I rewrote the script that generates the feed read by Feedburner, the service that sends out the daily e-mail to the Herald's subscribers. Now stories will be listed by order of most recent update and the blogs will be included in addition to the four main sections. If you're not a subscriber yet, head over to our feeds page to sign up!

Note: The first e-mail sent based on the new script will include a lot more stories than it should, but after that things will be back to normal, with working links!

Check out the News Feeds page for links to RSS feeds of all four sections and the five blogs!

The staff page has a new look, and now lists the current staff! Many people are still missing, but will be there soon. Check it out!

After launching a new commenting system on the blogs last semester, we gave users a chance to give feedback and allowed time to work out the kinks of the new system. Now all sections of badgerherald.com use the new system, so enjoy!

Note: While you can log in with your AIM, Yahoo! and Google screen names, Facebook is currently not supported. We hope to have that functionality working again soon!

We finished revamping all the blogs, including adding commenting functionality to all so users can sign in using their Facebook, Yahoo!, and other accounts. Feel free to leave feedback below.

We'll be continually improving the blogs as well, so watch for updates!

We're in the process of updating all the advertising pages to the new template and with current information. As always, feel free to leave feedback below.

We might implement hierarchical threaded commenting sitewide soon, and as part of the upgrade, commenters could be able to log in to comment using their Facebook, AIM, Yahoo! or Wordpress accounts. This might mean we would have to drop support for our current login system. EDIT: Either way, anonymous posting will be preserved.

Please leave comments below expressing your preference with reasons:

Option A: I want to log in with my Facebook, AIM (coming soon), Yahoo! or Wordpress account, or comment anonymously, and I want to be able to reply to specific comments directly.

Option B: Not being able to log in with the current system would be too inconvenient. Keep old login system and don't upgrade.

Any other feedback is welcome as well. Thank you!

As much as I hate to depend on Google for more of our services, this change has been a long time coming. Our old MySQL based search has been lacking, working fine for some searches and not well at all for others. Google has obviously mastered the art of search more or less, so to make the Herald site more useful, the default search engine will be Google powered. Feel free to leave feedback below.

Draft 1 of the Sports page is now online.

Please leave your criticisms, praise and other comments or questions as comments below.

Draft 2 of the Opinion page is now online.

Changes inlcude:

• Added section at upper left to display every piece from the most recent day
• Recombined columns, guest columns and contributions into 'columns'
• General rearrangement, including bringing up recent comments to encourage discussion and moving down cartoons since we don't currently have a cartoonist (Apply now.)
• Added section to display most commented pieces of all time

Please leave your criticisms, praise and other comments or questions as comments below.

I've spend much of the past three days making some changes on the badgerherald.com server that have sped up the site enormously. The two big changes were implementing MySQL database caching to prevent redundant database queries, especially from the advertising software we use, and implementing eAccelerator to greatly expedite PHP script processing.

The site has been very slow lately, partly due to the aforementioned setting not being in use, and partly due to web traffic increasing over the past few weeks (This chart won't pertain any longer once this entry is a few weeks old...):

Before the updates, top reported server load averages of 1.5-2, sometimes much higher. This basically meant people trying to view the site were put in a queue and their pages were not being instantly served. Additionally, the server CPU was consistently in use, averaging more than 90 percent use.

Now I've got the load down to an average of 0.1 or less, so content is being served up very quickly, as it should. The MySQL database caching has reduced CPU usage drastically, and we're now averaging less than 10 percent use. I'm going to continue improving performance around the site once more of it is converted to the new look.

I spent most of today working on the multimedia aspect of the website, including building the multimedia homepage (http://badgerherald.com/media), complete with monthly archives (which I'm going to add to every section) via a drop down menu at the upper right.

I added the capability to display videos next to stories just like photos. Some examples:

http://badgerherald.com/news/2009/01/25/uw_students_rally_fo.php

http://badgerherald.com/news/2009/01/23/martin_hosts_budget_.php

http://badgerherald.com/news/2009/01/25/lakeshore_emerges_as.php

I finally got a chance to implement a story e-mailing feature that allows users to send a link to a story to anyone right from the article. I also added more links to allow users to quickly submit article links to online services such as Digg and Newsvine. I realize there are a ridiculous number of services right now; I may take some down if I determine no one ever clicks them.

With the old site, we could display two photos within a story, and no captions. Though most stories have no more than one photo, I thought I could do better.

We now can display an arbitrary number of photos in the sidebar of an article. Not only can we display the photo credit, but we can now display the captions as well.

Also, as what I think is a nice touch to an article's design, I wrote a script that checks the dimensions of the top photo for a story. If the photo is sufficiently wide, it will push down the story and be displayed full width under the headline and subhead (We previously couldn't display subheads either.). Here's an example: http://badgerherald.com/sports/2009/02/04/shattuckkeepsup_el.php

As a couple of you have pointed out (thanks!), our RSS feeds were not properly working until 5 minutes ago. If you don't know what RSS is, visit our feeds page and check it out.

As Charles said, we are happy with the new site but don't plan to sit around while the web evolves around us. Many treat the launch of a new site as a stopping point, but we're treating it as the beginning. Spend four months immersed in a project and see if you don't have some new ideas by the end too...

Anyway, here is a short list of ideas for future enhancements to the site. Tell us what you think!

Online classifieds: In a month we'll be launching a new online classifieds system (OCS) that will allow you to place ads for display in print, online or both through our web site. The other side of this is a new classifieds section at http://badgerherald.com/classifieds which will display online ads -- these ads will also be rotated through every page on the site. This will be a great way to reach tons of eyes for a very low price. More news to follow...

BH.com start page: We don't know what to call it yet, but within a month we plan to debut a new "quick stop" page that contains a few articles from the Herald, wire news from around the USA and world, a weather forecast, a short calendar of events and a summary of bar drink specials. Consider it the "I just woke up but have to run to class" or "It's Friday, I'm hungover and want to see some music tonight" or "I have short attention span" section of Badgerherald.com. What kind of things would you like to see on this page?

News updates via email: RSS has made this partially obsolete (not using RSS yet?), but a lot of people still want to receive a daily email with the news. Don't you? Your feedback is valuable!

Downloadable crossword puzzle: Want to kill some time with the crossword, but don't have a paper nearby? You could always download it...