Full coverage the Las Flores fire can be found here:
I was only out at the fire a few hours, and my throat is still hurting and my eyes still burning. (Not to mention every inch of me smells like a campfire.) I can’t imagine how career firefighters are able to handle much more prolonged exposure to smoke and fire on a regular basis.
Now, this is a cool Web site: Image Archive: Top 100.
Of course, they just make me pissed that I was born a century or more too early, but I don’t imagine anyone gets to choose what age they’re born into.
As you might remember (those handful of you who care), last year, the Hesperia Star staff took over management of the content of the site at the same time as we added categories to make it easier for readers to find stories and allowed comments on each story.
Part of the goal was to make for a better experience for users — it was closer to the site I’d make, if I were making a site from scratch — but part of it was also to get our Web hits up, which after working at CBR, the 800-pound gorilla of the comic book industry on the Web, frankly sort of bothered me.
Well, it worked. While I don’t think I’m allowed to release exact figures, I just saw the site’s daily pageviews prior to switching over to the new system. Page hits had doubled by adding interactivity and usability to the site. So it wasn’t just what I wanted, it turns out that the readers responded to it as well. Hopefully the new site, which offers even more interactivity and usability, will have a similar response.
Speaking of the new site, it’s been patched to the next version of the program that runs everything, but the pages haven’t all been tweaked to take advantage of all the new bells and whistles. The current schedule is for the Star, the Daily Press and HighDesert.com to be fully belled and whistled by May 3.
As Marketplace pointed out yesterday, print isn’t dead, and reinvention is the name of the game. The Daily Press papers are currently kicking around some redesign ideas, from the papers’ logos through how they deliver news. Look for more on this later this year.
Like a lot of people who liked the old school Mustangs, I was thrilled a few years ago when Ford suddenly realized “hey, maybe they shouldn’t look like Ford Escorts with spoilers and airdams” and restyled the cars to look more like the classic models.
Now, I’ve never owned a Mustang (I’ve owned a succession of Honda Civics and one ill-fated Hyundai Accent), but these new cars got my attention, as classic Mustangs have for years.
In my case, it all goes back to a Matchbox car I got when I was in elementary school in Virginia.
And, indeed, it’s because of this Matchbox car that, if I got a 2008 or 2009 Mustang (there will be lots of expenses and other complications between now and then to account for first), I might actually break my no-yellow-cars rule and get one that evoked this old toy, even if it didn’t have a supercharger and so on.
Wildly impractical, I know. It’s just a gas-guzzling pipe dream at the moment.
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