We wanted to try something similar using video to tell the story of how people are doing one year after the Virginia Tech shootings.

Working with photographer Justin Cook and a number of reporters in our New River Valley bureau - Greg Esposito, Anna Mallory, Tonia Moxley, Donna Alvis-Banks, Tim Thornton and others - we set out to capture people's thoughts and emotions, "in the spirit of Avedon," for this interactive project.

I edited the video with no cuts and no b-roll. We wanted to hear the words and see the people the way they carried themselves, by how they stood, sat and spoke, for a minute or two. Their eyes looking straight at the camera, we wanted them to have a conversation with you.

DrawLoop has done an excellent job rectifying this problem with their free, online PDF converter tools.

They have a webpage-based version and a Firefox add-on (no administrator rights needed!).

It was a small change, at first glance -- aesthetic, maybe. One word has replaced two in the tabs, and nothing looks too terribly different at the outset.

But spend a minute or two at roanoke.com. Mouse over the tabs at the top of the gateway. See the news updates, the bracket challenge, today's calendar events and our latest Virginia Tech video. Then hover your cursor over the new tab -- the one that used to say "About Roanoke" -- and you'll notice something just a little bit different.

"Community," it's called. A word that's been hanging around the newsroom a lot lately. It's making itself comfortable, settling in, drinking all the coffee and forgetting to brew a new pot.

Hang out with the community tab for a while, and you'll find news from your area, the latest stories about the place where you live and -- if your address lies within our core coverage area -- even a homepage for your corner of the Roanoke or New River valleys.

Tommy Rhodes, a 69-year-old Roanoke resident, copes with a form of dementia called neurodegenerative frontal lobe brain disease, which strikes the front of the brain, the hub of intelligent thought. His wife Linda cares for him.

For the past several months, photographer Josh Meltzer and reporter Beth Macy have listened to the concerns of area aging experts, health-care providers and caregivers. The first two installments of the occasional series "Age of Uncertainty" will debut in The Roanoke Times on Saturday, March 15. The online portion of the story was posted to roanoke.com on Friday, March 14. You can visit it at http://blogs.roanoke.com/ageofuncertainty/.

In addition to the stories in the paper, the site features documentary-style videos of the two subjects, Tommy and Linda Rhodes and the Rev. Bill Wingfield caring for his wife, Kathy. Videos also tell the stories of the local Meals-on-Wheels program and the cost of staying independent at home.

As a newcomer to the area several months ago, I was particularly interested in learning about local running clubs. Within minutes, the Hellgate race kept appearing within my search results. Who does this kind of thing? What does it take mentally to run 67 miles in the woods at night? Without even realizing it, my personal inquiry took a backseat as I became transfixed with the race details and knew that I had to tell their story. After looking through the race results, I noticed that only one woman, Rebekah Trittipoe, had finished the race three of the past four years. Why didn't she finish last year? Was she going to try again this year? As the questions kept coming, I was certain that I had to tell this story through her eyes.

Upon meeting Rebekah, I knew that she was the perfect subject to introduce our viewers to ultrarunning. As I began to document her lifestyle and training regimen, our graphics department worked on building the course and elevation graphics. I pulled in photographer Josh Meltzer to help capture Rebekah's candid moments as Seth Gitner dedicated his time to driving around and producing panoramas of the race course. With only a week to go before the race, I began bringing together the content with an intuitive navigation and easy, straight-forward design. Once the design and programming was complete, we launched a preview version of the package which allowed our audience to get to know Rebekah and learn about the course.

Check out the streams on their Roanoke page.

The Hellgate 100K is a race that has occurred every December since 2003. For its fifth running, multimedia producer Tracy Boyer decided to follow area runner Rebekah Trittipoe as she prepared for this year's race. Trittipoe had run previous Hellgate races, but dropped out last year. As she turns 50 this year, she's determined to come back and finish the race. Trittipoe's story and the Hellgate race itself are featured in the "Running on empty" package that debuted today.

It's a weekly entertainment webcast that we'll post each Wednesday, so it'll be good through the weekend.

The name is derived from our daily features section, Extra. Think of this webcast as the online supplement to what’s already in print (and online.) Each week, the ExtraCast will feature a visual rundown of the top events coming up in the region -- with special emphasis on audio clips from bands and a featured video segment.

Of course you are. After all, the social networking site has over 54 million active users, with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day.

With numbers like that, we'd be crazy not to have a Roanoke Times presence on Facebook.

We're not crazy -- are we?

In addition to the position of a Data Delivery Editor and the purpose behind publishing databases on the Web, the DataSphere was also a chance for our tech team to try some new things that would make the data visible to search engines and accessible to as many users as possible. Whether we succeeded or not in that regard will be borne out through traffic data and other measures that we track on a regular basis.

Given that this was new ground for our tech team and the Web site in general, I wanted to pass on some lessons learned and reasons why we developed DataSphere in a particular way. Before delving in the geeky tech talk (stop reading now if this stuff makes your head spin), I should give some background on how roanoke.com appears on your screen.

The Roanoke Times/roanoke.com just launched its new home for search-it-yourself databases about our region and our state -- the first site of its kind by a Virginia newspaper.

Other papers, such as the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Indianapolis Star, the Greenville (S.C.) News, and the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press, have fine sites like this that inspired us, and from whom we have, well, borrowed ideas from.