newsobserver.com blogs -- tech

Usability testers needed - aka, free snacks for your opinion

charliemach — Wed, 12 May 2010 16:51:05 -0400

Things have been pretty busy for the N&O web geek squad over the past few months. You may have noticed a couple big changes to our go-and-do site, Triangle.com:

Weddings, Engagements and other announcements are now appearing on the newspaper websites.
All of our classified sites - merchandise, cars, real estate and rentals are in the newsobserver.com look.
Same thing with the Business Directory, the Know channel and the Shop channel (aka, Deal$).

So what gives? Why the Harlem Shuffle? Well, truth be told, we've been working with Mike Williams, the emperor of Triangle.com, on a plan of Frankensteinian proportions...

THE REDESIGN OF TRIANGLE.COM.

It's new. It's hip. It's sexy. It's targeted to a specific demographic. So lots of changes, really. We think we've done a decent job of turning Triangle.com into the go-and-do portal for the latest on dining, entertainment and people-connecting in the Triangle area - but we thought we'd run it by you first.
So: we're looking for a few non-geeky types (ok, Python fans are ok too) to participate in the usability testing study we're doing on the new site. We will give you snacks and beverages, you give us your opinion for an hour or so.
Interested in participating? Sign up today.

Photo galleries can be included in blog posts now

Drennan — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:24:53 -0400

This is an example of a photo gallery showing up in a blog. Only the first eight pics in the gallery will show here, and it can be used to direct folks to the full gallery.

A quick reality check on the new site

charliemach — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:34:15 -0500

Our new home page and news sections have been live for about a week. Anecdotal evidence (emails from site visitors, feedback through the support portal, and what the other parents at my kids' bus stop tell me) suggests that it's a good thing.

People like the site's renewed focus on the News & Observer brand - high-quality, in-depth local news coverage on things that matter. We did this by putting the content you want higher up on the page - even if there isn't a big pretty picture to go along with it.

Which is not to downplay the importance that big pretty pictures play in making our site interesting. Our photo and video galleries still get decent play in the Editor's Picks area, intermingled with other stories the online content team thinks you might find interesting. Plus, the big brown tabbed area appears in the right rail, with relevant content based on what section you are looking at.

Oh - and have you seen the "Similar Stories" widget on our story pages? This is new, too - it automatically displays stories that are similar to the one you're reading (duh). It's a bit hit-and-miss as to how you define "similar", though - take the story on the exploding container in Morehead City for example. We'll work on that.

But most importantly: what do you think? Did we do a decent job this time around? Let us know here. Thanks.

Redesign, part 2: A return to a news-ier format

charliemach — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:11:45 -0500

UPDATED: We're going to do this on a Wednesday, but 3 weeks from now. Too many people in the newsroom are out for the holidays...

On Wednesday afternoon, 12/16, you'll be getting an early holiday present from us.

Over the past three months, we've been looking at reader feedback on the new newsobserver.com site. From both you and our editorial staff, the answer came loud and clear: you want your newspaper site to have MORE NEWS, higher up on the page, and less whitespace.

Well, we listened. And on Wednesday, you can look forward to the following changes:

The big auto-rotating featured story area on the home page? GONE. Will be replaced by the major news stories of the day, with all of the related content right there, listed in an easy-to-read (and click) format.
The big brown multimedia nav bar cutting across the entire page? GONE. Well, actually just reduced, and moved into a more manageable area in the right column.
If you liked the featured story area, and/or the multimedia bar: we're introducing an "Editor's Picks" area where the bar used to be. It will promote special content and features, in a less eye-jarring format than the multi-bar.

We've already modified the site navigation so that you're presented with the easier to use mouseover effect, giving access to the subsections in all our major content areas.

Since a picture is still worth a thousand words, here's a link to a large-scale mockup of what our new homepage will look like. Major section fronts will get a similar treatment as well.

We hope this will go a long way towards making the site what you want. Let us know how far we have come, and/or how much further we have to go.

iPhone & AT&T versus Droid & Verizon

matthewfortner — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:26:08 -0500

The blogosphere is ablaze with rumors of the next iPhone. A few weeks ago a developer reported one of their apps was installed on a device identified as "iPhone 3,1". This time last year Apple was testing the iPhone 3GS which is identified itself as "iPhone 2,1". Then mobile device blogging superstar Eldar Murtazin claimed in a tweet that Apple has submitted the order for the new devices. Murtazin is editor in chief of Mobile Review and has a strong track record on the inside word.

Meanwhile Time Magazine placed the iPhone 3GS as number four on its top ten gadget list. Motorola's Droid topped the list with props to to its high quality display, hardware keyboard and most of all Verizon's solid network.

Surely you've seen the AT&T and Verizon ad sparring. AT&T's customer satisfaction ranked dead last in the Consumer Reports annual survey of 50,000 readers. Most of the complaints were dropped calls.

AT&T has released an app for that. "Mark the Spot" is supposed let iPhone users report network problems even without a connection. My issues here in the Triangle have been more with areas with a weak signal or even no service at all. Sometimes our voicemail alerts are far less than immediate.

Thaw Your Paws & Warm Your Buns

matthewfortner — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:09:56 -0500

Here are a couple of gadgets designed to cheat old man winter.

Sanyo has begun importing their rechargeable Eneloop hand warmers to the USA. At $34.99, you can get the egg-shaped, single sided warmer claimed to last up to four hours per charge. $44.99 will fetch the double sided model rated to last up to 3 hours depending on the setting used. There are other ways to keep your hands warm. You could use one of the many air activated warmers available, a plastic bottle of hot water, or pockets? But the Sanyo two sided model has another trick. It is also a battery charger with two rechargeable AA batteries that can be used in other devices. They are available at Sanyo's online Store.

Looking for the only heated portable chair in the world? Have $120 burning a hole in your pocket? Hammacher Schlemmer has you covered...your backside at least. The chair is claimed to heat from 120 to 140 degrees. The rechargeable battery that heats the seat is said to last up to four hours on the lowest setting and 2 1/2 hours cranked to high.

Free Email Client with Superpowers | Thunderbird 3

matthewfortner — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:11:53 -0500

Mozilla has released Thunderbird 3. The best email client ever?
I've used Thunderbird for several years because I prefer its built in color tagging of messages. Recently, I installed the beta which preceded this latest official release. What makes this bird different? The interface has been modernized and it can be re-skinned if you are the type that likes to tech-ccesorize. There are also several usability enhancements like viewing multiple messages at once. Here are a few more standout features.

Tabs
I'm a heavy tabs user in my browsers and I love it as much in my email client.

Search
Thunderbird 3 has by far the most impressive search and filtering I have seen.

Add-ons
There are a number of extensions that expand Thunderbird's functionality. Google Calendar integration interest you?

The biggest plus is that it is free. Thunderbird is worth a look and can be downloaded here.

Shopping Tech

matthewfortner — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:42:52 -0500

With the convergence of the holidays and the present economic pressures, we are all shopping harder. CamelCamelCamel is a free easy to use product tracking tool on Amazon prices. It tracks product availability, offers price drop alerts and charts price history. Firefox users can also check out the browser add-on that supports Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg. While we love gadgets, we also love a deal. Please share any shopping tech tips you have.

Kindle edition is here

charliemach — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:16:18 -0500

At long last, the News & Observer is available on the Kindle platform. We are very excited about this - we only got news that it was happening about 5 minutes ago.

A Kindle subscription to the N&O is $6.99/month. Single copies are only $.50 - so you save a quarter off of the newsstand rate.

Like most of the other Kindle versions of newspapers, it's a little different from the printed paper. All of the locally-written stories are there, although you may not see all of the nationally-syndicated news from AP and other wire services. Also, the stories may be in a different order. We'll be working with Amazon to improve our morning delivery and make it look as close as possible to what you'll see on the newsstand. But it's definitely worth a look.

Enjoy!

Kaspersky falsely reports trojan virus on N&O (and many other) sites.

gcui — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:23:38 -0500

Starting yesterday afternoon, Kaspersky antivirus is reporting a trojan virus (Trojan-Downloader.JS.Iframe.bxv) on our website.

This is a false report. Searching the internet for 'Kaspersky thickbox' has revealed this is a new problem that has affected many websites that are using the popular jquery thickbox library. Kaspersky has been notified of this problem.

In the meantime, you can safely ignore the false alarm and continue reading our website.

Attention users of Internet Explorer 6 (and other old web browsers)

charliemach — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:30:50 -0400

If you are using an older web browser, by now you have seen the little popup window (well, it's not REALLY a popup window, but why split hairs) encouraging you to upgrade to the latest version of it.

Please, oh please, do. Especially if you are using IE6.

Why? Well, you would not believe the manpower we in Interactive Media expend trying to make our sites look the same no matter what web browser you use to visit them. Manpower we would RATHER spend making the site easier to use, fixing real bugs, and helping the writers tell the stories they want to tell on the web.

And it's not YOUR fault. It's the fault of the companies that build and upgrade these browsers, who periodically change the way that the browser processes a web page before displaying it on your screen.

So support your local tech-geeks - upgrade your browser today. And enjoy the good karma that flows into you when you do.

New website - your feedback, our answers

charliemach — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:47:15 -0400

It’s been about 48 hours since we launched the new newsobserver.com site. Two usability tests, countless hours of development and debugging time, and a lot of general site setup went into it, and we’re still fine-tuning and doing some cleanup.

Thanks to all of you who have given us feedback, either on the “Welcome” story or in our new site feedback system. Some of you really like the new design and functionality (thanks!). Of the complaints we got, most of them fell into a few broad categories. Here are those categories and our responses:

1. "Comments are on a separate tab. "
We had a lot of complaints about the previous site when you paged through the comments – the story still appeared at the top of the page, and you had to scroll WAY down to see the next page of comments. With all the comments on a separate tab, you can easily see them if that's what you're interested in. The most recent comment still appears on the story page itself, though.

2. "The news grid isn’t very useful."
Well, you don’t HAVE to use it… If you don’t do anything, you still get local news, sports and entertainment headlines showing up in that area, just like on the previous site.

3. "Where are all the stories/blogs/headlines?"
We made the site more readable by slimming down the content on the home page, increasing the font size, and adding more empty space. This lets us call attention to the stories we think are important. If you’re a news junkie, and want to see a lot of headlines, try adding more categories to the news grid –it’s quick, you only have to do it once, and you get exactly the page you want to see.

Open question: would it help to be able to add your favorite blog to the news grid?

4. "I can’t log in to the blogs site."
Sorry about that – it was one of those things that happens when you move a big domain like newsobserver.com to a new server. It’s fixed now.

5. "Why does the story page keep refreshing and blinking??"
Sorry about that, too. It was just a server configuration problem. NOT a plot to show you more ads.

Please keep commenting and giving us feedback – positive or negative, it makes the site better.

(Oh, by the way - our plot to show you more ads is actually on the photo gallery pages – now, you get a new ad each time you click to a new photo. ;-)

Usability testing on the new newsobserver.com - results

charliemach — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:03:40 -0400

A BIG thank-you to all of you who signed up to become usability testers for the N&O. We've gone through two rounds of tests on the new newsobserver.com site since then, and your responses have been VERY enlightening. Here are a couple of the problems you helped us fix:

It's now easy to find out how to subscribe to the paper. (Yeah, kind of important.)
The controls and instructions on our various "widgets" are now more intuitive and easy to use.
Site search should now give you exactly what you want, plus different ways of slicing-and-dicing the search results.

Anyone who participated in the tests - if you're reading this - feel free to post your thoughts about how things went. (But remember, if you tell anyone what color the new site is, we'll have to track you down.)

Oh - funny story: we had all of the testers sign non-disclosure agreements, so they are sworn to secrecy about the actual design and functionality of the site. And THEN - a couple of days ago, we found out that Google had indexed it. Oops. We got lots of emails from confused readers. My favorite was:

 To: feedback@newsobserver.com
Subject: Contact Webstaff: N&O website changes.
I don't like them. 
[name withheld]

By the way: if you ever want or need Google to stop indexing a site for search purposes, they'll happily do it. You just need to create a file called "robots.txt" on your web server, and insert the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Google also has a nice tool for removing pages from their search index. Always good to see technology done right.

Final note, though you didn't hear it from me: We're launching the new site on 9/14. Can not wait.

Comics are coming to the E-edition

charliemach — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:59:37 -0400

The News & Observer E-edition is a web-based product for those of you who (like me) still have a fondness for the printed version of our newspaper. It was a LONG time in coming. The company that powers it, Olive Software, takes care of the online presentation and functionality, but we still have to send them the actual printed paper every night, in electronic format.

But that's a whole other story...

More importantly: we've had the E-edition for a little more than a year now, but it's been missing possibly the most vital tool ever invented for bridging the generation gap: comics. The comics section isn't actually printed at the N&O, so we have to get the electronic version of it separately from the rest of the paper, and only recently has our Circulation department secured the rights to this content. Thanks, Scott!

Upshot: you will see the full-color comics section in the E-edition starting on 8/2.

Oh - if you HAVEN'T seen what the E-edition looks like, check out the demo. If you're a 7-day print subscriber, it's FREE! If you live too far away for delivery, you can also get a straight-up subscription to the E-edition for $5. To subscribe, click here.

Preview the new newsobserver.com!

charliemach — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:20:30 -0400

For the past few months, we have been very hard at work on building the next-generation newsobserver.com site. The hard part - getting consensus among the Newsroom, Circulation, Multimedia, Sales and Interactive staff on what to include and how to display it - is largely done. The somewhat-easier-part has been actually building it... and man has it been fun. Busy, stressful, hectic - but definitely fun.

Now, though, comes the REALLY REALLY HARD PART: letting regular ol' site visitors (ie, you):

look at it,
use it, and
tell us what to do next.

In short, it's time to give up control of the new site to the people who matter most.

To that end, we are putting together a pool of interested users who want to become "Usability Testers." We will pull several of these people into a couple of sessions over the next six weeks, to give us feedback on what we've done right and what we can do better.

If you're interested in becoming one of our usability testers, sign up here:

http://blogs.newsobserver.com/tech/usability_signup

If we don't pick you for this round, there will be PLENTY of opportunities over the next few months, no worries. Thanks!

An open letter to our valued (and irate) online garage sale browsers

charliemach — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:56:33 -0400

We've gotten a lot of feedback about our new classifieds site in the past couple of days. Now that Friday has arrived, however, the deluge has begun.

It's the day before the weekend, when the most important thing on many people's minds is "where are the garage sales in my neighborhood?" Our old site allowed you to sort them by zip code, and see a nice ordered list that you could print out and plan your day with.

The new site was SUPPOSED to display all of the garage sales in a cool, printable, graphical map (thank you, Google, for this among many other blessings). Well, as luck and software vendors would have it, this function wasn't up in time for our launch. We are working with McClatchy Interactive and our vendor to fix this problem ASAP.

So to all of you avid yard sailors - please accept my humble apologies about this. You WILL have a useful tool to plan your weekends by; it just may take us a few days to get the bugs out of it.

New N&O Classifieds site launches tomorrow

charliemach — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:49:27 -0400

Despite the advent of several very popular classified advertising websites which shall remain nameless here, the newspaper classified site is still going strong.

Ours has been going strong for about 3 years now. It's gotten a bit creaky, so we're launching a new one tomorrow. Fortunately, our sister company McClatchy Interactive built the technology for it, using our existing site as a model for the features and layout. (Also, one of our original web designers went to work for MI two years ago, and was instrumental in designing it.)

It's a bittersweet launch. We built the current site using PHP, the then-state-of-the-art programming framework, and it's been chugging along like a faithful old steam engine. On the other hand, with the new site, there will be bells and whistles like:

Google mapping for garage sales
The ability to drill down into search results by meta-info (like how many days old the ad is)
A nice solid all-CSS template.

Check it out tomorrow - and place an ad today!

Design, Code or Both?

patrickmdoran — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:03:02 -0400

This is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing series of conversations between our readers and the N&O Design, Development and Content producing teams. We want to keep you informed about what we're working on and interested in, as well as what's up and coming on our websites.

We hope you'll find it to be an interesting read, and look forward to your feedback as we continue to move our online Triangle journalism and community building efforts forward.

----

I work on the Interactive Media team as a front-end designer, making the sort of design choices that impact what you see on your screen. Be it the logo on a new site or an advertisement, there's a good chance that I've worked on something you've seen.

Today I want to write about something that I am not an authority on - Javascript. That's one of the common types of code we use in our sites to add interactivity. It rotates to the top articles on the TriangleMom2Mom.com homepage and switches between the tabs on the newsobserver.com homepage. It also allows for many of the cool effects on Triangle.com.

As a designer I've often distanced myself from writing Javascript code, believing it was the realm of code-writing developers. Why should I write code? I can use Photoshop to design all the interactivity that's needed and let someone else take care of the math. I followed this path right up until a few months ago when a developer at our partner company, McClatchy Interactive, showed me jQuery.

jQuery is a Javascript library (a collection of commonly used code) that makes adding interactivity and effects to a page almost a joyous event. Unlike other Javascript libraries which require in-depth knowledge of coding, jQuery is fairly easy for a web designer (such as myself) to use.

To me its been more akin to having a friendly conversation with the boxes, images, and text on a page, versus sending them a complicated series of instructions that I have to write in Esperanto.

Within an hour of being shown this new technology, I was adding interactive elements to a web page with great ease. Boxes appeared and disappeared. Lines of text were highlighted and tabs faded in and out. It was still design, but now I was able to control it from another point in the process.

When we installed jQuery on newsobserver.com (in order to get our new story commenting feature up and running), I knew it was time to see where else it could be utilized.

We used it to load the newsobserver.com homepage more quickly. jQuery allowed us to take the pieces that take a little longer to load and move them to the end of the queue. This allows the page to show the breaking news stories much more quickly, sending our readers to where they want to be without removing anybody's favorite features.

Using this bit of code:

$(document).ready(function(){
$("div.fc").appendTo("div.stocks");
});

We were able to tell the page to load everything but the stock ticker, and then load the ticker and move it into its usual place.

Kind of like when someone at Target shouts 'Register 3 is now open, no line and no wait'.

What does this mean for our readers?

It means that going forward our in-house designers and developers will more quickly be able to add interactivity to our web pages and features. Javascript libraries are not going to save the world or move journalism to the next level, but it is one of the ways we're constantly working harder to make our sites the best in the Triangle.

We have an RSS Feed for this blog too, so you can keep up with what we're working on!