Site Update

Welcome to the beta

Posted by Ryan at 11:02 a.m. on December 9 Comments (51)

If you’re reading this, well, you found us. We’re doing some internal testing this week on the new Spokesman.com, and should be ready to go public by next week. We’re well aware that no redesign is going to make everyone happy, but, if you’ll indulge, let me talk a bit about our process and goals.

The flagship site of a publication like The Spokesman-Review has to do a little bit of everything because, frankly, a huge portion of our readership expects it. People come to us for a ton of different things - from breaking news to sports recaps to crossword puzzles to calendars - and each person expects to be able to find what they’re looking for on our website. Over time, our original news site (spokesmanreview.com) added features and content areas we never anticipated. Many of these things were difficult to support with that site’s underlying technology, and many things we wanted to do were simply impossible. So what you see here isn’t a simple cosmetic redesign; it’s a complete overhaul of our web technology - from the servers to the database to the framework we’re building on.

We chose all these things because they give us a flexible platform that helps us build new things quickly. Yes, we need a flagship site with a little bit of everything, but we also want to give you smaller, more focused sites that inform our community, and help people who live here interact with each other. Sites that focus on one thing, and do it really well. That’s a *huge* part of where we need to go, but we have to have the basic building blocks in place first.

You’ll find plenty of signs of this philosophical shift as you spend some time here. Goal No. 1 was to clean things up and make the site easy to use, and the top-level navigation reflects a pretty fundamental move in that direction. Our print newspaper is organized into sections, which works great if you’re getting your information once a day. But that’s not the way people look for information online; hence the structure here, according to what content’s about, when it happened, where it happened, and what kind of media it needs. Ideally, this answers all the ways our readers might be looking for information. And it *should* be fairly seamless to switch between those systems of browsing - check out one of the day pages (here’s the Today page), click on the calendar icon to browse to any day in our archive, toggle among different media types, click on an item to view it, click on that item’s tags to see related content, and so on. We’re really hopeful that we’ve made navigation - and exploration - a LOT easier.

We’re also making multimedia much more visible. We’ve been producing amazing videos and photos for a long time, but our old website didn’t make them particularly easy to find. New sections on this site will help you browse the latest and best multimedia stories, no matter when you come looking. The cleaner design also makes the advertising that supports our site more visible and better-looking. It will help us integrate our news site with our jobs, homes and cars sites - no matter what you’re looking for, we want to help you find the most locally relevant information there is.

And we’re providing a lot more metadata about everything we publish. Tagging is the most obvious example (although the “Places” section is going to have some awesome geographical capabilities before long), and is the kind of thing that lets us power a bunch of cool stuff. Pages that quickly pull together content based on a topic (try everything tagged “Christmas”) are the simple stuff. There’s a lot more.

Here’s one of my favorite things: the Live Stream. It’s a tumblelog, if you’re familiar with those - a page that collects all the activity on the site, mixing in stories, multimedia, reader comments, everything. How’s it related to tagging? Well, in our database, each of those items in the live stream gets the same tags as the content it’s linking to. And that means that on my profile page I can “tag myself” with my favorite topics, and get a personalized news stream right there, filtering for exactly the type of content I’m interested in.

As we finish migrating from Spokesmanreview.com, features like these will only get more valuable. For now, anything you don’t find on the new site will still be accessible on the old site; we’ll run both in parallel for a while. And we have a ton more features planned. The framework we’re building on will let us start rolling out specialized sites, too - Down To Earth, for example — focused on local people, places and topics. Spokesman.com is the first step, and we know there will be bugs to work out and adjustments to be made.

So please, tell us what you think! Sign up for a site account and leave a comment, or shoot me an email. And we’ll use this space to talk with all of you about how we can do things better.

51 comments on this post so far. Add yours!

Jon Etherton on December 09 at 6:59 p.m.
When I click on the “Preview comment” button, I get someone else's comment
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Preview your comment
remio on December 09 at 2:12 p.m.

Uh… Where's the blue sidebar?
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Clicking “Post public comment” appears to work correctly.

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Ryan Pitts on December 17 at 11:44 a.m.
@Robyn DeBanks - Yep, that's something that we're working on right now, actually. Getting rid of that third click “Thank You” page when you leave a comment. Thanks for the feedback!

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Arch_Druid on December 17 at 11:56 a.m.
I actually do not mind the “Thank you for contributing page,” but others do. I may be in the minority here, but I don't mind it a bit.

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Arch_Druid on December 17 at 11:59 a.m.
And as long as I am offering some suggestions to the blogmeister, here is something else that could be added. If we are not to have fun with html coding ourselves, how about an “i,” “b,” and “u” for emphasizing words? Color and font changes? Some major web sites do have them for their message boards and blogs.

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Eric Anderson on December 17 at 6:40 p.m.
I got an error trying to update my profile on this page:
http://www.spokesman.com/profiles/edit/

The error was :
“This URL appears to be a broken link.”
..for my LinkedIn.com profile:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericanderson
which is not a bad URL.

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Ryan Pitts on December 17 at 10:04 p.m.
@Eric - I'll check into that tomorrow. Not sure what the problem might be. Thanks for pasting in the error, though. That always makes things way easier to troubleshoot!

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Ryan Pitts on December 17 at 10:05 p.m.
@Arch_Druid - Some sort of whitelist for HTML tags in comments is on our list of things to do.

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blanche on December 18 at 12:01 a.m.
Looks good to me. How do I change my USER NAME?

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UnknownNeva on December 18 at 7:27 a.m.
I like the new site. What color would you call the header and footer bars? I am in a debate about it between a few of my computer and iPhone.

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mc on December 18 at 7:29 a.m.
I'm starting to get used to the new site.

One thing I have found— and this might be due to the fact that we are currently in the midst of a bad storm and news is coming fast—is two different headline inks leading to the same story.

For instance, at 7:22 AM on December 18, I clicked on the headline story—ROADS TREACHEROUS; SCHOOLS CLOSED link (Description: Residents across the region awoke to deep snow this morning, complicating commutes and closing schools across the Inland Northwest for the day. Click through for links to school and traffic details. Read more)—and I got taken to the STORM LEAVES REGION SNOWBOUND story from 7 + hours ago (http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2008…).

I'm still searching for where to read more about school closures.

Thanks for considering our comments as the Spokesman-Review moves forward in this next phase.

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UnknownNeva on December 18 at 7:30 a.m.
I like that you list the weather in the header. Maybe you want to take a hint from Q6 and use their Skype function to really portray the true feeling of the weather. They seem too be really excited about it. I know b/c George has been telling me about the weather and the “new” skype all night and all morning.

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UnknownNeva on December 18 at 7:42 a.m.
another note for the weather how about taking photos of staff outside and rotating them around?

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Rather not have it Printed in a public forum on December 18 at 9:42 a.m.
I still want to have one click take me to the full listing of stories in the days edition. It seems on this new site, it takes far too many clicks and then I am not sure I am seeing it all…….

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James White on December 18 at 10:44 a.m.
Ok - I had no problems finding exactly what I wanted on the old site and when I went to read it I had to go to this one!

This is the worst thing I have ever experienced! The site looks cheap - unprofessional - and is confusing!

I was wanting to find an old column by Doug Clark - found it with no problem while on the old website. Now I can't even find where to find the list of columnists!

Bring back the old site…oh and while I am at it this font sucks! It's extremely hard to read and the letters are not the same size!

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James White on December 18 at 11:00 a.m.
Well - I found the article I was wnting!!!

How…

by going back to my old search enging and looking at the old Spokesman Review site, clicking on the “columnist” link on the left blue sidebar that is now missing, clicking on Doug Clark's smiling face (which is now missing as well) and low and behold there are all of his columns! I scrolled down found the one I wanted and clicked on it!

Unfortunately it takes me into this lousy looking thing again with the yucko looking font but at least I found what I wanted. More than I can say for the new site!

Ryan - keep working at it! It might work some day. Thankfully I take the printed version and do not have to depend on this for my news. Problem is I didn't get my paper this morning because of the snow!

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Michael Stewart on December 18 at 5:55 p.m.
The RSS feeds are useless showing only the 5 latest stories. They would be useful if they had ALL the stores for that section for that day. Not everyone is always connected to the internet all day to constantly update the RSS feeds to get all the stories.

Also, the profile conversion from the old site failed for me. The instructions say to enter the e-mail from the old site as the username on the new site, but my e-mail address is too long for the new site. I was able to get around this by creating a new profile and entering my address to get access to the premium content.

Also, I would like to see something akin to the old All News page, that lists every printed story, with the section. I typically scan the headlines and read what I want based on that - oftentimes reading stories that don't generally fall into my regular interests or topics. With the new site I have to click into several different topics, and I will miss many of the stories that I may have read with the old site.

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Michael Stewart on December 18 at 6:21 p.m.
OK, I found what I wanted as the Today section, but it is hard to distinguish between today's news and yesterday's news. As the title of the page is Today December 18, 2008, it should not include yesterday's news. Or the other reasonable option is to put a new header when the previous day's news starts.

Also, could there be an option to exclude categories when looking at the Today section? I never read sports articles, so would find it convenient to uncheck a box to not show them. Similar to the same functionality of the Live Stream.

And one other thing… when I was linking my online profile to my physical subscription, I found it disturbing that my name came up with my address… In theory anyone could enter an address and come up with the name of who receives the paper there. Instead of asking for just address information, you should ask for the name on the account as well (or perhaps just the last name). Then you would not need to display anything other then what the user has already entered, with a notice of “found subscriber”, or “not found, please call customer service”.

Related to the possible disclosure of my name to anyone who types my address, there needs to be a privacy policy linked on every page. If there is no privacy policy, one needs to be created. Also, if there is a terms of use for the website, it needs to be linked on every page as well.

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Ryan Pitts on December 18 at 8:21 p.m.
Let me see if I can answer a few of the questions listed here today.

- There isn't a way to change your username - that's in order to maintain persistent identities for site users. You can provide first name and last name information if you like, and your comments will display that instead, but if you want a different username you'd need to register a new account.

- The RSS feeds were accidentally set to show just the 5 most recent items. We've adjusted that to 25, which I think should take care of most uses.

- You're right, we don't have a specific columnists link anymore (although that's a good idea, and I'll add it to the list). We replaced it with a full staff list that lets you find recent stories by *any* writer. The “Find a staff member” link at the bottom of every page will give you a newsroom list; if you're looking specifically for Doug Clark, his page will link to all his recent columns:

http://www.spokesman.com/staff/doug-c…

- For those looking for one page with ALL of a day's stories, those are easily accessible underneath our Times navigation. Each date collects everything we publish online and everything that comes from the print edition. So if you're looking at the page for Dec. 18, you'd see everything from this morning's paper as well as everything we've posted online today.

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Ryan Pitts on December 18 at 8:47 p.m.
@Michael Stewart - We might be able to work some filtering into the date-based pages (like Today), but really that's what the different sections are designed to do. If you hit the News section, you're going to see all those stories in reverse chronological order, so today's news would of course be first.

We're always thinking of different ways we can list things out, though, so hopefully we can come up with something that will do what you want. And I'll forward your comment about username retrieval to our customer service folks. The limit on the email field for profiles is set at 75 characters, so you must have had a long email address indeed!

@James White - I'm sorry you had trouble finding Doug's column. As I mentioned in the previous comment, there's an easy way on this site to find the latest work by *any* of our writers. I hope that's helpful. I think maybe we should change that link to “Staff list/Recent work” to be a little clearer though. And I'm glad you brought it up because having a columnists page here is a good idea.

I'm also sorry this transition is the worst thing you've ever experienced. However, I'm not sure what you mean by this font being terrible, and displaying in different sizes. The body text here is 14px Helvetica on a Mac, and Arial if you're on a PC. Both are quite standard typefaces, widely used. In fact, Arial is the same typeface we used on Spokesmanreview.com.

I'm also not sure why this site appears cheap and unprofessional to you. The vast majority of our feedback has been from readers who find the new site clean, pleasant, easier to read and easy to use. Perhaps if you told me what browser you're using, I could help you troubleshoot this.

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Ryan Pitts on December 18 at 9:09 p.m.
@mc - The promos on our homepage may contain shortened or different versions of headlines than the main story they link to. Often the promo link is updated to reflect new information in a story that has been developing over the day; I think that's probably what you noticed.

@UnknownNeva - I'm not sure what you'd call the colors, mainly because I'm a bit colorblind so I don't try descriptions beyond bold strokes like “blue,” “tan,” and “gray.” But thankfully I work with people who *are* good with color, like Gina Boysun (one of our newsroom developers) and Tyler Robinson (a marketing designer who helped develop the color palette here). But yes, it does display a bit differently across my machines - it's quite a bit lighter on the laptop I'm using now.

And I'll see what I can do about the Skype.

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James White on December 19 at 5:58 a.m.
Ryan,

Thank you for your response to my comments…

The problem with the font is it is all wavy on my end. I would be interested to see of any other readers of this blog are seeing the same thing.

I use Internet Explorer. I can not get it to copy the problem over into an e-mail or word document. When I copy over text into a word (PC based) document it comes in as Helvetica - not Arial.

All I can do is describe it…

this is a test below:
a b c d e f g h i j k lmnopqrstuvwxyz

most of the letters are all the same size in height except:
i j r u v w x y z - they all come through looking shorter. Also the tops of the serifs on the m n p q and r are all missing and the cross bars on the f and t are barely visible. So it gives the font a very wavy look. Or another way I can describe it is everything is 12 pt except the ijruvwxyz and they are in 10 pt. And the top serifs missing as stated above.

Also, when I copy over text into a word (PC based) document it comes in as Helvetica - not Arial

Maybe it's the font issue that makes it look elementary instead of professional.

Other additions to the drop down lists needs to be the columnist, like you said, and the public records. I just tried to find them for today and it took to many clicks to locate them. Maybe the word “records” could be added to the community link.

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Ryan Pitts on December 19 at 8:41 a.m.
@James White - Wow, that's a strange problem for sure. My previous comment simplified the font structure here just a bit, so let me describe the whole picture. The body size on this site is set to 14px, and the typeface looks for what a user has available from this list, in order: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, default sans-serif font.

Most Macs come with Helvetica by default, most PCs do not and so would default to Arial here. However, if you do have Helvetica on your PC, you'd see it as it's first in the list.

That doesn't explain why some letters are different sizes, though. I'm looking at the site in Helvetica right now, and the font looks absolutely normal. It is interesting that you mentioned that some letters look like they have their serifs cut off — Helvetica is a sans-serif font and shouldn't have *any* serifs on *any* letters. Based on that, and the fact that some letters are different sizes than others, I wonder whether your PC has a bad or incomplete version of Helvetica installed?

Not sure, but if you have access to any other computers, you might try taking a look at the site on them to see if the display issues you're seeing are confined to just your PC. Honestly, we haven't heard from anyone else describing anything like this display problem.

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DixieZag on December 19 at 8:45 a.m.
You still have not updated any of the Gonzaga basketball section, which was the only one I was able to read, because, I refuse to pay for an internet subscription to a newspaper site, there is not a single other newspaper that I have found that requires PAYMENT, just for basic content, YOU are the only one that I have found. Your advertising would be much more valuable if your website had free basic content, thereby allowing more mouse clicks and thereby being Googled more, but, whatever, stay in the 1990s if you want, I am not paying for your site. Please update the Gonzaga basketball site, the article from yesterday and today are still not listed on the site. Otherwise, I will just follow the Zags in the PI, ST, or TT.

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DixieZag on December 19 at 9:57 a.m.
Ignore my complaints all you want, I just read the entire Hartford Curount story on the UCONN basketball team, and many other interesting articles on their area because, like all other newspapers, they have free basic content, too bad all the people in Connecticut who want to learn about our area will not be able to read anything unless they fork over some money. You are wasting your biggest asset, the website's abillity to draw eyes from all over, thereby increasing hits and increasing ad rates. Good luck. Whoever made this decision, please re-think it. Your site is useless to people outside of your immediate area.

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Ryan Pitts on December 19 at 11:17 a.m.
@DixieZag - Trust, me I do understand your complaint. But that's a decision that's not up to me.

There is a significant amount of free content available here - the only things that are subscription-only are stories that come directly from print. And many of those are provided for free, even. Just look for the little flag icon, which denotes premium content. For example, among the most recent pieces of Zags content here:

http://www.spokesman.com/tags/gonzaga…

A number of those stories are free. All multimedia is free. All blogs are free. I hope that you'll explore some of those things, and yes, we'll definitely be moving our Zags and Cougs coverage here, with the same philosophy we had on the old site.

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cryss T on December 19 at 11:45 a.m.
most of the new site is ok. i really prefer being able to go to “Full Headline List” and being able to see all the news there. this is online and not in paper format so i just scroll to what i want rather than looking for “A”, “B” or “C” section of the paper. if it can have that option as well as by Topic, Time, etc i'd be happy.

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S Shanti on December 19 at 11:58 a.m.
Ryan,
I am experiencing the EXACT same thing as James is. I've seen the screen shot of this new site that was posted on the old site, and it looks great. Unfortunately the way I view the site it isn't so great. By the way, I've viewed the site multiple times from PCs both at my home and office and have the same problem.
***right before posting I hopped on my husband's laptop and the site looks terrific. I wish it looked the same for me! If you send me your email address, I'll send you a screenshot.

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Ryan Pitts on December 19 at 12:43 p.m.
@S Shanti - Please do! My email address is ryanp@spokesman.com

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S Shanti on December 19 at 1:33 p.m.
Just sent a couple of shots your way, Ryan. Thank you!

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killq on December 19 at 1:46 p.m.
Greetings,
I like almost everything that you guys have done. AJAX build?
Anyway, just to nitpick a little, I'm not nuts about the horizontal main navigation with fly outs. It looks super clean but I've always felt that burying important links in a fly out confuses some people and with all that room over there there on the left you could use text links in a vert menu out to those important sub pages (with fly-outs to the minor sub-pages) so users don't have to activate them via roll over (which can also easily break down with new browser builds. Hell, even MSNBC doesn't have it right yet).
Over all though, the new layout looks fantastic, a MAJOR improvement.
Must agree with those before me about having to pay to get to all of your sites features, it is annoying. However I understand what would happen to your hard copy paper subscriptions should you give away all of your content for free online. You're far from the only minor market paper in the country experiencing this, and I'm not sure if there is a solution. Until someone figures out a model to monetize web delivery other than through subscriptions (if one even exists) were stuck with it. Just another sign of impending doom hanging over printed newspapers.
Anyway, nice job on the site and my best wishes for it's success. Happy Holidays. Chris.

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Ryan Pitts on December 19 at 4:58 p.m.
@S Shanti - Thanks for the screen shot, I see exactly what you and @James White are talking about. Very strange! And I'm not sure what might be causing it. I'll be looking into this …

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Michael Stewart on December 19 at 5:21 p.m.
@Ryan My e-mail address on the old site was 40 characters long (not very long considering username-plusaddress@domain.com, a common tool in the fight against spam).

On the Create a New Profile page, there is this text:

“If you already have a Spokesmanreview.com print or online account, you can log in here with that email address and password. We'll fetch your subscriber information, then prompt you to pick a username for your new Spokesman.com site profile.”

I may be misunderstanding, but I read this as telling me to enter my e-mail address that I used on the old site as the username on the new site to get the automatic conversion. However, the username field on the new site is limited to 30 characters - so my 40 character e-mail that was valid on the old site can't be converted.

You said your database only supports 75 characters for e-mail addresses. RFC 5322 specifically allows 64 characters for the local part, and domain names have a maximum of 255 characters, so the limit for any e-mail address field should be 320 characters (allowing for the @).

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Ryan Pitts on December 19 at 5:59 p.m.
@Michael Stewart - I really do apologize that the conversion didn't work smoothly for you. I will forward your note to my counterparts in Marketing and Circulation, and hopefully we can keep this from happening to anyone else.

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Ryan Pitts on December 19 at 6:00 p.m.
@S Shanti, @James White - OK, I've put up a little font test page right here:

http://www.spokesman.com/font-test/

If you have a moment, can you click through to that link and tell me which paragraphs look strange in your browser, and which look normal. Screenshots emailed to ryanp@spokesman.com would be even better!

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S Shanti on December 20 at 12:23 a.m.
Ryan,
I get an error message that says the link is broken.

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Ryan Pitts on December 20 at 12:20 p.m.
@S Shanti - That link should be working again; we're still working through a bit of funkiness in getting all changes to hit all servers at same time. Sorry about that.

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S Shanti on December 20 at 2:26 p.m.
Paragraph #3 looked great. I emailed you a screen shot.

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kayssurf on December 21 at 10:04 a.m.
I found this really confusing. First, you have me listed as 2 people and I don't really want both names listed. And they are spelled incorrectly. There is no way I can edit the profile even though there is a link that says so. Thanks.

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James White on December 21 at 1:05 p.m.
Ryan,

I sent you an e-mail about this but just in case it gets buried - paragraph 3 looks great, but 2 and 1 are exactly as I have described - wavy.

tell me how to send a screen shot…

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James White on December 21 at 1:07 p.m.
S Shanti,

I was glad to see I am not the only one having issues with the font. Thanks for speaking up about it!

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Vitaly B on December 21 at 1:13 p.m.
@ Dave and Kay Stolz - On the top-left of the page, click on the link that says “Hi <your name>” & from that page click “Settings” which is right next to the “Edit your profile” link. There you can adjust your display name.

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Vitaly B on December 21 at 1:18 p.m.
@ James White - In Windows, to take a screenshot all you have to do is press the “Prnt Scrn” button on your keyboard and then paste that into the Paint program. This website describes the process in more detail - http://www.wikihow.com/Take-a-Screens…

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James White on December 21 at 1:22 p.m.
Ryan,

A couple of other observations about the font issues…

I do have Helvetica installed on my computer. I utilized it in my screen printing business I used to own.

I checked it in Word and Corel X3 and typed all of the lower case letters and they look fine on the Corel X3 screen BUT when I copy/paste into this document they go all crazy and wavy!

So I know that I have it and it works fine in Corel and Word.

Also, only the text of the body of articles and this blog are afected. Any titles, labels. advertisement texts/fonts all look fine.

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James White on December 21 at 1:27 p.m.
Vitaly,

Thanks!

I knew how to do it but was just having a major brain fog!

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James White on December 21 at 1:28 p.m.
Ryan,

Screen shot on the way. Hope it helps.

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Arch_Druid on December 22 at 2:49 a.m.
Ryan Pitts, this is a matter that needs to be addressed as a serious glitch. Attempting to type out G o o k i n which is the correct spelling of a fellow's NAME resulted in a red letter warning. I saw nothing in the material to be posted that should have gotten a “Watch your mouth g - - f not permitted here.” Really? You might look into that.

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Arch_Druid on December 22 at 2:52 a.m.
Speaking of, my mother has a print subscription to the Spokesman-Review. She pays for the paper. Seems to me that as long as the household has the paper then anyone LIVING IN THE HOUSEHOLD should be able to access freely all of the S-R's online content. I have been having trouble with you guys over this for years.

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Ryan Pitts on December 22 at 10:44 a.m.
@Arch_Druid - I apologize, but I don't have much involvement with the subscription side of things. Have you talked with our customer service about this?

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S Shanti on December 22 at 6:42 p.m.
Ryan, all font issues appear to be resolved. FANTASTIC! Thank you, again.

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kayssurf on December 23 at 9:59 a.m.
Vitaly, thank you! All fixed as you can see.

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