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

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!

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…)

From about 7 a.m. to 10:50 a.m., the main Yakima Herald-Republic Web site was unavailable. Vaguely ominous messages such as “Service Temporarily Unavailable” or “Rails application failed to start properly” greeted our readers. (Warning: We’re about to get geeky with our technical descriptions.) (more…)

For anyone who read my post about bug fixing shortly after launching the new navigation bar; Scott has eliminated several javascript errors. So far it looks like they have been eliminated, but (more…)

Hopefully change helps you find the stories you want to read on yakimaherald.com.

If you haven’t noticed already, yakimaherald.com has been going through a few changes recently. The two most recent changes have been how you find stories and the user interface (logo, colors, placement of content).

There have been other projects the Web guys have been taking on over the last two months to improve yakimaherald.com, however, for the time being, I am going to write about the two latest changes.

—-

Navigation System

Yakimaherald.com no longer has a navigation bar on the top and left side of the Web site. (see examples marked in red)

We have moved many of the links into one place in the top navigation bar for a number of reasons; the first to help readers find what they are looking for on yakimaherald.com. The new navigation bar contains most of the old links to pages readers have come to expect, such as the sports page, or today’s news page.

- More pages, more stories -
On closer inspection of the navigation bar, readers will find new links, new pages, and a way to read stories that were published that week in (more…)

Most Internet Explorer errors and bugs with the new navigation bar have been resolved as of 4:30 today. We will continue to check how it work on other browsers this coming week and add them to the list below. If the navigation bar is not loading or functioning in your Web browser please make a comment below so we can resolve the issue. Thanks again!

We are currently (3:15 p.m. Friday) checking for errors and bugs with the new navigation bar. During the next two hours we will be making sure it works in the most common browsers.

As of 4:30 p.m. yakimaherald.com:

Internet Explorer 6: working

Internet Explorer 7: working

Firefox 2+: working

Safari: working

A couple javascript errors are popping up, but is not causing a problem. Progress - looking into it.

—-

I will update this as we make sure yakimaherald.com is compliant within the above browsers.
-TJ

Welcome to yakimaherald.com’s blog - ‘The 404′ - where the guys at your favorite local dot com provide the public behind-the-scenes information about yakimaherald.com, yakimablogs.com, playdateyakima.com and other Yakima Herald-Republic Internet properties.

—-

The geeks behind the wheel:

Matt - Online Director -
Matt is responsible for the overall direction of the department and the site. He spends much of his time determining strategic goals, selecting vendors, and working with advertisers and other Yakima Herald-Republic staff. Matt has a BFA in Graphic Design and has been working in the online newspaper world for 10 years now. (Note from TJ: Matt’s cool factor has been raised by a factor of +2)

TJ - Web Producer -
I publish story updates, build graphics, write some code, shoot some photos and video, record audio, build blogs (like this one), and other various things. In other words, I stay busy.

Scott - Web Developer -
Scott programs and maintains the various technologies that drive the Web site, and usually is kept far away from graphic design.

—-

What is The 404?

The term ‘404′ is a tech reference to a common error message when a Web page is not available.

“The 404 or Not Found error message is an HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and not reveal the reason why.” - from Wikipedia

Since the Web folks work behind the scenes at yakimaherald.com, it made sense to name the public blog after a message explaining that something does not exist.

—-

How to use this blog
The Web guys will comment on what is going on here at yakimaherald.com. We encourage you to use the ‘Let me hear your take, comment on this’ section to provide us feedback and questions about your experiences with yakimaherald.com.

- TJ