A lot has been going on in the background with Depot Central (and I will leave those for Scott) however two important pieces of our site have returned.  The RSS and poll system are back.

Since we switched servers, the RSS feed pretty much died, so did polls.  The old systems worked well, but it was time for both the polls and rss feeds to be updated, so we waited until after we launched the new site to re-establish them.

Over the past few days both of these systems have been redone and relaunched, opening doors to future upgrades.

If you want to know more about rss feeds, check out this post.

-TJ

Well, we are beginning week two of running Depot Central and it still has quite a few things to work through. Thankfully there have been few hiccups. Scott can write a more comprehensive update at a later time on what has not worked and what is now working.

Bad news today from a great blog and resource for news folk diving into multimedia work.
Multimediashooter.com is dead, hopefully not forever…  Richard Koci Hernandez (multimedia guru from the San Jose Mercury News announced.

-TJ

Since Monday, we’ve been receiving non-stop questions about the “Search Archives” section. Unfortunately, with the release of Depot Central V2, this section has been quietly retired…to pave the way for the all-new, all-improved Search functionality.

Long-time users of Yakimaherald.com will be familiar with our Search Archives section, with a slow and cumbersome webform that almost never had useful results. To add insult to injury, stories older than a week required a $1.50 fee to look them up. Due to the previous way that stories were filed and stored, it was deemed easier at the time to contract an external company to index and search our archives(which largely accounted for the fee).

With the change to Depot Central V2, we now host stories from a modern SQL database, similar to a WordPress blog just like this one. And with recent advances in software, we can now integrate a dedicated full-text search engine into the site, with no extra burden for us.

What does this mean for you, the user? It means an end to archival fees for one thing: in a few weeks anyone will be able to view our archives going back to 1998, completely free of charge(albeit with some existing restrictions: we cannot host Associated Press and other articles we do not have the rights for).
Even better, the search is much faster, and much easier to use. It is already in use for several administration functions of Depot Central, and users have reported it as a “breath of fresh air”.

Stick with us for a few more weeks, and we’ll make sure you never get lost in our site again..

- Scott

Scott Francis, the Web team’s programmer, has been hard at work repairing parts of yakimaherald.com that should work, but doesn’t. In other words - bug hunting.

To catch folks up on our latest news, yakimaherald.com runs on Depot Central, a ruby on rails system to publish the news online. Scott built Depot Central.

Before we launched the new site, his programming of Depot Central has mostly been in the background on a test server. It’s unavailable to the public, so the Web team can test, evaluate and modify the system so it operates smoothly. Yet bugs are unavoidable. One perspective that is relatively commonplace in the tech industry is that testing within a closed system can never ensure bug free products. That reason is why we have the disclaimer at the head of yakimaherald.com. If you encounter an error, let us know so we can fix it.

Since we launched, several of these bugs have been reported and fixed. Others will be squashed over the next few weeks and months. The short answer is, what we build and test privately sometimes does not work after it is deployed to the public, forcing us to fix it or disband it.

Here’s a short list of things that have been repaired or modified on yakimaherald.com since we launched.

• Front page redux (several times - and ongoing)
• ‘E-mail the story’ link
• Several section pages did not display correctly (sports, opinion, letters to the editor…)
• Massaging the control system (how we manage the stories)
• Temporarily diverting sections to the old server, such as obits, until we get them migrated over to the new system.
• Getting the ad system to work better site wide.

More bug stuff later!

- TJ

The first full day of our new Web publishing system is coming to a successful close. Yakimaherald.com is now running on a home-grown content management system (CMS) called “Depot Central V2.”

Some pieces of the old Web site remain, such as paid obituaries and newspapers in education. These legacy areas will be phased out and the old server will be cleaned and used to bolster yh-r.com’s stability.

Building a news CMS is a relatively unusual task in the industry. Most news Web sites pay companies to customize and host existing publishing platforms for their news sites. A quick look at Yakima and Northwest area news providers; kimatv.com, kapptv.com, kndo.com, king5.com, nwcn.com, komotv.com, kirotv.com and many more are all built by their corporate owners or by private developers. Yakimaherald.com will join a handful of news Web sites built from within the home organization, such as spokesmanreview.com and seattletimes.com.

Taking on CMS projects by news organizations can be a risk, because they can be costly and time consuming to get off the ground. But the benefit of having a home grown system allows organizations to constantly improve their Web site to reflect the needs of their community.

I have experienced the troubles associated with ‘bought’ Web systems. They occur most often when trying to customize the site to help present a given story, that day. Dealing with customer service at corporate headquarters, or tracking down a programmer at the company that built your news Web site is downright impractical when deadlines fall in your lap.

Our old system, even though it was relatively flexible, was not an easy tool to use emerging online publishing techniques. Now, with Depot Central, it improves yakimaherald.com’s ability to take advantage of new online publishing methods for the benefit of our readers and viewers.

The first day went well and the Web team continues to find, and fix bugs. If you have any problems or comments please let us know. You can e-mail us at webmaster@yakimaherald.com, thanks again!

-TJ

For anyone who casually reads yakimaherald.com, you might have noticed several things going on with our site, some good, some not so good.

Over the past 3 months or so we’ve changed our advertising service a few times, added new code and subtracted others from the main site, and are creating new ways to tell stories online with video — all the while building a new CMS (content management system) to publish the news.

Currently, we use a rather pieced together grouping of technology to process and publish news stories for the Web site. The new publishing system (CMS) will use fewer processes and enable us to manage and publish online in a better way.

The new system, known to the Web team as Depot Central, has been an ongoing project for nearly two years. All of the work, from planning to programming will be launched in it’s raw form next week. More on this in a future post…

Experiencing Web news hiccups?

If you’ve noticed slow loading time, graphic or design elements being in the wrong place, or the site being down for a moment, etc… well, you are not alone.

One major hiccup has been the amount of time it has taken the public to load yakimaherald.com. After a few weeks of poking at the site, and a couple days of downright frustration, we think the major load problems have been eliminated.

If you want, please comment, or e-mail us about your load time experiences before Feb. 26 and the present.

Regarding problems with pages appearing funny when you look at them, etc… As we prepare for the new CMS, we are trying out new design and code formats. Most of them work the first time, others require a bit of tinkering to make the site display correctly on most Web browser configurations.

These changes make the site a more ‘organic’ site, than a static, flat Web site that rarely changes. One of the biggest reasons for building the new CMS is to provide flexibility for displaying and publishing the news.

Many Web techies call flexible sites ‘dynamic’, but for me, what yakimaherald.com is becoming is more organic than anything. I think that way because it’s changing in ways the public may not see in one day, unless it experiences a few growing pains (like a bit of misplaced code that breaks the front page,) but is recognizable over time.

To me, ‘organic’ also means that it’s home grown. It has a few difficult days, or weeks as it matures and develops, but it’s made by folks here in the Valley to reflect the community it serves. At least that’s how I like to think about it.

To wrap this up — I will have a lot to say about these new projects, as they come rushing forward to public use. My hope is that the changeover into our new publishing platform has few bumps on its way forward, but we will see. Bear with us and continue watching as yakimaherald.com experiences a major growth spurt in the coming days.

-TJ

Wow! It seems as if us Web folks have gone underground since our last posting. Sorry for the lack of attention to our yakimaherald.com development blog… we have been very busy over the last month. I’ll try to wrap up the latest developments that have consumed our department and answer a question or two that I have fielded over that time.

First the questions:
Q: Does yakimaherald.com have an RSS feed? (Learn more about RSS)
One of our readers, Scott, noted that he could not find an RSS feed for yakimaherald.com. Scott isn’t alone in asking whether or not we have an RSS feed.
A: Yup, we do. We have been quietly using feedburner to manage our news stories that are published on yakimaherald.com. Quietly? Yea, well, after we started building out the RSS feed - we found that some headlines/stories actually come through poorly depending on the RSS reader used. After struggling to iron out the consistencies among several RSS readers, we decided to not ‘advertise’ the link to the RSS page, but allow for it’s availability quietly. We can provide the link on request or, if you are a tech savvy RSS hunter, you can find it in the right side of the address bar in your Internet browser as an icon, (like this ) which, when clicked, would take you to our yakimaherald.com’s RSS page: http://feeds.yakimaherald.com/yhronlinenews. So - until we get the kinks worked out regarding the feed’s display in different readers, we won’t make a big deal out of it.

Q: Is every story that is published in the Yakima Herald-Republic on yakimaherald.com?
A: Yes and No. All stories written by YH-R staff are destined for yh-r.com. Stories written by the AP or other writers may or may not appear depending on whether it has a major local impact. Such as an AP story about agriculture that is focused on Yakima industry, or something of that nature. We also publish AP and other wire stories during the day as updates, when they provide local readers other interesting stories that are happening that day. Any story that is published in the newspaper can be sent to you by fax, e-mail, or mail by request. Contact our librarian Donean Brown at 509-577-7697(9am-5pm, Monday through Friday)

Q: Where is the ’search archives’ search box?
A: You can find it in a variety of places within our new navigation bar. Hold your mouse cursor above one of the section listings, and a menu will drop down containing subsections and search links. Instead of being contained on the left side of the Web site, we decided to move it to consolidate our features and links to one location.

(In the next blog posting!)
The latest developments: Upgrades, special projects, video and workshops - oh my!

Well over the past few days Scott has taken on the task of making a few fixes and improvements to our Opinion section.

As we work on improving some of our features, inevitably those changes alter how other things work in different sections.

One such fix came up this week when we were notified by a few of our readers that the print and email functions were not working in the Opinion pages. Scott has fixed that problem, but it highlights a greater need that we need you, the reader, to provide us feedback on what you experience on yakimaherald.com. Good or bad, the more we know, the better we can provide the news, entertainment, photography, video and blogs that we hope to supply.

I strongly encourage everyone to let us know what works and what doesn’t on the Web site - so feel free to contact us through commenting on this blog, phoning or emailing us through the ‘contact us’ page.

We are looking forward to improving the site, and hopefully not breaking too many things along the way!

-TJ

If you haven’t already noticed over the last two days we have added a new navigation bar link that contains links to our new photo department website (thanks to the head photo editor, Gordon King, turned geek,) a link to our photo reprints site, the new photo department photo blog (Go photo staff,) all of the great audio slideshows that you’ve come to expect of the YH-R photo staff in the new ‘multimedia’ link and finally - a local video section - that will have any video YH-R folks shoot and/or audio slideshows that are created as well.

Theses new tools (blog and video) will help us organize our content for you to read. Here’s a bit of info on these new sections: (more…)

The yakimaherald.com Web site was up and down most of Saturday, providing inconsistent service to our readers. We are looking into what systems failed and how we can prevent future problems.
I encourage our readers to please contact us if you are having problems accessing yakimaherald.com or any Yakima Herald-Republic Web sites (like this one) so we can get things fixed.
Thank you!
-TJ