Heads up, digital subscribers*. We’ve just released an update to our iPad app, the one that presents each day’s paper in an electronic format.

To get the update, head to the App Store and search on “Roanoke Times.” Look for the icon labeled “Print Replica.”

What’s new with the update?

To begin with, the loading screen is now a gorgeous image of Grayson Highlands by former Roanoke Times photographer Sam Dean.

Beyond that, the biggest change benefits your bandwidth consumption. In the previous version, the app would automatically download that day’s edition for offline reading if you were in a WiFi area. Now you have to push a button in the upper left (labeled “download for offline reading”) to kick that in.

This change was made to allow users with limited storage capacity on their devices to choose when to download and when to read only online.

Another change makes the app act more like a tablet app, allowing for left-right sweeping gestures to quickly scan content. When you are in the article mode (you get there by double-tapping on a story), sweep your fingers across the screen from left to right. The story you’re reading will sweep away and be replaced by the next article on the page.

You can learn more about the iPad app by checking out our FAQ.

This video also walks you through the iPad app signup and links to other instructional videos in our Digital Access Series. (Yep, that means we have stuff for you Kindle users and Droid fans, too.)

*Remember, if you’re a print subscriber any of our digital products are included at no cost. Email digitalaccess@roanoke.com to sign up and get started.

For ages now, we’ve encouraged online commenting on our roanoke.com blogs. We believe the best digital conversations happen around communities of interest, where commenters get to know each other and share their passion for food, sports, politics or the like.

But with the roanoke.com redesign, we wondered if we couldn’t keep the community vibe going while also allowing for conversations on stories that don’t fit neatly into our blog lineup. Could we resurrect story commenting, but manage it carefully and maintain our rules of engagement?

We’ve all seen comments run amok on other sites, with haters, shouters and trolls rendering the bottom of a story page the equivalent of a sewage-filled basement .  We’ve worked hard – and invested time – here to keep that crew out by pre-screening every comment posted on our site.

That will stay the case with our new story commenting, which we’re rolling out this week. You’ll find an example on today’s breaking story about the sentencing of former Franklin County sheriff’s deputy Jonathan Agee. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see where you can post a comment. As with our blogs, you can post anonymously but need to sign in. You also may need to wait a bit before you see your comment approved by our editing team.

Thanks for your patience if you experience a delay. We hope you understand it’s a small price to pay for keeping roanoke.com a safe place for commenting.

So, how will this work every day? We’ll open story commenting on a few stories a day. If you’d like to suggest a thread, let us know by messaging onlineeditors@roanoke.com.

Let’s get some conversations going.

Reporter Beth Macy has won a $30,000 prize for an upcoming book about the effects of globalization on Southwest Virginia furniture manufacturing. Her book, “Factory Man,” focuses on Galax furniture heir John D. Bassett III, who was also a subject in her 2012 Roanoke Times series, “Picking Up the Pieces.”

The Little, Brown & Co. book is scheduled to be published next year. Columbia University today announced Macy had won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. It “is given annually to aid in the completion of a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern. Recognizing that a nonfiction book based on extensive original research often overtaxes the resources available to its author, the project envisions the award as a way of closing the gap between the time and money an author has and the time and money that finishing a book requires,” according to Columbia.

Macy is nearing the end of a yearlong leave from the newspaper as she completes the book. She has written for  The Roanoke Times since 1989 and won numerous national and state awards, including serving as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the 2009-2010 academic year.

The redesigning around here continues with our latest addition: The beginnings of a video page where you’ll see the work of Roanoke Times visual journalists as well as breaking news feeds from the News Distribution Network.

To get to the video page, click on Multimedia in the top navigation, then click on Video in the subnavigation.

NDN is a wire service that distributes video from national and international journalism organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, Reuters and The Associated Press. The NDN playlist is currently viewable on the left-hand rail of the video page. It is updated dynamically throughout the day with breaking news video.

As we continue to build out the site, look for more video feeds in other sections. Do you have suggestions on the type of video you’d like to see?

It was time to celebrate Thursday night as employees involved in the roanoke.com redesign gathered at Roanoke’s Shenandoah Club.  Danielle Dunaway photographed the night’s events.

The list of RT employees involved in the redesign, which began in earnest in summer 2011 with “Project Gateway,” is long and likely not complete. That’s because it’s hard to find someone in the company who didn’t somehow offer support in some way for this effort.

But here’s the official list (with a shoutout to former online editor Meg Martin, who’s an ex officio member of this team). These folks served on more than a half dozen teams that looked at design, user engagement, our new digital-first workflow and that critical infrastructure. (Thanks, IT team!)

Alison O’Brien, Amanda Codispoti, Andrew Crater, Andrew Svec, Angela Campbell, Brian Kelley, Brian Thomas, Caitlin Saniga, Christina Nuckols, Craig Slomczewski, Dale Alexander, Dan Wheeler, Dana Bailey, Danielle Dunaway, Dwayne Yancey, Ellen Moseley, Erica Myatt, Gary Eanes, Grant Jedlinsky, Greg Ludwick, Jess Hoch, Karenna Glover, Kathy Lu, Katrina Waugh, Keith Liles, Kyle Draper, Lee Crawford, Lindsey Nair, Luda Nichols, Marie Stewart, Mark Shaver, Mary-Chris Hirsch, Matt Baumann, Matt Chittum, Michael Stowe, Mike DiFerdinando, Mike Guntlow, Natalee Waters, Nona Nelson, Patrick Hornby, Ralph Berrier, Ryan Loew, Katrina Tulloch, Stefan Babich, Stephanie Ogilvie, Suzanne Wardle, Tom Fraticelli, Tracy Brown, Wendy Kelley

We’re a week in with the new roanoke.com design and it’s time for an update. You have filled our feedback tool (accessible via that little yellow tab on the right of your screen) with more than 400 comments.

In summary, we hear this: Change is hard.

Yes, it’s hard when this website hasn’t changed in seven years – yes, you read that right, seven years.

Think of where you were with technology seven years ago. Did you have a 42-inch HD TV? A smart phone that streamed Pandora in your car? Were you still on dial-up? Maybe a few of you were on Facebook, but not a tweet was heard in the land those days.

We waited too long to change roanoke.com, I’ll admit. So when we did it last week we heard a lot of, “Whoa, doggies, why’d you go and do that?”

And, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Well, it was broke. We had patched and glued the old roanoke.com together for as long as we could, but we sorely needed this overhaul. Now might be the time to point out this project was not just about aesthetics – while the site looks new to you, the engine beneath it (what’s called the content management system) also is brand new.

Plainly put, top to bottom we’re driving a new car – while keeping the old one running during the transition. That accounts for the missing puzzles (they’re back), the site slowness (still working on) and more.

Thank you for your patience — and, most of all, for contributing your impressions and experiences with the feedback tool. We’re listening, we’re making changes.

But hang on tight – it won’t be another seven years before we do this again. It won’t be because we need to continuously improve what we bring you, our growing digital audience.

So, how have we responded so far?

You asked, “Where’s my breaking news?” Yesterday we added time stamps in red letters on stories on the homepage. Look for them if you’re scanning for today’s latest news.  If you see a story without a time stamp, that means it was produced during the previous day’s news cycle.

You said, “The blog font is too light – it’s hard to read.” Check it out on this page – it’s now darker, and we aired out the type as well.

  You asked, “Where’s the high school sports database?” Never fear, it’s coming back. We’re using the between-season time to make the change. But, meanwhile, stop by prep reporter Robert  Anderson’s blog, where we’re taking feedback on what you’d like to see differently.

You asked a lot more questions about where to find your favorites. For answers, we can point you to a helpful feature on the feedback tool.

In the white box search box, start typing in your question. (In this case, we started typing in, “Where are high school …” while looking for the database.) Before you’re even done typing you’ll likely see similar questions – and answers – to your own displayed in the search results.

If your question hasn’t been answered yet, we’ll answer it and add it to these search results so others can see it in future searches, wiki style.

Again, thank you for your feedback. Together we can make roanoke.com even better.

Find our new site at beta.roanoke.com.

The big day is here ­– we’re ready to give you an early peek at the new roanoke.com as we build out its final stages.  But before you click the link, we’d like to remind you that you’ll be checking out a beta version of our new website.

What’s beta mean exactly? Well, you’ll be looking at a site in development. Think of it as house being built before your eyes – we’ve framed it out and are hanging drywall, moving in appliances and bringing in furniture every day.

It’s a work in progress, so please pardon our dust as you come across sections shy on new content or tools that don’t quite work yet. In some cases, you’ll click through to the old site as we convert our content to the new format.

We’ll update this post with what we’re working on and encourage you to check back often to see our progress.

As we go, we hope you’ll continue to provide feedback – a conversation we began a year ago on the RefreshRT blog.

We now have new interactive feedback tool where you can not only share your comments but rate those made by others.

We’ve also produced a short video to give you a sense of what was important to us as we rebuilt the site.

On behalf of the many Roanoke Times/roanoke.com employees hard at work on this project, I’d like to thank you for contributing your ideas and helping the new site grow into an important community resource.

Carole Tarrant

Editor

What we’re working on* today includes:

(Updated 02.07.13)

• Browser compatibility (Advice for iPad/iPhone users)
  

• Story-sharing tools

• RSS feeds

• Story archive prior to Feb. 4, 2013

• Embedded video  (see http://beta.roanoke.com/multimedia/video/)

• Search

• Design of weather info in right rail 

• Caching issues (Advice for “Service unavailable” message)
• Commenting on select stories

*Items on our punch list may not be working or may change in appearance as developers test them. Thanks for your patience!