Fri, 10/10/2008 - 7:43am

I personally enjoy the new site, as we, the readers have never had the opportunity to have a voice in the community about the current happenings. Our voices ended over the kitchen table in our own homes or in the break room at the office. From the comments left by readers and the responses left by Mr. Bladine, it is obvious that the News-Register is listening.

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Tue, 09/16/2008 - 8:36am

I do NOT like the new format at ALL! Everything was so much easier to find on the old format. Myself, I think it was the wrong thing to do! It looked just fine the OLD way.

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Mon, 08/25/2008 - 7:10pm

It's possible you hit the "Business" classified link instead of the "Employment" link, since there are ads in the Employment section. If that's the case, you found a small glitch, since "Business" is not an active section in our classified ad listings. However, it might just be that there are no current ads in that category, but will be in the future. At any rate, we'll take a look.

As for Homefinder, the link to that is in the large blue bar that is just below the main upper-left section of the website.

The "old" website was carefully honed over many years to make it user-friendly. In changing to a whole new technology, we have focused more on technical startup than on the design. But now that we are getting the technology under control, we will turn more attention to design improvements that hopefully will improve ease of finding desired content.

In that, it's nice to have comments from readers about what they see, what they like, what they don't like.

Jeb Bladine
News-Register

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Mon, 08/25/2008 - 12:09pm

Where is the News-Register Home Finder? And why does the employment section of the cliassifieds say "There are no Classifieds in this section."

I am not impressed at all. The format seems okay in regard to finding news but everything else seems quite difficult to locate.

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Sun, 08/24/2008 - 8:01pm

I was told others see duplicates of my comments here -- maybe only when using a Firefox browser? I see odd spaces where it looks like comments were left but don't show up. This better be high on the priority list for our webmaster, Dan Shryock, when he gets to the office Monday. Of course, after running the Hood to Coast relay event, we're just hoping he makes it to the office!

Anyway, this is just one of a long list of "quick fix needs" on the website. They will be addressed this week, and then we'll be looking at schedules for adding new features and looking at future functionality improvements.

A couple of tips for people having trouble finding stories:

--- A lot of stories highlighted on the old website are not being displayed "live" on the new website. Our long-term intent is that major news be featured, but that the new website become known more for diverse, interactive community content than for just serving as a repository for newspaper stories. All of that still is printed in the N-R, so you can always read it there.

--- Even so, there still is a link to the "Archives" at the far-right in upper blue bar. It takes you to an archive search where 100% of N-R content still resides.

Jeb Bladine

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Sun, 08/24/2008 - 8:57pm

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Sun, 08/24/2008 - 5:36am

I think that it is wonderful that we are all taking this leap into the new "technology world". Mac and surrounding cities are stereotyped as being "rednecks", "hillbillys" and uneducated people. I feel we all need to give this website a chance and not be overly critical. Change is tough.....but needed.

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Sat, 08/23/2008 - 3:20pm

I dont care for the new format, and what happened to the Yamhill County Circuit Court happenings, I barely found the obits, and I still havent found the archives..sometimes more is just ...more.....

sigh.....

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Fri, 08/22/2008 - 9:48am

Thanks, Tom -- a little understanding is appreciated.

Those were, however, some Interesting issues for a technical discussion. Here are some comments from our tech people:

The security certificate is written for this specific domain name, so someone entering without typing “www” might have received a warning that the certificate wasn’t written for the domain name they typed in. That wasn’t really a security problem, but it has been fixed.

We have allowed readers to post links in our public forum for years, and we’ve never had a problem with posting of malicious script. Readers wanting to post comments to our stories must register with us, and they can be banned from that access. This is one of the ways a community system lets people communicate with each other, and we would hate to eliminate the ability to share links just because something we haven’t seen here is “possible.” Malicious viruses can be contracted all around the Internet world, and the most important thing is to have up-to-date protection installed on your computer.

There is plenty of debate in the Open Source community about the relative value of Drupal versus Joomla. Here are some comparisons from the perspective of our programmers:

Joomla is real easy out of the box. It's a great open source platform with lots of strong advocates among users and programmers.

Our programmers believe Drupal performs better, however, with more efficient code, finer access control, better scaling and “taxonomies.”

Drupal power sites include the homepages of Warner Brothers Records, The New York Observer, Fast Company, Popular Science, and Amnesty International, and also project sites by SonyBMG, Forbes, Harvard University, and more

Joomla wins hands down for easy use up front, but our vendor is building the base of what they expect to become a far more complex system. They believe Drupal serves their customization needs best.

But then, some say tomaaato and some say tomaughto.

As for launching the new site before all the potential issues were fixed, our online News-Register presence is not exactly of world-shaking importance – not yet, at least!! We provide a free service online, and many of the users don’t bother to read our newspaper or support the advertisers who make our quality community newspaper possible. Having said that, we also want to increase online advertising revenue to offset challenges in the print newspaper industry, so we want to build a better system for that.

We knew there would be some glitches, and there were several unexpected problems that didn’t show up during the long pre-launch testing. All of those problems are being dealt with, one by one, and that process will continue.

Then, when the initial dust settles, we move forward with other site improvements. And in-between all that, we will continue producing the product that people actually pay for – the News-Register. If you don’t subscribe, the link above works just fine!!

Jeb Bladine
News-Register

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Fri, 08/22/2008 - 9:11am

Our family moved toi Mac in 1967, and one of my first jobs, at age 12, was to deliver the News Register, door to door, twice a week, and even collected payments monthly. I had one of the largest routes at that time, 106 papers. Quite a load for a 12 year old on a Stingray bicycle with a banana seat!
I have been logging on to the website for quite some time now as I am able to keep track of friends as well as the growth and changes in Mac. I do admit that the new format is a bit tricky, and that it's not the old easy site I was used to. However, I do understand jeb Bladine's reason for the new site, and hope all goes well.
As with all new changes, adjustment can be slow and disappointing. When we couldn't turn around at the gas staiton at the end of "Driving the Gut" to make the return trip through town, we all had a tough time with that. When they closed Rutherford's and the 88 Cent Store, that took some time to get used to.
Let's give Mr. Bladine and his staff some time to work out the kinks, respond to our concerns, and get this new format up to our expectations. it's not as if we have never experienced any change before.
Tom Cole MHS '74

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Wed, 08/20/2008 - 9:02pm

I have to say I really am not impressed with this new platform for the website. You are using Drupal when you would have been much better off using Joomla which has a much wider base of support in the opens source community and thousands of extensions being developed for it. I know this is Drupal because someone was not paying attention to detail and did not replace the Drupal favicon.ico with say a news-register logo.

Issues...

* Security Certificate Violations (this is going to cause people to question the safety of your site)
* CSS issues with banner ads bumping into content or menus
* Does not pass the W3C Site Validation Test (202 Errors)
* Linking to external Cold Fusion Application Invites vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection, Viruses
* Links can be embeded in comments which can lead to a site that plants a malicious script or virus that can infect the user who clicks the link. Example Link: Link To Yamhill County

I could go on and on here … I was a regular reader of the site, but this is just plain terrible. The site should not have been launched until it had been completely tested, debugged and was functioning properly. There is a tried and true axiom in the development field .. “Never release version 1.0 of anything when 1.1 is best.” In this case v2.1 would have been much better.

Sorry to be so critical News-Register, but this is very disappointing.

Stephen Proffitt
McMinnville, Oregon

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Wed, 08/20/2008 - 2:07pm

Congratulations, Gordon -- Our first comment. Glad to see it's critical -- proves to readers that we're not censoring things!!

Circumstances forced us to launch this entirely new website interface before we could fix a wide variety of glitches. Those are being addressed one by one, working with the company that built and supports this new system. That process will continue, and we expect most things to be fixed by the time we launch a promotional campaign in early September.

So sorry, regular NR.com readers -- you are the "testers" for us. Keep looking and commenting on things.

For example, fixes to all of those "Access Denied" problems are in process.

The archives are there, just as before -- the link is in the upper right blue bar. We'll make that more prominent before long.

We're going to do everything possible to improve the CAPTCHA look -- we agree that it's a significant shortcoming to this system.

Some things, like spell check on comments, simply are not part of this version of website publishing system software. We are in a position to promote all kinds of improvements over time, but those will take some time.

We loved our old system -- after all, we built it!! However, we simply did not have the financial horsepower to redesign and reprogram that system as needed to respond to a whole new generation of community content website expectations. In particular, we had to have a system more conducive to advertising display and reporting demands.

We have gone with this particular outside vendor, but we are a partner as well as a client in the system. So, we hope we can influence improvement over time.

Meanwhile, we are enguled in fixing the immediate "glitches," and we don't mind you holding our feet to the fire on that.

Jeb Bladine
N-R Publisher

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Wed, 08/20/2008 - 11:52am

The new website is definitely NOT an improvement. Several examples:

1. The new website shows headlines only. The previous website showed the headline, plus a couple of sentences from the article. This is quite helpful in determining if you want to read the entire article, rather than just relying on a headline that may not accurately reflect what the story is about.

2. In clicking on several articles, I received an error message: Access Denied. What's this about? Why show a headline if you can't view the article?

3. Where is the Archive feature that was part of the previous website? When I travel, I may not have computer access. Upon returning to my computer, I use the Archive function to catch up.

In summary, the new website appears to be a step backwards, lacking user friendliness and functionality. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Also, do I have to put in this stupid CAPTCHA code each time I post a comment? Again, not user friendly. It's taken 5 tries to get it correct. Also, there doesn't seem to be a spell check function associated with this response.

Please advise.

Gordon Gillmouth
Fremont, CA

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