They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
–Andy Warhol
And so it is that we make some more changes around here. After all, they weren’t gonna change themselves.
Friday evening, we’ll change the look of of the website. It will result in a more streamlined look and feel, a simpler way of seeing the news in its various categories. The reason for that change is simple: I don’t like the look of things at the moment. And I’ve got only myself to blame. It’s the design I came up with, and which our long-suffering webmaster, Matt Cwalinski, turned into functional code.
It’s also not a simple design for our tiny, overworked staff to maintain — we have to shift lots of pieces around to make things work right.
It shouldn’t be that hard, and after tonight (the gods of code willing), it won’t be.
And most of our ads will be larger, and of a national standard size. Our surveys over the years tell us many of you feel the commercial information is important and helps you make buying decisions. We want those ads to have more impact.
The other change is a little more significant. We’re unifying the two Daily News websites under a common banner.
For a while now, the main part of our URL has been https://oswegocountytoday.com. If you typed in fultondailynews.com, you got the Fulton home page, and likewise for Oswego. We had hoped that our wonderful publishing software would allow us to keep doing what we’ve done all these years — hide the publishing system on one domain (in this case, oswegocountytoday.com) and serve up pages that look like two separate domains (the fultondailynews and oswegodailynews sites).
Alas, it won’t.
We can keep fighting it, or we can give in. We’re giving in. Oswego County Today, it is. Our masthead, when we get it ready, will incorporate our names of the last nine and eight years. But we’ll be a single site from here on out, with very little geographic separation.
We’ll also be fixing some of the nagging little stuff we’ve lived with since our last big changeover, such as massively long URLs to stories.
That means that when you next check in on us, your bookmarks may take you to different places, or to the dreaded 404 error screen. We’re working to make sure that old URLs work properly.
But we won’t be losing any of the stories in this system — they’ll be converted to the new look and URL.
We will be shutting down the site somewhere between 5 and 6 Friday night to get things done. With any luck, it’ll take about an hour. With no luck, longer.
As always, let us know how you feel about this stuff.
The more things change, the more they remain… insane.
—Michael Fry and T. Lewis, Over the Hedge[Note: The software change somehow turned off comments for this post, which is ironic if you think about it. I’ve turned them on again. NOW, you can let us know what you like and don’t like. – Dave]
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I don’t understand why you are making everyone register for this website, after all it is free. Thank You
[Thanks for your note. The registration thing is an error, plain and simple. In upgrading the software of the website, a plugin that turns on registration — which we had kept turned off — was turned on by accident.
It’s off again, thanks to a couple of folks who mentioned this to us.
Believe me, we were surprised to see it.
That said, we are studying the issue of registrations for some issues, such as posting comments. Here’s the problem: Anonymous comments were supposed to save the world — offer everyone a chance to participate in democratic debate about the big issues of the day and come to a consensus that serves us all.
And some of that does happen. But more often, anonymous cowards come here to call someone a nasty name that they just can’t summon up the courage to do to the person’s face.
We’ve said before that we think of comments as being like having a party in your house. If one of the guests got abusive, you’d ask him/her to leave.
But in this case, we’re running a house party and have a house full of people whom we don’t know. Asking people to register and post under their own names will clean up much of the dialogue and allow the little that isn’t up to snuff to be addressed on a person-to-person basis. If you know the name of the jerk who verbally abused your wife, you can go to his house and punch him in the nose. (But don’t, or you’ll wind up in our Cop Logs.)
The other reason is legal protection for the business and the people who work here. The law says that if you run a forum, you cannot be sued for someone’s nasty comment (and here’s the irony) if you don’t edit comments at all. In other words, you get the most legal protection from doing the least. If we edit comments, as we do now, we could be legally liable for the one that slips through.
So, we’re thinking about these issues. But if we do something like this, we’ll do it slowly and with plenty of notice beforehand.
Sorry for today’s hiccup, but it should all be cleared up by now.
-Dave Bullard/Managing Editor]
I like this layout better. Good Job!!!
Enjoy the new look. I didn’t like the old one, but hey, free is free and I don’t know how make a website myself! I didn’t like the pop up that always came up with the old one either. Even though I had pop ups off, this site always allowed one to get through. We’ll see…so far, so good!
[Wayne: Thanks for the kind comments! As for the popunder ad, please please please consider allowing the annoyance. Why? Because free may be free to you, but running this place costs us money and those popunders give us a few bucks to pay the server bill with. We limit them to (I forget the exact number) one or two per person per day, but they’re important to us because it costs us in the middle six figures to run this place and every dollar helps. (Go ahead and block the other guy’s stuff 😉 Again, thanks! – Dave]
Hello from the River Country Journal in Michigan!
Thanks for the explanation regarding the changes you’ve made and the rationale behind them. The revamped site looks good!
Best wishes!
[Bruce: Thanks! Hope all is well at the RCJ. -Dave]
I like the new layout…
def easier to get around to what
one is looking for…
Thanks and keep up the
good work!
Please bring back a search bar
[Richard: Thanks for the note. Absolutely we will, asap. -Dave]
Dave and Associates:
As a former Oswegonian and faithful daily ODN reader, I like the new format. Thank you for your efforts and best wishes for continued success! Hello to everyone in Oswego County from warm (well very hot) AZ.
FSH
[Dave and associates thank you back, and hope the climate’s not too hot for a Tovarich. -Dave]