If you use Google Reader, we have a Bundle for you! This is a bundle of BG Views Network sites. It currently has seven feeds in it, but we will be adding more shortly.

What I do not understand is this: When I update the bundle, subscribers do not automatically see the changes to the Bundle. They must click Subscribe again. Why is this not automatic? A Google help forum post on this very subject has gone unanswered too, so I am not the only one seeing this as a problem.

Another section of the site that was a priority this summer was the Housing Guide. I have made small changes to both the Mobile template as well as the standard template, mainly aesthetic changes.

Also new is the Search box on the right, and the Advanced Search page. Although the Advanced Search form is not complete, you can drill down to search by all the fields there. Look for more options to show up there very soon.

For the start of this semester, we have introduced a restructured home page with a bigger carousel. Please let me know what you think! I have more work to do on the home page, but it needed to be simplified.

There is still the problem that I have so many external scripts running, that when the page loads, the carousel takes a second to fully load. That is what causes the navigation buttons to "pop" in like that. Currently there is CSS in place to minimize the strange loading, and that "pop" effect is the best I can do for now.

Summer is here, and Summer Session starts soon. Before classes ended for Spring I sat down with our Web Editor Shawn and our EIC Heather to outline the changes they would like to see on bgnews.com.

The menu bar is going to get a slight tweaking, moving things around. The layout of bgnews.com is also going to change quite a bit, going to a two-column layout.

There are a bunch of other things on the To Do list for the summer, but those I will get to in due time.

One of the biggest challenges in moving away from College Publisher has been the 10 years of archives we have had online. As I am sure you are aware, those were abruptly taken down in January.

Simply put, there was no other way to switch from their servers to ours.

We are working tirelessly to get the archive back online, and today I would like to share (a new) update on that. I sent out an update on our Facebook Fan Page on Feb. 8, and I wish I could say we have made progress since then.

Hit the jump to hear the (somewhat condensed) updated info.

I was just trying to find an example of our YouTube videos showing up in Google News. It did not take long, searching for "Obama Ohio" and look what came up.


"Sweet!"

I should have thought of this a year ago. What is the best way to keep updates on anything? Twitter of course. And what is the best To-Do list out there? 37 Signals Ta-Da List. So thanks to Twitterfeed and Action Streams, I now have a daily log of what I have done, and what needs to be done. Also handy as a running tally to show the boss.

Since Twitter is not an archive, it is not a Wayback Machine, so I will be posting week-by-week accounts here to this blog. Highlights here and all the super-dry stuff after the jump.

We re-launched bgnews.com on January 12, this is what got done in the first week publishing our own daily newspaper after the long nights of getting everything done for a smooth launch. Here are the highlights.

• Setup RSS 2.0 feed for MyBGSU (BlackBoard doesn't like Atom I guess)
• Started talks with Andrew Spittle at CoPress about our CP5 archives
• Added ability to embed photo galleries in articles
• bgviews.com domain finally under our control
• Categorized the issue indexes
• Got my carousel picker plugin working thanks to Byrne
• Met with MediaMate talking about national ads and online ads

I must say I am impressed as to how fast Google added us to Google News. I am less impressed that despite the fact that I submitted our site name as The BG News (just so happens to be our name) that we are known in Google News right now as "Bowling Green News."


This means my news sitemap XML file will not validate, because of the site name mismatch. So until Google gets around to answering my question, we will be known as Bowling Green News in Google News, and then when it is set to our proper name, I will have to change our news sitemap XML file again.

Nice of them to be quick about including us, kind of a pain in the ass they screwed up our name.

UPDATE: Good news! They got back to me today saying our name has changed. So we will see tomorrow once they pull our articles if the news sitemap throws an error.

I have an update about our little problem of missing about 10 years of archives from our site. Since leaving College Publisher in December, we have been patiently, eagerly, relentlessly waiting for our archives and users databases. This past Saturday College Publisher provided the archive database to us. Yea... don't get excited yet.

We have been testing the Wibiya Toolbar since June, and are happy with the results. The developers have been very open to our feedback and have even modified our toolbar to work directly with our Google Custom Search Engine. It has been great working with Dror and his crew, and are glad they have incorporated our feedback.

Although the closed beta was not exclusive (most beta requests were filled quickly) it is now open for anyone to setup a toolbar, so check it out.

A lot is new under the hood. First off they have a new CDN for the script, and new code to add to your web page. I can immediately see the difference in speed when loading the toolbar from the CDN script. The next big change is the default search widget is now fully extensible, and easy to work with. The RSS feed widget is extensible in this same way, too.

Lastly they have added a whole slew of new items you can put on the toolbar, and best of all, in my opinion, you can finally take off the "random" button - I always felt that was an eye soar.

Lastly, it looks like they finally fixed a bug they were having with Google Translate, where you would get a Google API error when you used the Translate widget.  Nice update guys!