As I’ve mentioned on Northfield Nonmotorized, Northfield is in the process of making full sidewalk coverage the standard. In the last few years, they’ve consistently added sidewalks during street reconstructions — many on both sides. All new roads within the last fifteen years (save for a few rogue culs de sac) have sidewalks. However, there are definitely some areas that are missing this essential piece of a safe roadway. Note that these roadways are not limited to city-maintained streets or the city limits. This is about Northfield-area problems, and I do note when an entity other than the City of Northfield is responsible. (continued) Continue reading Guest blogger Sean Hayford O’Leary: The Sidewalks That Weren’t — Northfield’s 10 worst
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It was a little over a year ago now when we launched this version of LoGroNo.org. It’s summer again, and it’s time for a new design! So over the month of June, Tracy and I have been working on a new design for the site. The layout is similar, but the look is a bit bolder, and the text is more readable. It also has some special functions built in to tidily present the Representative Journalism stories. We want your feedback! Take a look at the beta site at http://new.locallygrownnorthfield.org and leave your thoughts below. Note that there are two rusty areas that are not final: speed and comments. The site will load slowly for the time being, and the comment layout needs some more formatting. But let us know what you’d like to see.
As comment threads grew longer, though, pages began loading very slowly. To fix this, I split the page loading so the sidebar and comments loaded after the rest of the page. This was helpful for quickly browsing around, but it prevented the aforementioned feature from working. I thought this would slide through undetected, but at least one crafty reader noticed and complained. I won’t bore you (further) with the details, but the click-to-comment feature is back. The pages will load the slow way when you click from the sidebar, but for general browsing, it’ll still be speedy as it has been since August. As usual, I will use this post to solicit any tech gripes in the comments. Have at it! P.S.: If anyone happens to view Locally Grown on their cell phone, you will notice that there is now a special version of the site for mobile browsers. iPhone/Touch folks will still see the regular site. Griff notified me a few days ago that those folks still using Internet Explorer 6 — the 2001 web browser that haunts web developers to this day — were not seeing our site properly: the sidebar was below the main content. It has been fixed, but it’s worth reminding all you Windows XP/IE6 folks out there: upgrade. Internet Explorer 6 is notoriously insecure, lacks modern features like tabs, and — above all — shoves sidebars at the bottoms of pages. On behalf of all web geeks, I beg you. Upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or, better yet, switch to Firefox. Anyway, on to business. Are there any other quirks we should know about? Any suggestions you guys have for the site? Let us know in the comments. A change was made over the night to the HTML guts of the Locally Grown site: we now load some of the page through a technology called AJAX. In a broad sense, AJAX allows the page you’re on to grab something new from the server without reloading the entire page. What this means to Locally Grown is that instead of loading the sidebar and comments right from the get-go (and taking forever to do so), it gets you the posts first, then runs back to grab you the sidebar and comments as quick as it can. What this means is that it’s substantially quicker to browse around the site. The only big downside of this is that you can no longer jump to specific comments from the sidebar’s “Active Discussions” area. So what do you guys think? Like it? Hate it? Anyone have browser quirks? Let us know. P.S.: Another more minor change, the “subscribe without commenting” feature, which disappeared right after the redesign has been found alive and well and has returned to its old post right below the comment form. Alright, guys, you complained and we listened. We’re trying out a lighter color scheme on the new layout of Locally Grown. Better? Worse? Keep the opinions coming. PS: If it still looks the same, hit the refresh button on your browser (looks kind of like the recycling symbol on most).
If you’re reading this, you probably notice something different. Long ago — well, January — I came to Locally Grown with the hope of assisting in a redesign. Now, at long last, we’ve got something live. Most of the changes are just skin-deep, but pages on the site should load noticeably faster and our search, which has been has been writhing in pain for months, can now actually find stuff. Oh, and the site has also been tweaks to work better on mobile browsers and has a special mode for print (this works automatically when you print in any modern web browser — no need to look for a “Print this page” link). So what do you guys think? What could we do to improve on this new layout? Give us your feedback. And be sure to speak up if something doesn’t look right in your browser. Update: I’ve finally figured out how to use Griff’s straw poll dealio. So if you’re not inclined to comment, feel free to express your opinion quietly here: [poll=12]
Problem: We use WordPressWordPress is an awesome blogging system that allows us to provide you with Northfield’s breaking news — all day, every day. WordPress is free and it’s used by a lot of people. Too many people, in fact; Spambots have gotten very used to WordPress sites and thus know how to attack it. Even my personal WP blog (which gets a lot less traffic than LG) gets thousands of Spam comments every month. What we do now: Akismet + Bad BehaviorThis is a combination of two plugins. The first, Bad Behavior, looks for suspicious behaviors of spambots. For example, every time you visit a site, your computer tells you what browser you’re using; spambots will change this information for every page they load. Bad Behavior detects this and blocks it. The second plugin, Akismet, works a lot like e-mail filters — it looks for suspicious content (e.g., cheap porn, fake watches, Russian mail-order brides) and declares it Spam.
And together, they work pretty well. But we’re not sure if they’re working well enough. So here’s what we can do: Solution 1: ModerationNow we would really rather not do this, because it’s tedious and it slows discussion, but one option would be to manually approve each comment before it appears. Solution 2: CAPTCHACAPTCHA keys, those images of distorted text, are a really good way to block spambots since most aren’t sophisticated enough to understand what’s written in the image. Unfortunately, a lot of us humans aren’t either. Example:
Solution 3: Put up with itDon’t need to explain this too thoroughly, but if you guys can live with the way it is now, we can too. So what do you think? Commenting is open P.S.: You usually see my name in the comments, not the posts, but I’ve been doing a little bit behind-the-scenes maintanence for a few months now. Someday I might be helping pretty up the site some. Emphasis on someday P.P.S.: Three new Spam comments have been caught while I’ve been writing this. Northfield.org has for some time been very open about the number of visitors it receives. We at Locally Grown thus far have chosen to keep our statistics hidden away from public viewing and scorn. Today however, we’re revealing our embarrassing secrets. So… everything you wanted to know and then some:
Looking at the month of January, our total number of hits — page views — was 13,585. Northfield.org’s was 34,557 39,570. Our total number of visits was 5,254 — Northfield.org’s 6,593 16,589. The disparate ratios may be because of technical differences — the majority of Northfield.org’s stories link to a separate page, we simply keep ours entirely on the home page. However, it may not — we receive considerably more comments than Northfield.org — to make and view those comments, people would have to make more page hits; so it may mean that people tend to simply skim through our content. Tricky.
One remarkably similar number is that of browser usage. Northfield.org shares are 47% Internet Explorer, 37% Firefox, and 12% Macintosh Safari (and a few others making up the remaining percent). Locally Grown is 49% Internet Explorer, 34% Firefox, and 15% Safari. I’ve been asked not to preach here, and I’ll bite my tongue to an extent, but Internet Explorer users: cut it out! Northfield.org has nagged users to switch to Firefox, and for good cause. Firefox is a fundamentally better browser — it’s safer, snappier, and most importantly supports websites with more modern scripting than Internet Explorer. Not convinced? Well, it happens. At least upgrade to the latest — more than half of you IE users out there are still using the old Internet Explorer 6 series.1
The last thing I’ll leave you with is our growth. In October — the first full month for which we have numbers — we had 143 average daily visitors. Today, we have 169. (In the same time, N.org went from 204 per day to 212.) The growth isn’t terrible steady or dramatic, but it’s there. So keep on reading. Correction: Adam from NCO has bursted our bubble. So, all original Northfield.org numbers have been crossed out and replaced with the information provided to us. |
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