great site

I was lucky enough to recently get my hands on a digital copy of the official documentthat was the focus of this story about our council finally passing an inclusion resolution. While everybody else was concerned about getting the councilor’s reaction to getting it passed, I figured it might be nice to actually show people exactly what had been passed since it had been altered.

People were grateful, but since we’re still so young, it’s still going to be a while before I can tell if people appreciate it or if they even care most times.

I’ve seen systems where writers can include a list of links that end up in a sidebar or footer, and that’s certainly the least common denominator, assuming you have enough human staff to paste those into the right places.

It’s simply not as easy as it should be in most newspaper CMS software. We should improve it, and soon.

If you can teach a cat to enjoy swimming, that will be the day that most journalists will learn how to do HTML.

Only when it starts tap-dancing the national anthem on the top of the water will the execs even understand what you’re talking about.

Although several generations of geeks like us takes this stuff for granted, no-one else remotely cares.

It’s a better-than-nothing solution putting them in a sidebar or footer. That doesn’t serve the reader most. It’s easier to make the word in the story a link…Then if they decide they want more info they don’t need to go searching for the link somewhere else.

Maybe so, but the habit seems hard to break when it comes to material written purely for the web such as newspaper blogs. Either they have no links at all or they get an intern to google for random things just to satisfy a link count. Or so it seems.

A compromise for “normal” journalism might be to slot to reference links at the bottom of the piece, rather like the BBC News site does in the sidebar, only a little more useful that that.