www.roanoke.com

New roanoke.com navigation toolbars

Our development team has been working hard, and here is the first peek at the navigation of the new roanoke.com. Click to enlarge the photo, take a look and tell us what you think.

What you’ll see is the main navigation (top bar) with the sub-navigation bar below. (For instance, in the first line, you’ll see that the News tab brings up the light blue bar below). These navigation bars will be on every page throughout the new site and are designed to make it easier to find and access the stories, photos and blogs you look for.

The top-level navigation bar will feature five primary news topics. If you hover over one of these sections, you’ll find a sub-navigation bar highlighting more specific content. This new navigation puts the most popular sections just a click away from anywhere in the site. For example, if you’re looking for Virginia Tech football highlights, hover over Sports and can click directly to Virginia Tech.

Within the navigation, we’ve also anchored some tools such as submit a news tip and share a photo. The search tool is also prominently positioned within the top nav bar, making it easy to access from any page within the new roanoke.com.

What pages of roanoke.com do you visit the most? As you check out this image, think of that and see if you can navigate to those pages.

We welcome your feedback.

Over the past few months, we have been exploring different commenting platforms, and we have selected Disqus, a commenting system used by many media outlets. We selected this system because it offers a lot of the features we heard from you are important. We are currently testing it out on “Damage Done“, a three-part series on the impact of heroin addiction on two local families.

Optional social sign in.

With Disqus, you can sign in through your Facebook or Twitter accounts, or Google and Yahoo, or you can set up an account with Disqus. If you choose a Disqus sign on, an email is required, but you can select your screen name and protect your identity if you prefer.

Social sharing.

You can also share your comment on Facebook or Twitter to get your friends and followers engaged in the topic. Find this option under account settings—edit profile—services.

Thumbs up.

You can vote for others’ comments – similar to Facebook “likes”. You do not need to be logged on to like a comment.

Moderation.

We will continue to moderate all comments. You can also report a comment. To flag a comment, click the flag symbol at the bottom of the comment.

Threaded comments.

Disqus allows users to reply to others’ comments or post separately. The threads are nested so it’s easy to follow the conversation.

Keep up with the conversation.

You can see what others are saying by subscribing to the thread of comments on a story, and receive email notifications when someone has replied to your comment. To do this, when you are in Disqus, go to account settings—edit profile—notifications.

Check out this new commenting tool. Once you sign up through Disqus, you can adjust your personal settings within your account to subscribe to threads, post to social sites and much more. Check it out and tell us what you think. If you’ve used Disqus on other sites, let us know what you like and dislike about it.

Good morning, today we present the second installment in our “Betcha didn’t know” series, highlighting features from roanoke.com that you might not know about.

Today’s theme is oldies but goodies.

As you think about outdoor activities this summer, please check out our hiking and biking guides to the Roanoke Valley and beyond. We built these guides some time ago, but they’re still relevant and useful. For instance, you can search for a hike by difficulty or a bike ride by location.

In the redesign, we plan on giving these guides a more prominent and permanent home. Until then, don’t let them go to waste! Happy trails!

Keep up with our live coverage of the Miss Virginia pageant by following our Twitter feed @RkeTimesLive.  We will be tweeting continuous updates, including many photos, as the participants take the stage tonight for swimsuit and more talent competition at the Roanoke Civic Center. You can join the conversation by using the hash tag #MissVa.

Interns Emily Mosh and Evelyn Rupert covered the preliminaries Thursday, and will return tonight and again Saturday evening, when the next Miss Virginia will be crowned.

Earlier this week we used live tweeting to cover Mitt Romney’s visit to Salem. Using social media allows us to publish news as it’s happening . We also had four bloggers capturing reactions to Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling: Blue Ridge Caucus, MedBeat, Dan Casey and RoundTable. The format allowed a variety of venues for different conversations to occur quickly after the release of the ruling. Check it out here.

If you don’t use  Twitter, you can still see our coverage of the pageant in the The Roanoke Times and on roanoke.com.

Have you checked out our @RkeTimesLive twitter feed? Let us know your thoughts.

Caitlin Saniga

Storify is one of the new ways we’re exploring telling stories on roanoke.com, and it involves you and your social media presence. It’s an online tool that allows users to search for keywords, phrases and hashtags (even taking into account proximity to a specified place) on sites including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, Google and many others.

Let me give you an example of one of our stories. On April 20, Roanoke was a bubble with runners and supporters who had gathered for the Blue Ridge Marathon. There were lots of little stories unfolding leading up to the marathon, during the race and after the runners crossed the finish line. And many of you were talking about it online. Using Storify, we were able to gather posts, photos, maps, videos and more from the community.

From that, a story very different from the one we ran in the newspaper the next day was told on roanoke.com as it was happening. We followed along as runners laid out their gear the day before the race, as supporters gave their well wishes, as racers progressed along the course, as participants displayed their bloody socks and marathon medals and as some chowed down on cupcakes and beer in the area after the race. What a day! As one person on Twitter put it, “Just reading about the Blue Ridge Marathon makes me exhausted.”

In that Storify feed alone, we heard from more than 75 different sources across platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. We saw 35 photos, 2 maps, 1 chart, 1 video and more tweets and Facebook posts than we can count. It seemed like the Blue Ridge Marathon crowd was a chatty bunch.

So we thought we’d try again with different audiences in different scenarios. So far, we’ve rounded up conversations from the Virginia Tech graduation and several other graduation ceremonies, Festival in the Park, and a severe weather situation that ended with a rainbow — and the dialogue has remained robust.

But there seem to be endless ways Storify can be used in storytelling.

With that in mind, I have a few questions for you:

Do you post to social media sites when you’re at events?

Would you post to social media sites if you were in a newsworthy situation (surveying property damage after a tornado or watching a house fire, for example)?

Do you use hashtags on social media sites like Twitter and Instagram to make your posts more searchable?

What types of stories or events would you like to see us cover with Storify?

Thanks for your input! And let’s keep the conversations going.

Mason Adams

Hi RefreshRT readers. I’m Mason Adams, the Roanoke city hall and politics reporter, and you can usually find me over at the Blue Ridge Caucus blog — but today I’m interested in your thoughts on podcasts.

Podcasts are essentially radio shows you can load on an iPod or other MP3 player. At one time the Roanoke Times regularly produced news-related podcasts in which senior editor Dwayne Yancey or another editor would interview reporters about upcoming stories.

Today, the only Roanoke Times writer regularly recording podcasts is music reporter Tad Dickens, who uses them on his cutNscratch music blog to interview and play songs from bands with upcoming gigs in our area.

Tad tells me those podcasts — especially ones featuring well-known artists — might draw up to several hundred listens over time. Two of his recent podcasts, featuring Roger McGuinn and Mother’s Finest, each drew more than 1,000 listens.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about these recordings since I moved to Check last fall. My commute grew from 10 minutes to 45, so I spend a lot of time in the car each day. I fill that time by loading up my iPod with a variety of shows — everything from BBC audio documentaries to a whole slew of comedy podcasts.

I listen regularly to The Economist’s weekly “Money Talks”, CBS’ “Face the Nation” and Slate’s Political Gabfest.

So that’s got me wondering:
– Do you listen to any podcasts? Which ones?
– Would you listen to Roanoke Times-produced podcasts? What would you like to hear – a round-up of the daily news, beat reporters discussing what’s happening in their worlds or a mixture of both?
– For commuters, how do you spend time on your daily drive? Do you listen to music, to the radio or to something else?
– Particularly for those who don’t always have time to read the paper or stories on roanoke.com, would you listen to an audio version of the day’s news stories?

Follow me on Twitter, @masonadamsRT or friend me on Facebook. I’m looking forward to your feedback.

A new yard sale map is now featured on roanoke.com. The map will be updated regularly with new yard sale listings from The Roanoke Times classifieds.

As you might expect, the map has more listings near the end of the week since most yard sales are scheduled for Friday or Saturday. The map is accessible from any desktop or mobile device at http://yardsales.roanoke.com. To assist with the browsing, a list of mapped sales can be expanded from the right side of the map.

How do you like the map?

Do you have any thoughts about how to make it better?

What other types of maps would be helpful to you?

Today's Inside Out cover

Today’s Inside Out cover officially introduces our new calendar tool, which is only about a month old. So that means it’s a work in progress!

Here are some new features we’re excited about:

- For people looking for events, we now have convenient filters you can use — free, 21+, kid-friendly (the blue smiley face), and Editor’s Picks — to help sort through the listings.

- For venues submitting events, they can now create a venue page so that they only have to submit the venue’s basic information once. We also streamlined our categories to make it easier to know where events best fit.

While we are happy to share this new tool, keep this in mind as you test it out:

1. It works best with Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox browsers. At this time, we don’t recommend accessing the calendar with Safari or Chrome. If you’re a Mac user, you can download a Firefox for Mac for free here.

2. Please share your thoughts on this blog post, or email events@roanoke.com.

3. Again, it is only a few weeks old and we expect there will be glitches as more people use it. Just keep us informed if you come across any problems.

Please take this poll to help us gauge our multimedia offerings.