" QUESTION? on the archive of this article the photo no longer shows up. How can anyone try to aide in this without the photo? Plus this photo was in Tuesdays paper when most paper sales are at their low-shouldn't this be posted in the Sunday paper when the Citizen sales are at the high so more citizens may see the pic and help APD?

Fleming convenience store burglarized
By The Citizen staff report

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 11:41 AM EST

"

" A couple of questions; There is a search bar at the top of each page, but no button to activate the search, what is this for? Is it possible to archive the legal notices for back reference rather than calling The Citizen offices to see if a legal ad has been placed? For instance, a municipality has a meeting and the public would like to go back and check to see if said meeting was advertized as required. Thank You. "

" Haven't seen that other error yet today, but how come all morning just about every AP article link leads to the no longer here error page? "

" Last time I saw the error, I noticed it was some kind of "include" -- but there was more. I'll keep an eye out and if I see it again, I'll send a screen shot to your e-mail.

Thanks! "

" I don't really have a comment as to seeing the "raw code" unless I had a look at it. . . if you see it again, would you mind saving the page for me as "HTML only", and emailing it to me?

As for articles not getting archived: we don't (can't) archive our AP feeds, which are the national (and beyond) news stories that we have on here. Only locally-authored news gets archived and is searchable. "

" Real issues can't be understood or discussed in a sound-byte's worth of words. One could always just ignore longer posts but Steve feels a need to repeatedly complain about them.

Meanwhile, I've recently been experiencing a glitch sometimes when I try to load articles from the the "Where to Next?" box. I'll click a link and get a deadend with some raw code displayed. Sometimes I can back-up and try again and get the article, other times I have to wait until later. Two examples:

Today, it was the article on Diana's sister's testimony.

The other day, it was the first announcement of the case of the Mayor of Detroit's perjury.

In that latter case, when I tried to search for it, I found nothing. I'm finding that a lot of articles don't get indexed, or don't get indexed properly, so when I try to find them again later, the search engine turns up nothing.

Any comments on these?

Thanks! "

" Can you please limit the amount of characters one can write? It's really a pain that people really have to write so much, it's just wasted space for most - because of someone's endless rant. "

" Excellent, ty "

" Sorry about that.
I have updated the story in our archives to show and link the website from the article. Look for it at the bottom of the article - click here. "

" Hi Webitor, U ran an story on real property tax and in the tangible paper copy there was a web site. Rather than write it all down, I had hoped to get it from your archives but the online article doesnt contain it. Do u have that available? Also, U used to have a "links" connection, is that no longer available? ty "

" I think you should add the crime & safety section like syracuse.com does. "

" Comments should carry over unless the article is updated. Sometimes, in the process of publishing the daily content, the article file gets overwritten by a duplicate of itself. The content is the same but the server interprets that as a change. "

" When a letter to the editor is carried over to a second or third day, why do the comments get dropped. Shouldn't they follow the letter? The same thing happens with news stories. The next day the same article is on the web but the comments are gone. Why can't they stay with the article? "

" steve w,
I guess I wasn't being clear.

There never was a security problem, but people were worried that there was a security problem because people thought accounts were being hacked. To alleviate the fears about accounts being hacked, I explained what was REALLY going on, that being the I vs L thing.


AJ,
At this time, comments are limited to what they are. I am using what was put in place years ago to handle comments. Rest assured I would like to see some more formatting options myself. "

" OK, actually there is one more thing.

Can we hope for html tags? It really is hard at times to convey what you're saying with standard type. Even if we got to use some of the most basic tags it would be an enormous improvement!

Thanks again Rich. "

" I for one would prefer manual - the simpler the better.

I really like the new website, and can appreciate the effort that goes into it as I have my own online business. Thanks for the upgrade.

One last thing, is their any way we can get a hierarchical listing of the comments? It would seem to make things easier to follow. (You didn't think I'd stop at paragraphs, did you?)

Thanks again. Keep up the good work! "

" Not very secure, eh? "

" We dumb dumbs always knew what was happening. The explanation was prompted by concerns raised over the security of the website. "

" Thanks, Rich -- this identity theft stuff has been a real problem. There are so many petty, nasty people out there with nothing better to do than pull stupid stunts like that. In future, I'll be sure to let you know asap if someone "spoofs" me again. "

" What you really need to do is tighten the registration for a response back from a legitimate email or user's can create id's all day long if they wanted to. "

" It actually took you dumb dumb's quite some time to figure that out. I remember Karl complaining about the 'identity theft' some time ago. "

"

Auburnpub Identity Theft?

In the past, and more recently, we have had a few reports of unauthorized postings being made under some of our more prominent posters' names.

First off, I need to dispel any fears that the website has been "hacked" or compromised in any way. We have not observed that to be the case at all, and there is no evidence of such a thing occurring.

So, how is it that someone could be posting comments under someone else's name? The short answer is, "They didn't". It may look that way to you, but it doesn't look that way to the computer.

To use one of our more prevalent posters as an example: can anyone spot the difference between these two user names?

Farmer's Gal
Farmer's GaI

No?

Let me show them to you in a different way:

FARMER'S GAL
FARMER'S GAI

The fact of the matter is that in most sans-serif fonts, a capital I looks a lot like a lowercase L, but only to human eyes.

Over on this side of the internet tubes, we were able to recognize that someone had created that latter login recently, and getting to the bottom of the mystery was simple after that. The account and all of its comments have been deleted, and we shall have to remain vigilant in the future.

In the meantime, please don't hesitate to contact me directly if you spy anything fishy going on. "

" Actually, I am working on that feature right now. "

" I want to know if it is possible to submit a letter to the editor on line. I like this new web design, but apparently i am missing something "

" Yes Yes YES! I'm all for customization options! Just make sure a simplistic "list" is on it for all of us simple-minded mashers! "

" What would you like to change?

Today I was hoping to get a feel for what the community thinks about site customization.

Lets say that after you log in to auburnpub.com, you are presented with a menu of personal preferences that you can change to affect the way this website looks for you and only for you.

This could be anything from site colors/styles, to what appears first on the front page, to how fast the rotating blocks rotate (if at all).

What options would you like to make auburnpub.com your own?

"

" The rotating content should be slowed down to atleast 10 seconds. It works fine for me but it seems others are having trouble holding their mouse..Maybe karls dragon got hungry and ate it! lol. "

" Rich great work with the new site design! I was planning to heckle you about how miserable the citizen’s website was next time we got together. But Im pretty impressed …looks like I have to work up some new material before I see you. Again two thumbs up to you and your staff.

PS. I heard thru the grapevine Amy is expecting. Congrats, and job well done.
"

" I'd vote for slowing the rotation to every 10 seconds. Alternate choice: make it manual.

All in all, the site is looking very good. "

" Personally, I don't dig that "flip" stuff at all. You'll be reading down the choices, not even really registering what your options are cuz you're worried about the script changing, and when it does flip, half the time you haven't had the time to digest what was in the column in the first place and make your decision. Lengthening the time between flips is not the answer, because you still have that "pressure" in your mind that it's going to "flip"
I would much rather see a simple, easy-to-use listing. This is one case where fancy-shmantsy new technology is more of a pain-in-the-*** than a good tool. "

" Well, the past week has certainly been a wild one for auburnpub.com. We launched the new site design on Monday the 7th around 1:00 pm and I think the feedback started rolling in at 1:01.

Font size was too small - fixed?
Some links were broken - fixed.
People couldn't find letters to the editor - Fixed (under navigation block in /opinion/).

The most recent thing we have been hearing about lately is the various rotating content sections are rotating too fast. I am talking about the "Where to next?" block in story pages, the "Navigation" block in section pages, and the rotating picture headlines on the front page. Some people weren't aware that you can 'freeze' them by putting your mouse on them, and then select different tabs by mousing over the tabs on top. For some people maybe this doesn't work. Some people simply hate the distraction.

Recently, we discovered a bug where the rotation was happening more often than it should be happening. The rotation is done with JavaScript timers, and through a bug in the JavaScript code, more than one timer was being allowed to get started at once.

Imagine you are watching a carousel, and your job is to hit a button every time the blue horse goes by. The button is what flips the content on the web site. Everything works out fine as long as there is only one blue horse on the carousel. But what happens when there is a bug in your code and you get two, three or six blue horses on the carousel? Well, your website starts flipping out and you get angry emails.

As of now, I think the JavaScript is repaired and you should only see the rotating sections flip once every 5 seconds. We are only allowing one blue horse on the carousel at a time, and if a new one tries to get on, the old one is kicked off. Also, you should be able to stop the rotating by mousing over the rotating box.

What do you think about the rotating content? Should it be switched to totally manual (mousing over the tabs)? Should it be slowed down? Sped up? Is 5 seconds a good number or should it be 8, 9 or 10?

Let me have it. "