for the tinfoil hat anonymite crowd. When we first got this going, registration seemed to be the only way to avoid the ugly, frenetic, insane — and, above all, boring and life-sapping — troll-infested swamp that had overtaken every online forum in Humbolt County to that date. Nowadays we see that there’s other ways to control this. Maybe we’ll free things up in the future.
There’s a few kinks in the system. For one, the North Coast Journal Blogthing is going to hang at Wordpress for hopefully just a week or so more whilst we swap in a more robust blogging engine. Expect to see some cross-posting at the new site. For another, the calendar of events — what we hope will be one key cornerstone of the whole deal — is still lagging a bit behind the newspaper. That will change. Also, we’re going to be developing some new applications that will make planning your days and nights even more quick and fun. Also, the fact that our new platform is fairly easy to extend means that we’re going to be bringing you some cool new news tools as well. Stay tuned.
Any bugs? File them here and they will be rapidly triaged according to their level of complexity and/or importance.
Many thanks and congratulations to the Journal’s Holly Harvey, who ran point on this project from our side. Thanks also to the talented young Manxers at Tangerine Smash, who brought it all home with aplomb. Eureka’s Carson Park Design provided key input early on and lent a hand throughout.
Colophon: Northcoastjournal.com runs on Django, the hot framework for cool web developers (especially those in the newspaper world). Accept no substitutes. The site uses JQuery, Tablesorter, Lightbox and Google Maps. It is hosted at Morse Media (+3) on a Red Hat server (-1).
This article appears in All The Pieces.
oh god not back to 1998…you were so close, what up with the foldy fake magazines look a likes for the realestate guide… your designer come out of the print side of the industry..should have consulted some multimedia type peeps, I hear they keep up on technology. Least the brown and powder blue color scheme is soothing…
Is the Journal moving toward becoming more (frequency-wise) than a weekly? Staff stories on the website between weekly issues? Breaking news? Being that 4th Street is pretty much DOA, the Journal could make serious competition for the Singleton daily.
Carson Park Design is awesome.
Baby steps, Andy. But thanks for the encouragement.
Hey look, ads on every page! And still no letters to the editor online.
CASINO CASINO CASINO.
So what do I win when I get all the casino ads on one page?
The trifecta? You get a coupon for three bucks off at the buffet.
Letters are coming, I promise.
By the way, catboy — yes, you get ads, but do you get unkillable Flash pop-unders? No, you don’t.
Here’s a screencap of what I see in Firefox.
My default font is larger than the designer expected, causing overlap on the “Previous Editions” link.
Do you have data on the number of 800×600 users still visiting the site? The front page feels claustrophobic.
Images need ALT tags describing their content. Visually impaired users will appreciate it. Accessibility is a much bigger issue than that, but ALT tags are a start.
I see some archive links go to an IP address instead of the domain. Is that temporary? It’s a big deal if your archives permanently change URLS, unless you place forwards on the old URLs.
But I’m a perfectionist and could quibble all day. The redesign is bigger, better, faster, more… which is good.
I was the lead programmer on the Eureka Reporter’s new site — though it was made with a then-unfamiliar content management system and I think I could do a lot better with it if I were to start it again today… Obviously, the comments that follow are my own and not those of the Reporter or my employer.
Coincidentally (or perhaps not?), I received word from someone at the Reporter today that they had shut down comments for good (after about two weeks of requiring registration for comments instead of the wonderful chaos of allowing them anonymously in the months prior). I was kind of bummed as I converted the “Most Commented” block on the front page to a “Most Viewed” one, since I thought that, when the site first went live, the ability to add and read comments on stories was something that really set the site apart from its competitors. (This was back before the TS allowed comments.) I understand that with allowing comments comes the overhead of having to moderate them (perhaps this is why the Reporter finally axed them), but still, it would be great if the new NCJ site allowed anonymous commenting. Surely you, Mr Sims, are aware of the value of anonymous sources…
So why was Django chosen instead of a more fully-developed CMS? I think I *will* accept substitutes, thank you — namely, Drupal, written in PHP. Python is fun and has some good ideas, but PHP is the *lingua franca* of web development, and Drupal is simply an amazing, mature content management system.
The Linux server was a good choice (though I’m partial to BSD myself). The Reporter runs on a Windows NT server, at the insistence of SN’s IT department. Getting it up and running correctly was — how do I put this politely? — an educational experience. But we eventually got it to a point where it doesn’t crash too frequently at the moment.
jQuery is friggin’ awesome. I hold my nose whenever I have to write JavaScript without it.
Well, there was some data. I wouldn’t have given it the weight it was given, but there you go. Maybe in a year or so, when all those old TRS-80s have finally bitten the dust, we’ll widen things a bit. That would certainly be my preference.
Sorry about the broken layout. It’s a direct consequence of the choice to go 800px, of course.
I’m pretty sure that the alt tags were all there at one point. I’ll run through it again with Firebug and see what’s missing.
Hey, Garrett!
Oh, of course. What we’ve got is still anonymous, though you do have to provide an e-mail address. I’m not going to give out any direct links, but you and I know there’s plenty of ways to anonymize your e-mail, especially when you’re just using one for registration purposes.
Of course there’s the down side of anonymity, which is what we saw destroy site after site when we first got this thing going.
Like I said, it will be reevaluated.
Django is more than a CMS, and less. It’s a framework for building applications. That’s what we’re going to be doing much more of in the future.
Of course it has downsides that things like Drupal probably avoid (witness our unresolved blogging issues). But there’s so much going for Django going forward — take a look at the GeoDjango project when you get a chance, and also things like Everyblock.
I’m not really qualified to speak on the subject and must bow to your superior knowledge, but it’s my bet that PHP is on its way out. It’s going the way of Perl. Moribund community, poor syntax, weak libraries. Python is much more than just “some good ideas.”
My -1 rating for Red Hat wasn’t for Linux, it was for Red Hat. I much prefer Debian or Ubuntu. I’d sooner slit my throat than have us run on NT.
Hey Hank, just a question, when are you going to do a story about Amulet leaving Arcata?
🙂
Ain’t I a stinker?
Sweet! Smile faces work! 🙁 🙂 :/
For every Amulet that Redding kills, a thousand Amulets will rise to take its place.
Nah, kidding. It’s a bummer.
Mine works fine in Firefox, looks exactly the same as Safari. The links are awesome – I love the Menu of Menus.
I’ll be the first to agree that PHP’s inconsistent syntax leaves much to be desired, as does its painful approach to OOP. However, you can’t count out its momentum, its ease of entry, and its ubiquitousness — it has a lot going for it. Other web languages will rise — I think Ruby is pretty cool, though Rails is a painful way to go about it — but if you’re betting on its demise, you should consider that a long-term investment.
This is a very technical discussion.
Hank Sims Says:
May. 28, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Hey Hank, just a question, when are you going to do a story about Amulet leaving Arcata?
For every Amulet that Redding kills, a thousand Amulets will rise to take its place.
Nah, kidding. It’s a bummer.
Redding? They are in Idaho now. 🙁
But back to the page, how does the loading speed feel for everybody? I seem to have a little bit of loading lag, anybody on dial-up?
Nice new website, Hank. I’m happy for the Journal and Humboldt County.
It looks fine in Opera, too. Thanks for using a local host (I use him, too) and for having some consideration for people with smaller, slower computers. Unless you’re going to start adding porn, the site is fine as is.
GB
Congrats! The site aged a good ten years or so! Now I can find stuff.
Oh yeah, you cover this week got me high: http://redwoodr.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/journal-cover-trips-out-community/
Just to clarify a bit about the hosting – we’ve been hosting the North Coast Journal for years. Up until now they have been on a shared server. The new site is on a dedicated server because of the particular demands of Django. The OS is actually CentOS not Red Hat, strictly speaking, in spite of the similarities.