Letters, we get letters

So we call them "emails." What's the difference? Although perhaps that cues an animated discussion of the 19th-century practice of frequent letter writing (yes, the era was much longer than that, but I have this mental vision of Jane Austen sitting down, quill pen in hand, to write one of her reputed 3,000 letters) and the lost art of genteel communication. Have at it if you like. As for me, I like email -- faster gratification, more inclination to actually communicate with others, and less hand cramps. Keep 'em coming.

As promised, then, here's a couple of quick issues that writers have queried about regarding the new site:

-- The crossword puzzle. Oh, yes, you may be sure that more than one of you has asked about that; that turns out to be a part of the site that some readers avidly look forward to using. Happily, it looks as if we'll port that over to the new site at some point. Stay tuned. Sudoku, however, is unlikely to show up on the new site. I suppose I could lobby for it, since that's one of my own daily addictions, but I'm not sure where we'd even get that from. Those pining for a quick brain jolt on their work breaks might give this site a whirl instead.

-- We've also had a couple of suggestions that we put the day's date at the top of the site. What, you don't like living in a timeless bubble? :-) I would also guess that that might happen at some point; actually, I vaguely remember that topic coming up in some of our design discussions early on, so I'm not sure how we resulted in going beta without one. A detail none of us nailed down, maybe.

-- For the reader bothered by one of the ads, that one I'll kick along the curb to New Media director Gerry LeBlanc; he's the man for discussion of online ads. I don't mess around in that area. Your email has been forwarded over, though.

-- And one question I liked was from the reader who wondered why the Northampton police report is separate from the Area Police News report, which gathers the logs from our other major communities. What, you don't like living in a logically disordered world? :-) Seriously, though, that's a function of the ordering of information that we do for print. There's a dedicated Northampton page on A3 of the print Gazette every day, and so the city's police log goes there. The pages for the other communities are in the B section, so those get gathered together and go there. Anachronistic? In a Web world, yes. Here, that method really is kind of logically disordered. They're all just police reports, after all. Assuming we coded them correctly, they should all go onto our Police page, along with larger police-related stories, as well as onto our Local News page and relevant town pages.

That last issue may not seem site-related per se, but I think it really is. Much of what we're doing, along with every newspaper that's continuing to adapt to the online world, is to think about how information is presented. Print newspapers are a system of information presentation that's evolved over centuries, and that system is quite efficient -- for a broadsheet-spread piece of paper. For a web page, though, that changes quite a bit. Yes, each version may have a Sports section, but how you order and display the information in each is necessarily different, and each does some things well that the other doesn't. So, a question like "Why are police logs split up on the site?" is one of those things that we spend a lot more time thinking about here than one might guess. Do we split that "Area Police Log" up to direct things to town-related pages? Gather everything together? What would we do with the versions of the files that are automatically sent from the print side? All tricky to figure out sometimes.