Archive: Lincoln / bluno.org

Archive for Lincoln

Couple seemed happy, friends say

December 18th, 2007 Lincoln

An Onion-esque headline from the RSS feed of my ol’ hometown ~~paper~~ err.. website : Couple seemed happy, friends say.

I’m wondering if this type of ‘reportage’ has a name. The kind with really short, dramatic paragraphs:

“First it just rang and rang.”

and

“She wasn’t there.”

Kubickian? Do they teach this stuff?

A few suggestions for Prairie Fire newspaper

November 29th, 2007 Lincoln

Several years ago, I spent serious chunk of time researching and planning how to start up a weekly paper. An “alt-weekly”, if you will. Omaha had its “Reader”, which had some Lincoln coverage. But there was nothing dedicated to the Lincoln community which provided the full range of what a good weekly paper covers - music, politics, culture, art, community. I wrote up a business plan, made prototypes, went to an AAN convention to network, and talked to anyone remotely interested.

Had I been able to connect the idea to the right investor, I might be in a very different place right now.

After it became apparent that i would not be able to launch a print venture, I spent a year or so working to launch an online community at lincolnblog.com (long since mothballed - get in touch if you want the domain). Lincolnblog had very modest success, but after I moved to San Francisco, I didn’t have the time to keep up on the effort, and shut it down.

So, when some folks from Lincoln started the Prairie Fire newspaper, I took notice. A few of the people involved are folks I talked to when I was looking to start a paper.

I happened along the site tonight and noticed that it hadn’t been updated since October, though a bit of Drupal hacking pointed me to November content.

I know some of the folks involved, and respect the effort that they are putting into the project. I wish them the best of luck. I’d also like to share some unsolicited advice - and who doesn’t love that!

Your website is not just an archive

Your website will be the most dynamic part of your publication. Really.

Realizing that your advertisers may value the print version of your publication more (silly advertisers!), so you may need to justify exclusive content in your print edition (for now), but do find any way possible to update the site daily. Blog counter-points to whatever the Journal Star is publishing in its opinion section or write about upcoming community events, bakesale notices — anything! Just don’t let your site become an out-dated graveyard of content.

Develop your online community.

You already let users post comments. Excellent. You have more tools to provide the “thoughtful public discourse” you talk about in your mission statement. Open up forums on your site, develop blogs for your featured writers so that they can post whenever they choose. You may even be able to recycle some of this content back into your monthly print version.

Reach out to Lincoln’s former residents

Like me. You will be offering a view into the ‘Old Country’ not available anywhere else. Offer email newsletters and a consistent RSS feed, which by the way, the Journal Star star has finally opened up to.

Considering the site already runs Drupal, they are well on the way to providing a much better online experience. I look forward to seeing how you guys make it grow.

Going west, as a (not so young) young man

November 5th, 2007 Lincoln

Fellow Nebraskan Ev has a good post on his experience leaving Nebraska for the Bay Area tech world, and chimes in on the need to be in the Valley to be in tech.

“By staying in Nebraska, I relegated myself to spectator, even though I was trying to be a participant.” As someone who left Nebraska two years ago to further a career in the tech world, this quote rings true for me. I really admire the companies like 37Signals who have made a great business while shunning the Valley. There are plenty of other small web design and web dev shops, too. So, it can be done outside the Valley/Bay Area, but I think for folks in Nebraska, the quote is still very true.

I don’t think it HAS to be that way, but some things need to change in order for smaller towns like Lincoln to stop the brain drain.

I spent several years trying to find a place or make opportunities for myself in Lincoln. I wrote a few business plans. I burned too much time with people who were great at making promises, and even better at failing to deliver. I was ready to throw myself into creating my own business several times, but Lincoln seems to lack the support, investors, mentors that an entrepreneur needs.

Outside of running my own business, the opportunities are slim. An ad agency or two here and there. State or University gigs. As someone with 12 years experience in web design/development, the movement available was all horizontal. Not much opportunity to grow or be challenged.

Not knocking on my great hometown, by any means. I really wish it didn’t appear to be the case.

I didn’t know Ev was trying to start an internet business in Lincoln back in 95-97. I’m surprised our paths didn’t cross back then.

News from the hometown

June 2nd, 2007 Lincoln

Highlights from tonight’s surfing through the hidden RSS feeds from my hometown newspaper, the Lincoln Journal Star

Virtual Lincoln

April 12th, 2007 Lincoln

Whenever I get misty-eyed for Lincoln, I have found I can now get my virtual fix at roundus.com, which has some pretty nifty panoramas of various sites of interest in my hometown.

My favorite shot by far is the Men’s room at Yia-Yia’s

They you can browse a Google maps mashup showing locations of all their shots to date.

The quality isn’t quite as high-res as the panorama’s at panoramas.dk (my fave’s being the and Ground Zero Tribute )

Some reccomendations for future shots:

Russ’ Market, 17th & Washington
Intoxicants (liquor store), 11th & G
Duffy’s bathroom
Precision Skates (w/ Phil at the counter)
D’Leons (Drive thru on West O)
N Street Drive In
Thai house/Oriental Market
Thrift stores on O Street
Zesto’s (on South St, or is that closed?)

Lincolnites former and current : What other locations should be documented?

Lincoln among nation’s top digital cities

December 12th, 2006 Lincoln

Lincoln among nation’s top digital cities - Unfortunately the state legislature passed a law prohibiting Lincoln’s public power system from utilizing existing infrastructure for data services. Competition is fierce; I wonder if Lincoln can keep up.

Hacking journalstar.com RSS

December 10th, 2006 Lincoln, web

I’ve recently switched over my RSS subscriptions to Google Reader. Google Reader makes reading and managing a high volume of RSS feeds so effortless and intuitive, I was inspired to visit some of the sites I hoped to add to my feed reading list. As a recent expatriate of Lincoln, Nebraska, naturally I wanted to add the Journal Star, Lincoln’s local paper, to my read list, but it was apparent that the paper’s online division (or more likely, their tech-ignorant publishers) has not come around to embrace RSS. I wasn’t surprised, but still disappointed.

I found I wasn’t alone in my frustration.

So, I sat down to write a quick blog post complaining about their lack of feeds in the dawn of 2007 - but then I thought, “Who wants to read that?”. So I started looking for an alternative RSS-enabled news source for Lincoln, Nebraska.

Google news offers RSS feeds of searches on the site (RSS Feed for “lincoln nebraska”), but it isn’t comprehensive, and is mostly sports news anyway.

The UNL newspaper, the Daily Nebraskan, has a wide variety of feeds (DN RSS Feeds), but I really had enough of the DN in my years of attending classes at UNL. Thanks, but no thanks.

I SWEAR I had a feed of ‘most printed articles’ from the Lincoln CBS affiliate KOLN, but those ended up being mostly recipes, so I unsubscribed. Can’t find any mention of RSS there either.

I headed back to Google to see if anyone had set up a way to scrape Journal Star headlines and output them to RSS. No luck there either.

Lincoln, it seemed, wants to keep its news to itself.

As a last resort, I headed back to Google searching for all sorts of search combinations of RSS and Journal Star and I found this little gem: http://www.journalstar.com/?rss=huskerextra.

And after a bit more research, trial, and error, I found the format to their publishing system’s RSS output.

Here’s how it works. Their publishing system users a url structure like this: http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2006/12/10/news/local/doc457b548b7be44737957995.txt. The key to accessing the RSS is the directory structure between the date stamp (i.e. “2006/12/10″), and the ugly document name in the URL (i.e. “doc457b548b7be44737957995.txt”)

Just plug this directory structure in as the value for the RSS url parameter and you get: http://www.journalstar.com/?rss=news/local. Magic!

Here are some examples, with a handy link to add to Google Reader:

Even the police calls, bankruptcies and resurant inspections have RSS feeds. What fun!

Since the feeds exist, WHY wouldn’t they be promoted on the site? Clearly, they don’t realize that “RSS is the paperboy” (see question #4). An RSS subscriber is clearly more engaged and interested in the content. They are more likely to turn more pages, participate in comments, and post links on their blogs, in turn driving more traffic to the site. I don’t expect them to provide full content feeds, though some sites have had encoraging results.

So, now that this cat is out of the bag let’s hope that the Journal Star doesn’t try to stuff the cat back in. It would be simple enough to disable access by a variety of ways (.htaccess etc.). If they do disable the feeds, it will be clear that the Journal Star doesn’t understand this powerful and simple method of content delivery, doesn’t respect it’s users, and doesn’t care to learn.

We’ll see.