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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Ch-ch-ch-ch

Later this morning, my newspaper colleagues will be debuting a redesigned website, which will include a new platform for this blog. If you come here through news-sentinel.com, you should still be able to click in as always. If you've got me bookmarked, you might have to change that, although I think they're going to try to come up with an automatic rerouter. Stay tuned.

Comments

Tim Zank
Tue, 01/17/2012 - 12:33pm

WOW!

Was a larger picture of you really necessary? Ha!

Harl Delos
Wed, 01/18/2012 - 5:13am

They're using Drupal for this site. It has become incredibly popular in the last five years.

There are two obvious ways to handle the rerouting problem. One is to have Drupal do it. It's fairly easy to set up one or two redirects in Drupal, but it's not particularly fast when you have thousands of URLs to convert, plus you have the fact that Drupal keeps getting upgraded, and it might be a pain to catch up.

The other way to do it would be using the Rewrite Engine in your Apache web server. You're running Apache 2.0.52, and it's both efficient and fairly stable, and you can use a text editor to add thousands of redirects at once, instead of one at a time.

But it still sounds like a pain in the keister to me. I'm glad I've retired.

 

William Larsen
Wed, 01/18/2012 - 9:21am

Leo,

It took my computer nearly five minutes to load this new format/link. It then took another couple of minutes for the comment page to load. All I have to say is the format/page is much slower with nothing to show for the change.

Christopher Swing
Wed, 01/18/2012 - 1:40pm

Well, there's a few things to show.

The "recent comments" on the left seem to be hopelessly broken now. None of the comments are matching up with the posts as I look at it now.

Well, as I looked at it. The problem where comments are made on a different page from the post (so you can't reference what you're posting on) has been fixed on main site pages... and broken here. Now I'm on a different page commenting on a post I can no longer see. Fix one thing, break another.

The "website" field is also gone from the comment form.

But there is something to show for it!

In the main site, they've managed to almost-scrub comments from the articles, including the Bryan Brown promotional pieces! Well, depending on if you use the site search engine or not. Not all the old versions have been killed. And they've been preserved outside of the News-Sentinel's control. Nice attempt at revisionist history, but then I'm guessing the News-Sentinel doesn't care to be known as any sort of "newspaper of record" anyway.

Phil Marx
Thu, 01/19/2012 - 12:27am

Of course, Leo, all of your posts are interesting.  But the most interesting ones are those which draw comments.  And your new format presents a problem there.

The individual stories on the home page do not show whether or how many comments they received as before.  All we have is the left sidebar showing the last six comments from all stories combined.  I think this is a loss.

Christopher Swing
Sat, 01/21/2012 - 12:10am

Yes, however the comments got broken here and removed sitewide is a huge problem.

Unless that's planned, since I'm pretty sure Leininger has had his fill of getting torn apart in almost every column he writes. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't want to see them back.

And Leo; what the hell, man. Doesn't your letters to the editor policy include at least a brief check of the links people put in their letters? Wallbuilders shouldn't even be considered iffy.

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