Editor’s Notebook: Goodbye Tuesday blues

By Polly Keary, Editor

Tuesdays are my least favorite day.

I get up on Tuesday usually pretty wiped out from Monday, which is deadline day and often heavily sleep-deprived.

It’s amazing, the things I find to do on Tuesdays. I tend to oversleep. I traipse into the office later than usual. I then arrange things on my desk, check my email repeatedly, read the news, check my email again, and wander out to see if Kathie has anything to say about her weekend.

When I can no longer stand my procrastinating self, I pick out music, put in headphones, and begin to put up the website.

It is a deadly dull job. Every photo that goes into the paper has to be manipulated and resized in a long process. Every story has to be cut and pasted a piece at a time into the website template.

The graphics, like Sports Roundup or any graphs, have to go through an intensely convoluted process to become formatted right for the website. Same thing for stories in which multiple photos appear in the text.

It takes a couple of hours and it feels like it takes at least half the week.

And when I’m done, I’m never terribly happy with the outcome. The photos don’t line up the way they should, I can’t get the thumbnails big enough, the lines automatically triple space and the front page looks a little haphazard and disorganized.

That all changes this week.

We have a new website! We have finally gone to a WordPress website, which if you aren’t a web developer is a new kind of website that is easy to update and looks great.

It took all of an hour and half to learn the entire new process. Every time my instructor uttered a new sentence I gaped in joy. Just drag and drop photos! Thumbnails appear on the homepage automatically! The front page is elegantly arranged, I can post as many photos with a story as I like, they line up right, and I don’t have to edit every photo to a fare-thee-well to make it fit.

I have been dreaming of this day and it is here. There might be a few bugs to work out, but I hope you like the new format as much as I do.

Also, I am pretty enthused about our new Facebook campaign. Kathie has always taken a lot of pride in this paper and she is the one who got us started on Facebook. Now, having met a lot of other editors at a convention earlier this month, I found that many of them are very active on Facebook.

Suddenly Kathie’s Facebook enthusiasm seems like pure genius. In one week of searching through Monroe’s various community Facebook pages last week, I got tons of great news tips, including information about a free class for kids on how to handle bullies and tips on places to get great Halloween goodies.

Please drop by our Facebook page and let us know what you think we should write about. And let us know how you like the new website.

This week, I’m actually looking forward to Tuesday.