Today Charlottesville Tomorrow launched a new website, and it represents a significant improvement over their old site. I suspect that nobody bothered with their main website, at charlottesvilletomorrow.org, since all of their stories went up on their Typepad-hosted blog, at cvilletomorrow.typepad.com. That disconnect didn’t serve them well, and the new site remedies that, putting a wide array of news front and center on the home page. Notably, the site is running on Armstrong, a still-in-development open source content management system created by and for internet-first media outlets.
(Disclaimer: Armstrong is funded by a grant by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, who awarded me a fellowship last year to develop The State Decoded.)
That’s a tremendous improvement. I was thinking yesterday while reading some articles on their site that they desperately needed a formatting change.
I’ve been trying to open http://www.cvilletomorrow.org/ all day, but it never loads, just hangs.
Happy and thrilled for the upgraded functionality C’ville Tomorrow’s new site now has.
I shall miss the familiarity of their old site’s format though
(okay, maybe not that much, if I find myself herded going along with all the other lemmings in the same direction)
I just get a 504 error
For those having issues accessing the new site, I’m afraid it just takes time for DNS updates to propagate around the Internet (which is why we kicked this update off Friday afternoon). Friday we redirected our web domain to new servers, and if you can’t see it yet, it just means your browser or internet directory has not caught up.
The computers we have that were unable to access the site were fixed with one or more of the following:
1) keep waiting, the equipment will eventually get the new IP address
2) clear your Internet browser’s cache of visited sites
3) flush your DNS – from a command prompt on a PC, type ‘IPCONFIG /flushdns’
We moved over every article, MP3, image, AND comment to the new platform. We look forward to your feedback on the design and your comments on our news stories.
Brian Wheeler
Charlottesville Tomorrow
P.S. Waldo mentioned that nobody ‘bothered with [the] main website, at charlottesvilletomorrow.org’ — Actually, our primary domain is http://www.cvilletomorrow.org and we haven’t had any site besides our old TypePad blog since mid-2009. So there really was nothing else to ‘bother with.’ During 2009-12 we just redirected our domain to TypePad, the blog we first launched in 2005. Now our website domain just points to the NEW SITE! Enjoy.
Seems like /rss works in my reader but I just took a stab at it. Any reason there is no link to a RSS feed? Or am I just blind?
@Gman – Great suggestion and it’s on our post-launch enhancement list. If you previously received our information via a Feedburner URL, there is no change.
Our primary RSS feed for all news stories is:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/cvilletomorrow_rss
[…] Waldo at cvillenews notes that Charlottesville Tomorrow are running “a still-in-development open source content management system created by and for internet-first media outlets.” […]