www.roanoke.com

Megan Schnabel, editor

Michele Crim, designer

Annie Johnson, reporter

Michelle Skeen, editorial assistant

We have more changes to announce at The Blue Ridge Business Journal, our bi-weekly business publication.
In the recent past, we’ve relied on freelance writers, and an editor who doubles as a reporter.
Now, all that’s changing.
A few weeks ago, we announced a new editor: Megan Schnabel, a veteran metro editor for The Roanoke Times and a former business reporter here, has taken over as the journal’s full-time editor.
She joined our long-time designer, Michele Crim, as we moved the journal’s operations into The Roanoke Times newsroom to work alongside the staff of the daily newspaper.
Now, we have more staff additions to announce:
* Annie Johnson is the journal’s reporter. She most recently has been a reporter for Congressional Quarterly in Washington, covering Capitol Hill. She knows her business stuff, too. Annie has a degree in economics from the former Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg (now just Randolph College.). She also previously worked as an intern on our business team for The Roanoke Times, and later worked here as an editorial assistant before going off to D.C. We’re thrilled to have her back.
* Michelle Skeen is the journal’s editorial assistant. She’s a graduate of Virginia Tech, and has interned for the daily newspaper in Waynesboro, the News-Virginian. Michelle will be spending a lot of her time working on the Business Journal’s website, which is presently undergoing a major renovation.
We’ll have more details on that coming soon. But if you’d like to follow business developments on Twitter, you can do that now. The Business Journal has its own Twitter following at “BRBusinessJ” and on Facebook, where can you find us simply as “Blue Ridge Business Journal.”

-- Dwayne Yancey, senior editor

Photo by aslakr | flickr.com

If you're reaching this page after 11 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 7, because you typed "roanoke.com" into your browser hoping to find today's breaking news, the latest from the Fort Hood shootings or election results, we're sorry.

You've been redirected to this post because, between 11 and 11:30 p.m. tonight, we'll be taking a few of our databases offline to perform some routine maintenance and backups.

Thanks for your patience. We'll be back online as usual by 11:30.

Till then, our stories, multimedia and calendar will be unavailable, but you'll be able to browse our blogs -- where you can recap Election Day news and analysis, find a recipe for Brunswick stew or discuss the 100 things restaurant staffers should never do at Lindsey Nair's Fridge Magnet blog, find out about holiday promotions and new shops arriving in town on Jenny Kincaid Boone's Storefront blog and recap this week's Virginia Tech game on Randy King and Doug Doughty's Insiders blog.

In the meantime, if you've got questions or comments, feel free to comment here on our From the Newsroom blog or e-mail me at meg.martin@roanoke.com.

-- Meg Martin, online editor

There are at least two ways to look at all the lay-offs that have been announced at companies around Western Virginia lately. One is to add up the numbers and see the sobering result. The other is, well, to look at them -- plot the lay-offs on a map and see where they are and what patterns or trends emerge that way about which communities are the hardest hit.

That's what our data delivery editor, Matt Chittum, has done on The Datasphere, our online center for all kinds of data about Western Virginia. Here's his map and a blog post explaining it.

Matt also was invited to talk about it on WVTF-FM last week. Here's his interview with the Roanoke public radio station, if you'd like to take a listen:

Whenever I walk past music writer Tad Dickens' desk, the odds are he's got a set of headphones clamped to his ears. He's not always jamming out to tunes, either. More likely, he's working on a podcast -- an audio interview that you can download onto your ipod.

In the past few weeks, you've seen a series of interviews in the Extra section he's done with musicians who have been coming through the Roanoke and New River valleys -- today, it's country star Vince Gill. Last week, it was country star Jason Aldean and New Orleans piano stylist Allen Toussaint. Before that, it was bluesman Derek Trucks, country singer Crystal Gayle, Dave Matthews collaborator Tim Reynolds and, well, you get the idea.

With each of those, Tad produced not only a print story, but also a podcast.

Want to take a listen? You can find Tad's most recent podcasts here -- and the older ones cataloged here.

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.

Read more »

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?

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.

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!

Correcting mid-'90s code is bittersweet

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!

This icon is rapidly being adopted as the standard for RSS feeds.

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.