" If the Citizen staff would have taken the time to look closely into the issues of the zoning case in Sennett, they perhaps wouldn't have sensationalized the case with their poll.

Certainly the readers from around the area would support drive up and outside dining.
The zoning laws are there to protect the residential neighborhood along Genesee St..

What about the neighborhood who bought into the area over the years knowing that the Pioneer was a sit down Restaurant. No outside distractions- Now do you allow lights, sound, traffic, and especially noise to this area.

Just stop in think- if this plan goes through against the zoning laws, it opens the site up to selling to a fast food chain when these non-Restauranteurs
grow tired of their venture.

It's hard enough protecting neighborhoods and areas without the paper throwing fuel on the fire.

Let's hope all who have voiced their opinion of this change being successful, get the same thing happening in their neighborhood some day.

Why not a strip mall along 38 A across from Martin Point!

"

" Thank you. For all our grumbling, we do appreciate the work that goes into the online forums at The Citizen. Thanks very much. "

" Whew!

Well, the internet is back up at the good ol' Citizen building, and we have the new articles up online.

I actually took them by foot on a flash drive to my house for upload to the website. Five minutes later, Jeremy called me to say "we are back online here."

If you happened to see a web savvy-looking guy huffing it up state street this afternoon, remember what we we are willing to do to bring the news to you, our gentle readers. "

" Beautiful! I tried a "Two Cents" search today, and the results came back in reverse chronological order with the stray articles of other titles at the end. Perfect! Thanks so much! "

" Note to www.auburnpub.com readers:

Due to technical difficulties with our Internet connection, we are not able to post today's major site update at www.auburnpub.com on schedule. We are working as fast as possible to correct the problem and apologize for the inconvenience. "

" Dear Webitor, TY for stopping the two cents from aborting. However I made a comment over 30 minutes ago that hasnt yet posted. Is there still a prob somewhere? TY NL "

" Farmer's Gal,

As always, thank you for the feedback. I'll take it into consideration. "

" I believe we have two cents repaired. An explanation for what happened will come eventually. For now, we will be able to fix it quickly if it happens again, soon there will be a preventative fix in place. "

" AJ,

I believe there is a a list somewhere around here, I will get it to you when I find it. The company that manages our CMS for us just did a lot of updates to the comment section and I will have to check with them. "

" Past-website-designer (no longer au courant) to current-website-designer -- I am not trying to be a pain, but to give legitimate feedback. Hope the is taken as such.

Sorry it's long, but I am trying to give a careful description for troubleshooting/system enhancement purposes.

Here's my user behavior. I'll click into an article I want to read. I'll see the other articles flipping about in the box to the right. I'll see 2-3 that interest me. I'll follow the first one, then click "back" to go back to the previous article alongside which there was another article I wanted to read -- but it may not still be there. If I start following links here and there, serendipitously reading what interests me, I can't find my way back to the other articles I saw in passing which I wanted to read later. In effect, I've become lost in the system and can't find the link to an article I saw alongside on the right a few clicks back. If the article which interested me was an AP article, I can't use the search feature to find them again either, so I am left lost and frustrated and unable to find the content I want to read.

Much of the time, the feeds have changed before the links, and I am following dead links to an error page saying the content is gone.

None of that is what I'd call optimal navigation.

My other grumble is about the search results page -- can you set the order? Is it some kind of relevance search? Or can they be ordered by date, or alphabetically, or at least in some order that makes sense? So far, I have not been able to figure it out -- they seem always willy-nilly. Even better would be if the end user could manipulate the results sets, so the user could decide whether to sort by date, reverse date, relevance, alphabetical, etc.

My most frequent search is "Two Cents" -- so I can read previous days' comments after the current day has changed. The results set comes up in no order, and often has non-Two-Cents articles mixed in with the Two Cents pages. Now, if those articles have the keywords "two" and "cents" in them, it would be legit for them to show up in the results of such a search, but if relevance searching is applied, they should all appear at the bottom, after the pages which have the header "Two Cents" -- the header should be weighted more heavily than words in the article, and when the two words appear together, that should be weighted more heavily than when they just both happen to appear on a page. I don't see that happening.

I haven't had a chance yet to try out the new search functionality you set up between yesterday and today, but I will and I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for listening. "

" What's with the latest Two Cents page? It worked fine yesterday, but as of this morning, it crashed IE every time I try to open the page.

Here's the error message:

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.auburnpub.com/articles/2008/02/20/opinion/two_cent.txt.

Operation aborted

Since IE is the browser to which most subscription databases are built, and since one of my primary jobs is managing those databases, it's the browser I use. For now, good thing I also have Firefox installed, because some new function on the page is crashing IE.

Can you check into it and do some tweaking?

Thanks!

"

" Rich, I notice that certain tags seem to work and others don't (unless I've made clerical errors). Is there a list of what works and what does not tag-wise?

Thanks

AJ "

" Speaking of search, yesterday afternoon I rolled out the new Yahoo-powered web search. Not only can you search our articles here on auburnpub.com as usual, you can instead choose to search the web, all without leaving the comfort of home.
And by "home" I mean this website.

Put your mouse on the search box to get started. "

" Ah, I forgot to touch on "Search" in my preceding novel.

The quick search box at the top of every page defaults to the previous 14 days of articles. If you want to search farther back than that, you can start an "Advanced Search" through the "Archives" link. "

" Not at all, I can post wherever the topic is, although I would prefer conversation regarding the website to stay on this blog.


There have been a few complaints about navigation being difficult. Perhaps I am blinded by my involvement in setting up the navigation on this site, but from my side of the screen, things look pretty easy to navigate.

First: you have he second blue bar at the top of every page, the one that says "Home * Local * Sports * Lake Life . . ." This bar contains links to all the content sections of the website. There is no content on the site (aside from archives that you need to search for) that you can't get to within a few clicks, starting in that blue bar.
Second: Every article page and section page on the site contains a navigation block. Navigation blocks in section pages contain two flipping panes. The first pane lists links to all stories in that section. The second pane either shows a list of our latest/breaking news, or it shows a list of subsections (for example, in /sports/, the second pane has links to sports/bowling/, /sports/golf/, /sports/recreation/, /sports/doubledays/ and /sports/the_zone/).

The navigation block in story pages contains a third pane, between the other two. Called "Seen this yet?", it shows you an abbreviated list of stories you haven't seen today on the site.

Anyone who has ideas on making the navigation on this site more complete is more than welcome to send in their ideas. This is not a challenge to those who have criticized the navigation in the past; I really am at a loss as to how I could make the navigation more complete.


A note on publishing times:
We do the major daily content updates on the site to coincide with our publishing time of the actual newspaper, which is around noon on weekdays. We do major updates Friday and Saturday night at midnight because our Saturday and Sunday papers come out in the morning.
This doesn't mean there won't be fresh content all day long, though. Breaking news doesn't follow a schedule, and we update that online as it happens. Also, the AP feeds that we inject into the site are constantly changing throughout the day (sometimes to the chagrin of a "Seen This Yet?" user). "

" Just in case it's against the rules for Citizen staff members to answer questions about the website in the Two Cents section, would you reply here, Rich, about the links to IMDB info on random movies which has been taking up space in the "Articles you haven't read yet" menu the past few days?

Thanks! "

" Citizen Webitor, sorry for getting back here so late-my bad timing. Anyhoo-I DISAGREE STRONGLY!!!!
That noxious phrase is NOT ACCEPTABLE! "Bad" CANNOT "become a noun" anymore than your cat can "become" a dog. (although one might understand why it may desire to do so?)
This odious, ignorant, and ill-considered phrase is a remnant of "ebonics"--that ridiculous collection of half-phrases, malapropisms and spelling errors paraded as "culture"--it did, and DOES, NOTHING to promote intelligence in our youth or I dare say, in the adults who casually slip into embracing it as unthinkingly as one might say, slip a tablet of cyanide into an hors d'oeuvre?
Please join me in making a resolute and firm decision to work toward stamping out this invidious phrase before the Chinese and resurgent Russian intelligentsia recognize the proclivity of ill-informed Americans to embrace stupidity and conquer us by introducing babel amongst our citizenry through "cultural" mediums!
I don't let my guitar students use it-and NEITHER SHOULD YOU!!!!!!! "

" Online addtion, Mr. Malaprop, can be found in AJ's post about taxes paid by the rich on the Two Cents page yesterday. LOL!

Sometimes the online EDITION of the paper runs late, or isn't there one day a week when The Citizen isn't published? "

" What has happened to the online addition? We use to be able to at least get some info after 1 A.M. Now it seems like -- well maybe 4 0r 5 AM plus You NEVER have up to date obits!! "

" I know you can't archive the AP feeds, though it might not hurt to have a disclaimer explaining that fact.

But I was actually grumbling about the search results for Citizen articles and features -- I've seen things disappear never to be found again, you can't look for anything more than 2 weeks old, when you do get search results there is no logic in the order in which they are presented, you can't work with results lists (sorting, or searching the subset, for example), and the underlying design that replaces the whole article, comments and all, each time it is edited, so that you end up with two and three minutely different versions of the same article, is really annoying.

When people post online, they want other people to come across their posts and read them, but if you don't time it right, your comments will be attached to an old copy of the article and subsequent readers won't see them unless you yourself dig up the old copy (assuming you can find it using the search engine) then copy and paste and resubmit.

I realize that this is surely a "design feature" and not setting you can just simply adjust, but it would be a whole lot better if the old and new versions merged any attached comments and kept only ONE version of each article. "

" What's with the box for an e-mail address when submitting posts to Two Cents, the blogs, article comments, etc? It wasn't there this morning, and, thankfully, still seems to work without entering anything in it.

It would be helpful if before being requested to enter data, esp. something like an e-mail address, the user knew what were going to be done with that info -- is it optional or required? Is it for internal purposes only or is it going to be posted along with the post? Etc.

Can you clarify?

Thanks! "

" Originally we omitted the button for styling, knowing that you can hit enter after typing your search terms. Most people don't bother with the button anyway.

On top of that, we are going to overhaul the search system anyway, integrating yahoo search with our site. So, the search bar is going to be changing soon anyway. "

" I posted this at the end of January and never read a response.

" 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. " "

" Karl,

Sorry, but "bad" is becoming a noun. I guess I should have said "That was my bad"; I would have complete sentence credit at least.

To be fair, the term bothered me at first as well, to the point where I almost complained about it once. After a while I caught myself saying it and was mildly distressed. To my knowledge this was actually the first time I typed the phrase out.

Your good. ;)

As for the searching: we don't and can't archive or search the AP feeds.

"

" Omygosh, Karl -- is my bad grammar intolerance contagious? ;-)

I too am frustrated by the really crummy search engine, and by the poor and incomplete indexing, the duplication of articles each with its own totally separate comments, etc. As an Electronic Resources Librarian, evaluating the search functionality of databases has been part of my job -- and you really don't want me to even tell you all the weak points for this one.

There are many improvements, just to be fair, but there are also many features/attributes of the new design which are still or newly sub-par, IMHO. "

" Your web site makeover is an abject failure as fas as I'm concerned.

Difficult navigation, Flash that constantly changes what I'm trying to look at, mouse-overs that change the underlying content... I bet that these are all things in the "Bad Web Site Design Hall of Fame."

Jeeze-Louise!

The general layout for newspapers has been tinkered with for a hundred years or so. While 100 years may not have been enough time to get things perfect, it certainly is closer than the jumble of (nicely shaded) boxes that appears on these pages.

I use Firefox, and I haven't looked at thes mess with IE, but I hope this doesn't "fix" it.

Arghhhh!

"

" Citizen Webitor,
PLEASE. For God's sake, for the future of this country, in the name of proper Grammar, and mostly FOR THE CHILDREN (!) will you PLEASE resolve NEVER to use an adjective as a noun--as in that HORRENDOUS expression "my b.." (Sink me; I can't even bring myself to type it!!!)
Your BAD JUDGMENT? Your bad grammar? Please---Properly complete your sentences!
Anyway--the search engine here is worthless. I tried typing in "Religion Today" after it disappeared--POOF!--from those damned "flippers" (BOOOOO!) and in came up as "Nothing matched" blah blah blah,
Can't you make it so that it searches for key words in titles? "

" Your Photos

After a few weeks of nobody submitting photos to the "Your Photos" section, we started to get a little worried. Finally some staff submitted a couple just to keep things interesting, and when I tried to approve them, they weren't there!

My bad.

You see, there are two scripts that run the "Your Photos" section, one that save the photos (when you submit them), and one that retrieves the photos (when you view them). Both of those scripts need to know where to save/retrieve the photos on the server. Unfortunately, the saving script was saving them in one place and the retrieving script was getting them from somewhere else. The "somewhere else" just happened to be a backup of our Christmas Lights photo contest, which convinced us that no one was submitting new photos since the old ones were there.

The good news is that people have been submitting photos, and we are in the process of approving them now. "