August 30, 2006ONA announces finalistsRoanoke.com was listed as a finalist in two categories for the Online Journalism Awards, presented by the Online News Association and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. The categories were for General Excellence in Online Journalism and Outstanding Use of Multiple Media for "The Crooked Road." Both awards put us in elite company. As the blog Online News Squared points out, the dual entries put the site among 10 others to appear in multiple categories. This is fantastic news and follows recognition by the Newspaper Association of America (Digital Edge award for multimedia), the National Journalism Award from the Scripps Howard Foundation (Web Reporting for "The Crooked Road") and the "EPpy" from Editor and Publisher (Best Overall Newspaper-Affiliated Internet Service for under 1 million unique monthly visitors), not to mention several nods from the Virginia Press Association and the Associated Press. It's a small but dedicated and passionate online team that makes the site worthy of such recognition. It also helps to have strong support from the company leadership who push all of us to do better. August 20, 2006More on the Homestand: Video using Flash 8 AlphaThe Homestand project enabled us to do some interesting Flash 8 alpha video work. Using the chromakey cyc wall in our studio, we were able to do video cutouts with a drop shadow applied to the ballplayers using Adobe Premiere, Quicktime and Canopus Edius 3.0. Special thanks to a great tutorial found at Community MX and a Flash Pro 8 book by Tom Green. August 17, 2006Looking back: Homestand
If you missed the debut of The Roanoke Times' latest special package Homestand, you're in luck -- the Web doesn't strike out. Here's a summary: From the crack of dawn until the last light pole at Salem Memorial Baseball Stadium is shut off later that night, there's rarely a slow moment for those involved in running an Avalanche homestand. The Roanoke Times spent some extra time during the team's four-game series with the Kinston Indians in an attempt to spotlight those who prepare the field, prepare the food and entertain the masses who are looking forward to -- and even expecting -- a special experience at the ballpark every night. Aside from the wonderful story by Katrina Waugh, this package features a host of multimedia items including an innovative use of video courtesy the new(ish) studio. This can be seen on the interactive link. Also new are several new uses of the scriptaculous JavaScript library, and Prototype framework. Click the "about" and "contact" links located at the bottom of the Homestand page, and watch the effect. You can see a variation on this when viewing page two of the story -- no more links to multiple pages! For the multimedia "pop-ups," we used the Lightbox Gone Wild script from the good folks at Particle Tree. This is a modified version of the Lightbox script we are already using to display photos and graphics throughout roanoke.com. For the Homestand, this script allows us (via the beauty of AJAX) to pull in the Flash objects overlaid on the primary page. In this way, control is never taken out of the users' hands. There are also links to the individual multimedia items as well. One of my favorite parts of this project is the contact form, revealed when you click the "contact" link at the bottom of your screen. Using this form is much easier than opening your e-mail client, and allows you to send your thoughts on the project to both the dot.com and sports sections. Of course, you're always welcome to post your thoughts on the Homestand here on this blog. July 3, 2006Improved photo galleries
The Week in Photos has now been converted from the older, Flash-based gallery, to the new JavaScript and XHTML driven model. Oh, and you can now buy most any photo you see in the gallery through a new service offering called Pictopia. But back to the galleries. The primary difference between the old galleries and the new ones is the way they are presented to the user. We used a Flash-based program called SlideShowPro through most of the past year with fairly good results. However the method for updating and building those galleries was time-consuming, and expensive -- Adobe's Flash software isn't cheap. We also wanted the ability to tie in the aforementioned ability to allow users to easily purchase photos from the galleries, something that would require significant modification to the Flash model. The solution, and the resulting new galleries, was handled through a mixture of JavaScript, XML and XHTML. Now we can control the look of the galleries to a higher degree, and still provide a fancy-pants transition like the Flash gallery. June 27, 2006Starburst baseball cards May 22, 2006Blogging for the masses
The Movable Type system interface manages several blogs at once. After all, blogging can be pretty technical without all that writing and stuff. All of our blogs are run through a CMS called Movable Type (v3.2). This is a powerful system produced by the folks at Six Apart, who also distribute the equally popular TypePad and LiveJournal publishing platforms. But MT and its siblings aren't the only kids on the block. And as luck would have it, USC Annenberg's Online Journalism Review recently (May 18) updated its "Blog software comparison chart," which shows a rundown of the most popular systems. We chose MT based on its excellent ability to manage many blogs at once, while still remaining simple enough for someone with minimal training to use. In fact, some bloggers in our newsroom even say that it's learning curve is more shallow than our print publishing system! And the blogs aren't just for text and photos. The TimesCast is also published using MT (and a specially designed Flash video player). MT isn't entirely perfect, and it faces steep competition from open-source blogging systems such as WordPress. But for our purposes, it allows for an effective entrance into the blogosphere. May 19, 2006roanoke.com wins 'Eppy'
The EPy logo UPDATE: Here's the list of winners as posted on Editor & Publishers Web site. In the category of Best Overall Newspaper-Affiliated Internet Service under 1 million unique monthly visitors, the Roanoke.com was the winner. UPDATE: Another mention of Roanoke.com's EPpy win popped up on Poynter's Romenesko this morning. May 10, 2006Different but the same The tabs on the gateway are displayed flush left in the FireFox browser To see what I mean, open up our home page in the current version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. Then open up the same URI in the latest version of the FireFox browser. Right away you'll see subtle visual differences. The tabs on the main content box are shifted ever-so-slightly to the right in IE, while in FireFox they're flush left. A more major difference is evident on this blog -- you won't see the "share this post" function in IE.  The tabs are set a few pixels to the right when viewed in Internet Explorer Notice the And that's also one of the hard parts about building and maintaining a Web site -- having to adjust and create additional design for different browsers. Fortunately, this might get better soon as Microsoft is planning the next release of the long-awaited version 7 of IE very soon. In fact, the second beta version of the browser is available now. We try not to push folks toward a certain browser to use when viewing roanoke.com, but we do plead everyone use a current version. More modern browsers like FireFox, Mozilla, Opera and Apple-only browsers Safari and Camino are free, and are updated often. Microsoft has only updated IE 6 (the latest version) to address security concerns, and not how it renders code. Try experimenting with these different browsers to see what works best for you. |
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