{"id":12332,"date":"2014-09-27T10:47:25","date_gmt":"2014-09-27T14:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=12332"},"modified":"2014-09-27T10:47:25","modified_gmt":"2014-09-27T14:47:25","slug":"the-big-launch-a-whole-new-ncpr-org","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2014\/09\/27\/the-big-launch-a-whole-new-ncpr-org\/","title":{"rendered":"The big launch: a whole new ncpr.org"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The new ncpr.org is launched. Artist: Carey Rockwell<\/a> from Danger in Deep Space<\/em>, a Tom Corbett Space Cadet Adventure, public domain<\/p><\/div>\n

If you have visited NCPR in the last few days, you will have found a lot of changes. On Tuesday night Bill Haenel flipped the last set of switches to launch the first complete redesign of NCPR since about 1914 (in internet years). It’s been a little lively around here ever since as we address issues that didn’t show their heads until after we went live, and as we fix up old pages, sections and navigation to work properly with the new design. That process will continue for a while, so I hope you will bear with us during our shakedown cruise.<\/p>\n

But the site is working well enough on most devices and browsers to be let out in public and I wanted a chance to brag on Bill’s accomplishments a bit. The first big deal in my mind is the new home page. The old design featured a few curated and promoted items at the top, and most of the rest of the content was brought to the page through whatever happened to be newest in the particular feed that put stuff into that particular box. That meant that most items on our most heavily visited page were there “just because,” and were not selected and curated by a human editor to suit our audience. Some features that didn’t update often carried some very outdated stories, and some contained stories that just didn’t work inside the old site design. Bad<\/em> robot.<\/p>\n

No more. If you go to our home page now you will find at this moment 33 stories, posts, photo features, videos and audio features from NCPR and from our public media partners that were selected from among the hundreds of items available to be the best, or the most important, or the most interesting features available. If you want to see everything produced by NCPR News, go to the news page; if you want just the best and the most timely, you will find it on the home page. And if you want more than these 33 items, you can load in more, and they will still be hand curated from among all the sources we tap.<\/p>\n

The other big thing I like about the home page is that you can actually use all the content directly from the page, without going to a different page to read the whole story, or listen to the whole story, or watch the video, or share it with your friends. Using the read, listen, watch, or share buttons on a home page story will bring it all forward into view. This a real innovation and will save visitor’s time and a lot of extra navigation and page loading and backtracking when they want to browse through a number of items.<\/p>\n

And unlike the old site, this one will adapt itself to the size of the device you are viewing it on. So win, win, win, in my humble opinion. The media players are based on newer technology. The photos display larger than ever before, if you are on a large screen. Content types we couldn’t display properly before, such as First Listen album previews, video collections and NPR slideshows now work properly for the first time. And there’s lots more to come, including stories from public media network and program sources we couldn’t tap before.<\/p>\n

I could go on and on, but the best way to get the idea is to explore for yourself. Play Lucinda Williams new double album, which the rest of world won’t see until Monday. Watch John Hodgman, at the behest of his secret ape overlord, put Tweedy out on the street to hawk their new release door to door. Read the NPR ombudsman’s take on the ethics of language used in reporting on terrorism. Meet an Adirondack couple whose solution to funding high winter heating costs is outside of the box. And more<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This had been a huge job with Bill Haenel doing all the heavy lifting–a full year in the works. And did I say?–It looks simply marvelous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have visited NCPR in the last few days, you will have found a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12332"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12332"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12339,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12332\/revisions\/12339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}