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Creating a newspaper web site with MovableType, web standards and ideas from the blogosphere
So, we launched the new BadgerHerald.com last week. What a tremendous joy to finally be able to show off the project that has consumed most of my working life since June (and a lot of time in April and May as well). I hope to tell some detailed stories about the development process, but for now I’ll start with some brief introductions.
First, a little about the Badger Herald.
The Herald is an independent student newspaper on the University of Wisconsin campus here in Madison, WI. Started in 1969 as a conservative challenge to liberal anti-war activism on campus, the paper has remained (more or less) afloat with no assistance of any kind from the University. These days, the Herald is still known as “conservative” in some circles (due to our editorial board, which tends to the right) but the news, sports and arts coverage exhibit mostly a “pro-student” bias, if any. For the last several years, the Herald has put up with what can reasonably be called a half-assed web site provided by Digital Partners. It was hard to update, hard to customize, and no one at the Herald was ever really in charge of it. Sometime early this year, top Herald staff acted on wishes that had been simmering for years and hired my company to develop a new site. (I have a long history with the Herald — my insider/outsider position made ZEMU great for the job.)
Geek cred
One of the more notable things about the new site is that it’s built with XHTML and CSS. This is becoming less of a big deal over time as more people are starting to design with standards, but I’ve only seen a few newspaper sites that do this — which is shocking! I should disclose immediately that the XHTML does not validate (the CSS may or may not). But the code, written almost completely by Charles Parsons (rock star), is all very clean and very smart. Whipping it into shape (and into validation) should be a simple task for the future.
Also notable is that the new site is powered almost entirely by MovableType (we are using 2.661 — MT3 came out just as we began development, but we didn’t want to take any chances and wanted to wait until the pricing was ironed out). The core setup is based around four weblogs, one for each section (News, Op/Ed, Arts, Sports). Each weblog publishes it’s own home page (at badgerherald.com/news, for example) as well as stories to a date based directory (one of today’s stories is at /sports/2004/09/07/badgers_slay_golden_.php). As you can imagine, we had a bunch of challenges in fitting MT into a newspaper format. But as others have noted, you can do anything with this beast. I plan to write more about the details of configuring MT and developing templates, but not now…
We’re serving up ads with an open-source ad server called phpAdsNew (worst name ever). Charles found and configured this beauty. Comics are powered by Noel’s PhotoStack, believe it or not. Each series is an album, and the individual strips are simply shown in reverse chronological order. The comics home shows the newest strip in each series (Charles did this too). There is more of this kind of information in the colophon.
Strategy and goals
I could go on forever about this. I’ll try not to.
The idea was to create a well-designed, lightweight and flexible solution for publishing newspaper content. We wanted it to reflect the nature of the Herald, which is why we decided to develop (rather, configure) our own tools instead of using another provider like Digital Partners. We wanted to build and maintain the site with modern, open-source/free technologies and tools. We picked MovableType largely because of the enormous and generous user base. We coded the pages with XHTML and CSS because it loads faster and costs less (and it’s the right thing to do). First and foremost, we wanted to do the “newspaper thing” the right way.
But we also wanted to embrace and adopt some trends and ideas from the blogosphere. Like RSS feeds with full text for all sections. And open comments on every story. Complete, searchable, free archives (stored in a smart directory structure). Linking to other outlets (even the competition *gasp*). (MediaSaavy’s smart suggestions came out just as we were planning the site, confirming just about everything we were planning to do.)
Of course, making some money would be nice. So we put smart, reasonable advertising in the plans from day one. We declared “no banners,” and incorporated systems that would encourage local advertising (like our forthcoming online classifieds system). Google ads were too good to pass up, so we threw those in as well. Newspaper advertising (and web advertising) is in a hard place right now — we’re trying to be smart and offer advertising that works and is not annoying to users. That will create a better overall experience, more traffic, and help the Herald in the long run.
The future
Sounds cliché, but this launch is just the beginning. Charles and I are now employed by Herald (again) — we’re managing the daily operations of the site but also working on long-term improvements to make sure we don’t get stale, old or lame. We have a bunch of new development in the works, as well as a laundry list of back-end improvements to make the site work better and the nightly maintenance easier.
Keep your eyes on this site and our development weblog as we unveil new features, chronicle ongoing work and tell the story of how the new site came to be. But most of all… enjoy!