RSS for dummies – would I convince you?

Here’s my first attempt an a RSS guide for dummies. What do you think. Too patronising? If you knew nothing about RSS, would this convince you to give it a try?
Our news, delivered to you, for free
Want to get our headlines, as they happen, delivered to your desktop – for free? Well you can, with [...]

Newsroom 2.0: re-imagining our business

There are a lot of people talking about business models and the web. How has the news gathering process changed? How do we best utilise the new technologies? How do we think of news as a process, not a product.
But for those of us who started in the print world, most of these people are [...]

When is small too small?

So I built this nifty New Forest gallery…
http://www.dipity.com/Shepherdess76/A_New_Forest_gallery/flip
but to embed it in our site I have to shrink it to 300 pixels wide, too small to see much.
Not sure how to solve this problem, except maybe with a big single picture that links to the gallery. Any thoughts?

Getting ready for switchover

Our new site goes live tomorrow.
So far today I have discovered that the search and archive don’t work, we’ve got no control over our RSS feeds and we can’t use any iframes wider than 320 pixels because of the mandatory content panels that run down the right of the page… which makes embedding dipity timelimes [...]

Grasping the nettle

I’m getting my hands on our website this week.
My title is (for now) website champion, because our biggest hurdle is a newsroom at best disinterested and at worst actively hostile to the web.
Here’s my list of  immediate improvements, things we can do NOW. Some are really basic – because we really are starting from scratch. [...]

The future for regional news?

I’ve been thinking about a couple of things this week.
In my new role at the Daily Echo (which makes me responsible for content and driving up traffic – will post more about this later!),  I’m very interested in what’s happening with the BBC plans for regional news websites.
That’s not because I’m scared of the competition. [...]

Style and the Express

Love this post from the Press Gazette. Some people will say these style points aren’t important and that none of this stuff matters as audiences get younger and news providers proliferate across the web. 
But I’d say these kind of standards (the quality control that sub-editors do because reporters don’t) are what make us different – [...]

Express picks fit-to-box layout in world without subs

So here are some details about how the Express is going to manage without subeditors.
It’s the old Northcliffe dream; reporters are sent a box, write their story to fit and craft a headline, remembering to include all the relevant copy commands. Job done.
But then there’s a team of ‘rewriters’ who’ll check the story and make [...]