Daniel Lovell has won more than two dozen awards for his columns, editorials and investigative journalism. He is actively addicted to the Internet, soda and New York Yankees baseball.
If you're reading this, you've already noticed our new blogging platform and design, and you've undoubtedly noticed the design changes throughout the cnylink.com website. But we're far from done making improvements.
We're in the midst of finishing up a new news platform that will make our news more readable, and will better integrate multimedia files within our stories. That means you can expect to see more videos and photo galleries, attached to the stories we post online.
The new platform will also allow our users to sort news based on the community they want to read about. Want just Baldwinsville news? You'll be able to get it with just a click of a button. Cazenovia? No problem. This feature will also allow users to sort news by relationship to a particular topic, so if you want news about girls basketball, schools or pie-eating contests, you'll be able to sort our stories to find related news and blogs.
If that weren't enough, we're also making all our stories Digg ready, so users can promote any stories they find particularly interesting. And we're integrating the Disqus commenting system you've already seen on our blogs, which allow for more cohesive commenting threads, assigning karma to commentors, and a whole lot more. Disqus is really an up-and-comer in the comment-handling world, and we're excited to join the select number of sites using this system today. We've found it user-friendly and fun. And the added bonus? It cuts down the spam in our comments section to nil. Comment spammers have really been causing us trouble, posting about 200,000 spam comments per week. That causes a lot of work, and a server load that effects overall load time for our site.
Of course, there's more. Stay tuned. You'll likely see these changes in the coming days. Maybe even tomorrow. I hope you like them. Please feel free to drop me a line, or post a comment below to let me know what you think.
