The new photo box makes it easy to flip through the day in pictures.
Scroll through the latest and most popular videos.
We started singing a lovely tune last week about our launching a redesigned site that features improved usability as well as a host of newfangled features only to realize that we were a bit premature with the announcement.
Nonetheless, a week later, we are confident that the new site will roll around Tuesday, May 13.
To the right, you'll see screen shots of the new video player and photo box, both of which we hope will enhance our front page and make it a portal for you to access local, national and even international news.
We also encourage you to submit your own photos and video for display on the homepage. The new design allows for us to feature cool images and videos much better than the existing design does.
Bottom line: We're go for launch!
And we appreciate your patience as we iron out the lingering glitches that are sure to surface after the fact. Please write us at webmaster@theolympian.com if you have comments or questions.
Deleting comments? While we're on here though, we'd like to address a question posted by one 'Crusty' about why comments seem to disappear between versions of stories.
Crusty wrote:
During your redesign I hope that you changed the practice of deleting blogs when the headline changes.
More often than not, the same story with a different headline deletes all of the previous postings.
Why??????
As you may or may not have noticed, we have adopted the policy of indicating when comments are deleted by replacing the deleted comment with the statement 'This comment has been removed by TheOlympian.com.'
We believe the scenario that Crusty is describing occurs in between when a breaking news item goes online and the next day's follow-up story runs in print (and then also online). For example, here's the breaking news version of Thursday's story regarding the reduced speed limit on I-5 south of Olympia. And here's the next day's follow-up.
We create new story files the next day and effectively 'retire' the previous day's version, but we see how that it creates the impression that we're deleting comments.
Unfortunately, we have not found a long-term solution to this issue. We have tried to keep the same thread going between the breaking news version and the next day's version, but highly controversial items can generate upwards of 400 comments per day. And that makes them very hard to follow after a while.
Still, we hope this clears up some confusion.