I dunno what was wrong with the template. Thankfully, I'm a digital packrat ... so I was able to revert bellyfuzz back to a template I had saved on my hard drive. The only change I made was to copy over the new members list and to delete the stats4all stuff. Stats4all is ceasing to be a free service.
I'm still enjoying my new job. I have to fly solo for another week. My new web producer begins work on April 28, so I'll finally have help. But I'm pretty happy with what I've been able to accomplish by myself.
It's funny for me to think that bellyfuzz averages 35 page views per day while my professional site averages 9,000 page views per day ... and it's only 15 days old. Eeek! I'm expecting that News 9 will get a quarter of a million page views in its first month. And in three or four months, I'm hoping to be pulling in one or two million page views per month.
In living proof that former marketing guys should NOT try to edit HTML, I have managed to munge our 'blog in a way that requires the golden touch of the webmaster from down south San Antonio way. In trying to add a simple "favicon" to out URL for bookmarking I have succeded in hiding all but the most recent post, and all right-side links, navigation and content.
Thanks to Cursor.org, and the good folks at The Memory Hole, Time Magazine's attempt to pull a fast one has failed. Time decided to remove from its website archive an essay by Daddy Bush and Brent Scowcroft on why toppling Saddam was not a good idea last time we played colonial warlord. How lame are the idiots at Time to think that no one had a cache image, or even a scanner? Childish deceitful internet Luddites.
I'm on my first business trip in a while - Yorktown Heights, NY, and its been quite enjoyable thus far. The highlight was getting into & out of ORD with no delays, on schedule. I was sure hell was freezing over. It might be - the New Yorkers are quite pleased with the 70 degree temperature that this week has featured. By posting this, I'm sure I'll jinx my return flight, and spend the entire day stuck in a middle seat on a 4 hour ground hold.
The El Mundo work is really good... there are useful things that can be done with the technology, other than David Hasselhoff videos. *shudder*
In other technology efforts, certainly one that Baze will appreciate, the online petitions keep rolling, include this one to Stop Them Before they film again. In another film nod, Faure showed me his 'Goldberg' video of things in motion, which has inspired an ad for Honda. Most sincere form of flattery indeed.
OK, If your Spanish is as non-existent as mine, this may be a bit challenging, but bear with me--these are cool. The fine folks in the Design/Graphics Study at Poynter.org have put together an excellent feature on how journalists explain things graphically. They invited submissions from all over the world, and many came from one place--Spain. The Spanish language daily El Mundo has had a wonderful series of graphical explanations of elements of the Iraq war on their site each day since the war started, and many others, on more mundane news topics such as road repair, the Masters golf tournament, and even birth. These Flash movies, while accompanied by Spanish text are remarkably informative, and clean crisp examples of what can be done well with multimedia presentation on the web.
(Navigation Hints: Click on a topic, wait for the Flash to load, ("Cargandos Datos" means "Downloading Data") then click the link labeled "Comenzar" ("begin") to start. Look for Avanzar (advance) or Retroceder (Go Back) in the upper right corner, as you mouse over left and right arrows to advance or reverse the presentation)
Click the logo above, then "Los Gráficos de la Crisis de Irak" (Graphics on the crisis in Iraq, DUH! ) for a cool look at weapons systems in use, battle explanations and more. See their view of Augusta National over the years, road repair in Madrid and even a baby's-eye view of birth a bit further down the page. You can try to recall all that Spanish you thought you learned at the same time!
