After the big orange "Give Now" button had been up on the home page at NCPR for a day, we thought to ourselves, Hmmm! big looks pretty good. We need something like this all the time. How about a top news story? So while you were all busy clicking on the big orange button, Bill Haenel was busy building a feature that would automatically deliver a designated story–its headline, photo and some intro text–onto the home page. So then we thought about–how about more than one? So Bill spent the end of the week making a "carousel" that would rotate a set of featured stories. On Monday, just in time for people to miss the big orange button, the new widget was rolled out.

Later on Monday, the idea popped up that we have a lot of weather resources on the site, but no weather on the home page. What can we do? So Bill made a widget that would deliver the Canton forecast to the home page, and a feature that allowed you to get the forecast by zip or town. Pretty cool. We went live with that yesterday. In this morning's email, kudos came from Brian Mann, accompanied by a kvetch–"I don't live in Canton, why do I want Canton weather? I selected Saranac Lake, but when I came back–there was Canton's weather again." So while I was cutting up this morning's news audio and posting it to the site, Bill wrote a function that would save your weather preference for the next time you returned.

In the trade, this is called nimbleness, and it's directly related to capacity. Capacity is a factor of resources, bringing us back to the big orange button. Your generous support now and in the past is what has made it possible for NCPR to invest in a 21st Century online service, one that is responsive to the sometimes brutal rate of change in media technology. As every parent knows, when the baby needs to be changed, she needs to be changed now. Thank you all for making that possible. Much more soon.

Tags: Uncategorized