From Analog to Digital

You may have noticed that Herald-Mail.com was down briefly for maintenance this morning. If so, we apologize for any inconvenience caused by the downtime. In addition to some bug fixes, we’ve revamped our user accounts to include profiles and an updated preferences area.

You can now click on any user’s name to view their profile. A user’s profile currently displays a few details about the user and lists the most recent comments (if any) the user has posted. We have a few ideas for the new profiles that we feel will help facilitate reader interaction on our site.

We’re running a contest in response to a totalbeauty.com article that ranked Hagerstown 2^nd out of eight cities with the ugliest guys. We’re trying to find Hagerstown’s hottest man, and we need your help.

Register for an account on Herald-Mail.com to help choose Hagerstown’s hottest man. The winner will be chosen at an event at Bulls and Bears Restaurant on December 21, 2009.  See the contest page for more information.

Some of you may have noticed that the site was inaccessible last night between 1:30 and 3:30 this morning. This was the result of planned maintenance and software upgrades.

You may notice that some of the sections on herald-mail.com have changed slightly. This morning’s upgrades involved extending the functionality of our CMS to give editors more fine-grained control of the presentation of editorial content, and also to improve site performance.

We have some more enhancements planned for the near future. I’ll detail them here as they arrive.

We’ve listened to the feedback from users of THECalendar and have brought a new local event site online—allHagerstown.net.

Submitting events is now easier. Events submitted by users are instantly posted to the site and can be edited and deleted. Events can have images associated with them.

We’ve moved the events from our previous software over to our new site. If you submitted an event and would like to take ownership of it, please create an account and let us know.

The Herald-Mail is hosting an online photo contest for pets. This is partially due to the success of the Yearbook of Babies: Cutest Baby Contest we hosted earlier this year. We’ll be giving away over $1,000 in cash prizes to the category winners (provided by Parade Magazine). The photo categories are:

• Cutest Pet
• Best Pet Expression
• Me and My Pet Look Alike

For prize details and entry instructions please visit the registration page. You can find it our website—click on Pet Contest under Cool Stuff.

I hate math. It’s s a real known fact around here that my mind can not process even the most basic math principles.
Computer programming seems to have a solid foundation in math-like logic.
So when Ray, the web administrator, explains a specific programming issue to me, he tries to make it sound non-math-like. I think he worries that my eyes will glaze over like they used to do in every math class I ever had.

Interestingly enough, both programmers I’ve worked with here – Ray and his predecessor Travis – are able to explain processes extremely well. I’ve come to the conclusion if I ever am forced to take a math class again, I’m hiring a computer programmer as my tutor.

I used to be a reporter. The only tools I needed were a pen and a notepad. I hated tape recorders. I just didn’t trust the recorder as much as I trusted my pen.

How things have changed.

My name is Liz Thompson and I’m the digital director for The Herald-Mail’s online division. In the last year and a half, we’ve revamped and expanded our primary online site – herald-mail.com. We’ve added some sites – like WashingtonCountyLiving.com – and have a long list of plans to add more.

We’ll share some of those plans here and hopefully get your feedback. It should be fun, because around here, nothing ever stays the same.

Welcome to our new blog.  A few members of the Herald-Mail Digital staff—initially myself and Digital Director Liz Thompson—as well as Herald-Mail Publisher John League will be contributing on topics centered around our online initiatives.

I’m the web administrator for the Herald-Mail.  I keep our existing websites running smoothly and develop new ones.  I’ll typically post things like notices of scheduled site maintenance, planned and newly released site features and occasionally a narrative about what goes on behind the scenes of herald-mail.com.

Some of you may have noticed a new section—Cool Stuff—added to the primary navigation bar across the top of every page on herald-mail.com.  We’ve initially added a feed of posts from our Twitter account (and any posts that other Twitter users make about us), and a Shoutbox.  The Shoutbox is a place for users of our site to post short announcements and converse on whatever topics emerge from within.  We’ll be adding new features to our collection of Cool Stuff as time moves on.

Another thing that might stand out is the extended footer we’ve added to the bottom of our site.  The footer now provides a centralized listing of the sections of our site.  One area that may be of interest is the “New Features” list.  We’ll keep this list updated as we continue to improve the existing functionality, as well as add new functionality, to our website.

Thanks for reading;  we hope you’ll check back frequently.