It's been about a week since we launched DataSphere, and so far, the response has been interesting. There were a few write-ups in some blogs and it was also the centerpiece item on Poynter.org earlier this week.

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.

Continue reading "More on the DataSphere" »

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• Posted by john jackson in Technical issues ::
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It's official: Roanoke.com is No. 1 on Google, Yahoo! and a few other search engines when searching the word "roanoke."

Though this shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone that has checked under the hood (i.e. viewed our markup), but we ran into a little trouble between our own search engine and its need for a element that told search engines not to index our gateway. Silly I know, but we've finally removed it and have shot up the charts as a result.

The section and story pages weren't affected with this issue and have always ranked high for SEO.

This more than anything proves why it's important to follow a Web standards-based approach when building your Web site, especially when you have the quality (and quantity) of content published by The Roanoke Times and roanoke.com.

Sure, there are things we could have done to make our templates better. We have a table (gasp!) used in our section and story pages to hold them together instead of using CSS floats. And many sections of our site could use a semantic makeover. But a lot of this dates back to the redesign of last year, and would be somewhat tricky to adjust at this point in time.

Despite those wants, I definitely feel we're finally meeting some of those needs especially for users who might be relying on search engines to find our site. Why not try bookmarking us?

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• Posted by Patrick Beeson in Technical issues ::
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Since the official launch of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, we've been working to get roanoke.com up-to-speed for users of this new browser.

If you've upgraded already, and see anything on our site that doesn't look correct, please post a comment here or send me an e-mail.

And if you haven't upgraded your browser lately, you have many excellent (and free) options to chose from: Firefox 2.0, IE 7 and Opera 9. If you're using a Mac, try Mozilla's Camino in addition to Apple's Safari browser.

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• Posted by Patrick Beeson in Technical issues ::
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Chalk this one up to a "duh" moment.

All of the headlines shown on roanoke.com should now be linked -- no more linked "story" -- as well as the photos paired with the lead stories.

This should make it far easier and intuitive for users wanting the fastest way into the story. Apologies for not doing this sooner!

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• Posted by Patrick Beeson in Technical issues ::
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Over the past few weeks, Dan Casey's bike column has been revamped to fit the new site's look.

After wading through about 80 pages of now-defunct coding, the worst one is officially this series of journal entries written in 1998.

For you techies, view the source of this page. It is littered with line breaks and font tags.

Thank goodness for Web standards!

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• Posted by Amanda Hicks in Technical issues ::
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Looking for a way to keep daily tabs on specific sections or even all of Roanoke.com without typing in that familiar URI? RSS will feed the need.

Puns aside, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) offers a way to pull content (stories, podcasts, the TimesCast) from a given Web site to a news aggregator. This can be either in the form of software, or a Web-based service such as Bloglines or Google.

We also use RSS feeds to pull content from part of our site to another. This can be seen whenever you see blog entries displayed on the site, such as in the blog index section (lastest entries).

Visit our RSS index page to find an RSS feed for a given section or podcast.

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• Posted by patrick beeson in Technical issues ::
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