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January 2, 2007
New Year: New Layout, New Calendar
We have a few changes with the New Year. The home page layout has been altered to create an additional sidebar on the left, in which we are testing Google Ads as a potential tool to help our financial sustainability strategy.
But more importantly, we've introduced a calendar of transportation meetings, the top requested feature in our reader survey.
The calendar is implemented with Google Calendar, and the next 10 meetings will appear in the sidebar, and the full calendar is available on it's own page (meetings start showing up in January) and as a Feed you can subscribe to.
However, the calendar is only going to work as a group effort. While I'll happily maintain entries for meetings I attend regularly, I don't have the time or the desire to try to maintain every meeting out there. So we need folks to signup to cover other meetings. We can do this several ways. Someone could agree to maintain a certain set of meetings (say the City of Portland Bicycle Advisor Committee), and we can work on signing up enough people to get everything covered.
Or, we could have a pool of folks on an e-mail list, and I could just pass on the meeting notices I receive (I'm already on most of the lists) to the list, and the next person with some free time could set up the calendar entries.
Either way, folks who are willing to be maintainers need to get a Google account, and I will delegate authority to create entries.
So let's talk here about how to organize the effort, and if you're willing to be a maintainer, drop me a line (webmaster@portlandtransportr.com) with your e-mail address and your Google account address.
Posted by Chris Smith at 7:47 AM
Comments
January 2, 2007 8:34 AM
Kari Chisholm Says:
You might consider running the Google ads on the individual post pages. They work better there (since the ads are contextual) and many of your readers never see the home page -- anybody reading via RSS or LeftyBlogs.com or OrBlogs.com or the BlogWire on BlueOregon.com. I can't remember the last time I saw your home page...
Also, if you want BlogAds, the offer still stands.
January 2, 2007 7:36 PM
Jason Barbour Says:
Just two comments:
1. Am I the only person in the world still using 800x600 resolution? The homepage now doesn't fit the screen.
2. I like the calendar idea and I'd probably offer to add things like Sellwood CTF meetings (next upcoming meeting is Jan. 16th, normal place and time), and C-TRAN meetings (public hearing on their service redisign on Jan. 9, 5:30 PM at Fisher's Landing Transit Center), but I have zero interest in registering for a Google account, even if someone paid me to - for more information, see google-watch.org. I probably wouldn't have this issue if it were running on a different platform.
January 2, 2007 8:03 PM
Chris Smith Says:
Jason, you may not be the only one, but you're one of the few. Our metrics say that 7.5% of users are at 800x600 and only a small fraction of a percent are smaller. I'd happily revert except I wouldn't know where to put the calendar?
And as for the calendar, Google's functionality was the closest match to what I thought we needed.
But so far, I have no volunteers, so maybe the calendar is not going to last that long.
