The Daily Progress has a blog.
These are words that I never thought I would write.
Laura Bland, their Online Content Coordinator, appears to have dragged Bryan McKenzie into the 90s kicking and screaming. It’s got an RSS feed, an Atom feed, categories, monthly archives, comments, trackbacks, and reasonable URLs. Unfortunately, it also has smiley-face graphics, there’s no blogroll, and only Bryan McKenzie is contributing thus far. But, my Lord, what a start.
And just four years and ten months after cvillenews.com started! Seriously, I thought it would take a lot longer.
I’m happy to have added the Daily Progress blog to Charlottesville Blogs. Welcome to the Charlottesville blogosphere!
I’m excited to see the DailyProgress.com launch the blog as well. It’s one of almost 100 blogs that Media General owned newspapers and television stations have launched in the past few months.
We’re using ExpressionEngine to power the sites which, as you noted, comes with RSS feeds, the much loved smileys and so much more. We do have the capability to add blog rolls and other features but doing so is up to the individual web site.
Thanks for recognizing the efforts of Laura and her co-workers at dailyprogress.com.
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Tripp Fenderson
Product Integration Manager (AKA. The man behind the blog curtain)
Interactive Media Division
Media General, Inc.
Aaahhhh, ExpressionEngine. It was really bugging me what software that it was using. Clearly it wasn’t home-brewed, and it was too modified to be WordPress. I’d long wondered who actually uses ExpressionEngine — I so seldom encounter a blog that uses it. I’m glad it’s working out for y’all; I’ll have to keep an eye on it. Congrats on a successful wide-scale roll-out, Tripp.
I not going to expect very much from it. I imagine that it will be highly (or narrowly) moderated.
I noticed earlier last month, they tried a variation of a blog providing a place for reader comments on their website after stories. They’d pose a question and asked for your response.
On the high school T-shirt controversy a month ago, my on topic comments were never allowed to be posted because they were not narrow enough, and included my support for school uniforms. My content did not vary significantly from what I posted here in my first comment on that topic, except that it was more highly edited due to character limitations. Based on that experience alone I believe this will not be a real blog but instead a highly censored illusion of a blog.
Heh. I was living in Tucson when the Arizona DAILY STAR won a Digital Edge Award for “Fostering Community Online”. From the award note: “Down in Arizona, they’ve got something they call SNUG, the StarNet Users Group. What a zoo. That’s an inside joke, actually. A recent anniversary party at the local zoo drew 3,000 subscribers. The monthly get togethers have spawned impromptu beer bashes, volunteer associations, online petition efforts and a get-out-the-vote drive. ”
That was back in … 1996. StarNet had started the previous year, after one of their writers, Bob Cauthorn, had gotten bit by the Internet bug and started to learn his way around a Unix box. AZStarnet was not just an online newspaper, it was Tucson’s biggest local ISP for quite some time. Cauthorn went on to bigger things elsewhere, and StarNet eventually abandoned its online community and turned into a generic newspaper Web presence, but it was a lot of fun in the early days.
Ok, so Brian McKenzie has a blog. Why? I just took a look at it and it’s completely inane. The guy apparantly has nothing to say. He’s using ‘smileys.’ What is this, a 7th grader’s fansite for Slipknot?
K3w1 D00d! Got any w@r3Z?
It’s mostly your typical ‘gosh I just don’t get this internet thing’ sort of rambling.
Hint to Mr. McKenzie: this stuff was almost cute back in 1995. Dave Barry made it annoying within about 5 minutes. More than 10 years down the road it just comes across as foolish and pathetic. We’re laughing at you, not with you. My grandfather is in his 70’s and probably knows more about the technicalities of internet communication than I do. Age is not an excuse and it hasn’t been for the last decade.
If you have nothing to say then please don’t say anything at all. When you fill a blog up with nothing entries just for the sake of saying that you’ve updated it, then you become someone who is hard to take seriously. When you finally do have something worth saying you will find that nobody is listening any more. I know that you’ve probably got an editor telling you to keep posting to this blog all day long. But really, you and your newspaper will be much more credible if you write fewer entries about really meaningful or interesting subjects.