Tag: sitenews

Around Carson has been on Twitter for a short while now, and now I've added a box to the sidebar that shows the most recent updates right on this page. Look to the right and you should see it. It's a way for you to keep up with what I'm doing at Twitter without having to visit the site or have an account yourself. I've been putting content on Twitter when I'm too lazy too busy to post to the blog - links to interesting articles, pointers to other Carson area bloggers, and updates from the road if I'm out and about and see something happening. I'm also following several Carson City Twitterers, so if you have an account follow me and I'll follow you back.

You can reach the Around Carson Twitter page at twitter.com/aroundcarson.

I've started a Twitter account for Around Carson, giving you another way to keep up with what's going on in the Carson City/Carson Valley area. The account can be found at www.twitter.com/aroundcarson. There're you find links whenever a new story is posted here, as well as other short blurbs as I find the time. My thinking is that I'll post there if I just have something short to say that doesn't warrant a full article, or if I don't have time to put an article together. I'm just getting started with it, but hopefully I'll be able to keep it up and make it something useful for everyone interested in Carson City.

If you're not familiar with Twitter, see What Is Twitter?

I've been doing some programming this week, and I finally did something I've been wanting to do for a long time. I switched over the Photos from Around Carson photo gallery from the creaky old software that I wrote over three years ago, to the better system that I created for the WNHPC. With this change comes a new URL, http://photos.aroundcarson.com. I think I've switched everything over so that there won't be any glitches, and I have redirects in place to handle old bookmarks and search engine results.

The one thing I haven't gotten working yet is posting new photos, but that will just take a bit more work. I definitely want that to be part of it when it's done, because seeing all the photos that the community submits is half the fun. Although I've stopped using this system almost entirely in favor of using Flickr. It did need to be refreshed, though, because when I do use it I run up against all the shortcomings and hate it. So this new system should address a lot of that, because I wrote this new system with all of those shortcomings in mind, and an eye towards solving them. Now I don't have to be embarrassed by the photo gallery on this site anymore.

It's pretty rare anymore that I sit down to do any programming on the code behind Around Carson. Even though I don't feel like the site is "finished", it seems to have been working well enough lately that I could just let it sit.

But one thing that was starting to get out of hand was the navigation that can be found at the bottom of the main page, or on the tag pages. Now that I have so many entries on the site, the navigation is up to 86 pages to browse through the whole site. And under the old programming, at the bottom of every page (and the top of many) there was a complete countdown from 1 to 86 so you could navigate through all the pages. That was getting insane, so I incorporated some code from this site, and built a new look for the navigation. Now many of the page links are hidden, and only the ones adjacent to the page you're looking at now are visible.

Much much better. I put the same code on the Western Nevada Historic Photo Collection, because at 14 pages it was on the road to getting unwieldy as well.

There's a new feature on Around Carson: a list of all the tags I've used for my blog entries. If you notice, most of the blog entries here have "tags", which are like keywords, and if you click on the tag it takes you to a page where you can see all the entries with that tag. So you can look at everything I've written about Jethro's, for example, or the V&T Railroad.

Until now there has been no way to see all the tags in one place, or to find out how many entries each tag had. Now there is one page where you can do all of that. Might not be of much use to you, but I know it will help me when I'm trying to tag future entries, to see which tags I've used in the past. Also, not all the entries on the site are tagged, and that's something I've got to take the time to go backwards and fix. But that's a lot of work. This page is a good start.

Okay folks, I'm leaving town for a vacation for about two weeks, and it's kind of hard to post about what's going on in Carson City when you're not even there. So I'm leaving the site in your good hands and I expect to see plenty of posts and new pictures when I get back. And yes, the Photo Posting form is fixed now, for anyone who might have tried to use it in the last week. Screwy servers. Screwy programming stuff.

Around Carson's Then And Now articles are listed in the "Things We Like" section of the Knight Citizen News Network. At the moment it's even mentioned on their homepage!

The KCNN calls itself a "self-help portal" that highlights citizen journalism and placeblog efforts around the country and tries to help folks build and grow these kinds of sites. It's good to see that the Then And Now section, which is probably one of my favorite parts of the site, is the one they picked to give some recognition to. It also makes me feel bad that I'm not writing more articles for it, but there's a whole boatload of procrastination issues at play there. I'll have to get back on it.

Placeblogger has finally launched. A few months late, but I know what that can be like. It's a directory of sites like this one, that cover a certain town or community. And Around Carson is actually listed on there, although it's not part of the list of top ten placeblogs. I can't understand why, especially considering that their list of recent entries includes all the Viagra spam that's been making it to the homepage the last couple of days. And the fact that I pretty much took the last two weeks off for the holidays, even though I really didn't plan for it to happen that way.

In all they have 8 placeblogs listed for Nevada, including Reno and its Discontents, Nevada Politics, an aggregator run by the Nevada Appeal, and Nevada Blogs, an aggregator run by Dane Carlson.

Lisa Williams’ description of what placeblogging is really makes me want to get motivated and make Around Carson better:

Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They’re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.

I've been working on a few changes under the hood at Around Carson. Most of you probably won't notice anything, it's just a couple of things to try to keep up with the "Web 2.0" crowd and to clean up some things I wasn't too happy about.

The main thing is that I've enabled tagging on the site. "Tags" are basically just keywords or categories that I can assign to any entry I post here. At the bottom of the post there will be a list of tags, and if you click on any of the tags, you'll get to see all the entries that have that tag. So, for example, if you click here: traderjoes, you'll see everything I've written about the new Trader Joe's store. It's a small thing, but it's something I've been wanting to do for a while. And since this site is running on a homegrown system, I had to do all the programming myself. It's a learning experience. That's what I keep telling myself.

Also, related to the change to the new tagging system, I got rid of the confusing and half-thought-out multiple blog concept I was toying with. It used to be that on the left sidebar there were three "blogs" listed: the Around Carson Blog, the Construction Blog, and the Site Updates Blog. I never really knew where I was going with that idea, and the way I implemented it was kind of half-assed. So for the last eight months, ever since I launched this new system I haven't been happy with the way it ran. So, as part of this switch to using tags, I did away with the "Construction Blog" and the "Site Updates Blog", and I just set up two new tags: construction and update. They take the place of those old "Blogs", and I'm a lot happier with the way the site works now.

I've got more stuff in the works, too. I want to create an RSS feed for each of the tags, so if you're only interested in getting news about, say, the Ormsby House, you can subscribe just to that tag feed. And I'll probably build a "tag cloud", which is where all the tags used on the site are listed, with the more common ones standing out in bold. Just more ways to explore the site and find out what I've been writing about for the last year and a half. Plus, I need to go back over those last 18 months worth of entries and add tags to all of them, so that should take a bit of time. Looks like I'll be busy!

And this is the 18-month anniversary of this site. It was in May of 2005 that I first got a bug up my butt about creating a site like this. It's not quite as successful as I wanted it to be yet, but that's my fault for not getting out there and promoting it. I do have a bunch of loyal readers, though, and I started it right when the Reno blogsphere was starting to skyrocket, so I was able to ride that wave a little bit. So now I'm just hoping for bigger and better things, and to get some of you to chime in and start posting (hint hint). And I'll just keep trying to make this website the online home for what's happening in Carson City. One step at a time.

Around Carson 0.1