Monday, June 30, 2008

A Little Clean-up and a Star-Telegram comment . .

After a year or so the place needed a little sprucing up.

The polls have been removed. Poll summary: a majority of you live in Fort Worth, only about 25% of readers were born in the area, most of you read the Star Telegram, and many other newspapers as well, but a surprising few read the Dallas Morning News (17%).

Speaking of the Star Telegram. I am not able to subscribe to the S/T right now. I did so for 20 years, but now I'm living too far away. I try to stay up with local Fort Worth news by logging on the Star-Telegram online but I have given up. It's that bad. Go to the New York Times online or the Wall Street Journal online, navigate a little, and then try the same with the Star-Telegram online. What a difference. The S/T is inoperable, advertise-bound, the drop down tabs are impossible to navigate, and it is way too busy in general. I'm getting a lot of my news from locally written web logs like the ones I have to the right.

If you have an opinion on why the Star Telegram can not have a good news site and make money please fill me in.

Lastly, I have separated the blogs and website links into three categories. Most of the ads have been removed. I keep the Google ads so that I can track the number of clicks to this site. It ranges from 100 - 150 per day, by the way.

Tomorrow: how to make a real summer milkshake.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I finally subscribed to the Sunday paper and I enjoy it much more then trying to read it all online. I find that even for the online items their posting of breaking news is very slow. The drop down menu is one of the most irritating things ever...

For the local blogs, I used to love West and Clear, now it is a moderate like. It has gotten snippy, which I believe started when they started going after Chesapeake so heavily. I don't disagree with their arguments at all just their tone. But - like people always say - their blog, their right.

People are always amazed at my ability to name different places to eat- it is because of you and Hole in the Wall. Love the blogs, glad you took the time to remodel (because it means you are still interested in writing it!), and thanks!

Anonymous said...

have you ever looked at the dafowo show on the s-t site? very smart and funny; you might like it even though the site is a maze. star-telegram.com/dafowo

Francis Shivone said...

Dena -- thanks for the compliment and I apologize that I haven't been able to add more lately. Hole in the Wall does a great job on reviews as does the new FWFoodie.I like the news on West and Clear but, as is obvious in my posts, I'm more "conservative" on most subjects of discussion. In Chesapeake's case they are making a ton of cash but they are also pouring millions into renovating downtown Fort Worth. You can interpret that as "payoffs" or "good citizenship", I lean towards the latter. Thanks again for the thoughts.

JasonR -- I have tried and tried to overcome the website's disorder, and have seen the dafowo, maybe it's generational, but I prefer the cleanness of NYTimes without the flash. Thanks.