Progress!!

Listeners of the World,

As many should note I have been boasting about a grand redesign of OurTown.com and I am here to give a much needed progress report! In this report I will touch on the programming side of the site and the design side of the site to give an overall report.

Over the past few months we have been working with Minimaal concepts on the design portion of the new OurTown.com. We are now over halfway done with having approved the new "front page", "local area portal", "Local editor admin", and "sign up process for users". We still have our new "ad sales portal" and "sign up process for local editors" left to be completed. We will look forward to approving those mock ups by the end of the month completing the design portion of the new site!

Now that we have covered the very important new design look for OurTown.com, we must cover the equally important functionality of the new site......the programming! Our team of programmers have been working for months now programming our new site in a completely new language.....ASP.NET. They have now completed almost all of the databases, the new structure of the site and are working on the new content management system. They still have about a month and half to two months worth of work left and are hoping to start meshing up the look with functionality early April. They have been working hard to make sure the none of the local editors have to work hard while using the site!

In my next post I will be posting links to the new design and will hopefully have a much more detailed update on the programming work. Until next time...

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

Press Passes!

Listeners of the World,

Today I wanted to highlight a feature of OurTown.com that often gets over looked.......Press Passes! I seen many articles about online bloggers and journalist not being able to obtain press passes for different events, which in turn causes them to miss out on stories to share with their audience. Here at OurTown we looked into this problem early on because we thought that this was very important for our local editors to have! That's why we had developed our press passes along time ago, modeled after current newspaper passes. We have had much success, along with much resistance from event staff, with our local editors being able to gain access to certain events with these passes. We know that the industry has a long way to go before major events will accept press passes from online bloggers and journalist of hyper local sites, but we feel that we have a great first step. So please remember that when becoming a local editor our staff has truly thought of all the different tools you will need including Press Passes!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

OurTown Problem!!!!

Listeners of the World,

Almost all large trafficked websites encounter problems from time to time and OurTown.com is no exception to this rule! We have discovered an error that seems to be appearing on some of our sites that have overloaded front pages. While we encourage all of our local editors to have the most information on their pages, it looks like this encouragement is the source of the problem! We have had our programming team hard at work, trying out different possible solutions, but to no avail the problem consists. We also decided right away that it would be a good idea to have an error page show when this problem happens, but this is not working either! It seems that the browser is becoming overloaded and giving up which times out the rest of the page. Now with the browser doing this there are no error messages sent back to the code so the error message never appears. Well today it looks like we have finally made some process by upgrading some of the hardware and expanding out to use multiple servers while loading one page. We are looking forward to seeing great improvements in on this problem over the coming week and will keep everyone updated!

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris