The Daily Pennsylvanian :: Letter from the Editor

It took some blood, some sweat and some tears but The Daily Pennsylvanian finally has a new web site.

The decision to leave an established web provider, College Publisher, and go off on our own was not an easy one and the process was anything but simple. But, ultimately, we wanted the freedom to provide our readers with what they wanted online.

The new site’s differences begin with its URL: www.thedp.com. While your old dailypennsylvanian.com links will still work, the new URL is simpler and easier. The look of the web site, of course, has also changed. It has more emphasis on featuring interesting articles and making photos and multimedia accessible.

But, most importantly, the philosophy of the site has changed. Instead of an issue-based platform where we upload stories once a day, the site will update 24 hours a day. Old articles will be easily accessible on the homepage days after they are published.

Soon, the web site will feature a comprehensive events system. With this system, student groups and university departments can input information about their upcoming events and make it available to readers online and in print. The system will extend our current events@penn listings.

We hope you enjoy our new web site and its new features. Have any feedback or anything you’d like to see? Email me at mullin@dailypennsylvanian.com.

Comments (3)

All the old comments disappeared! When I get sad and lonely I some times look at the old hateful comments people left me and feel better (seriously), and today I log on to see them gone.

My suicidal blood will be on your hands.

Love,

-Jim Saksa, C'08

Sweet redesign. I'm pretty surprised comments weren't ported -- in some cases those were the most interesting parts of an article, like http://thedp.com/node/49185 (worth noting, what's up with the repeated byline on that story?), which had almost 100 comments.

A couple other suggestions: - The tab order on the "Create new account" page is off. After you type in a username and then click "Tab", the field then highlighted is not "email", it's a field at the bottom of the page. That's weird. - Some kind of success message after you create an account. After I created my account, I went to sign in and was really confused why I couldn't sign in. It took me a while to realize that I needed to wait for the email confirmation, which had my password. - You're using true black in a lot of places on the site, which is really intense. Modern web design standards are really veering away from using true black, instead using #222222, #333333 or something even lighter. - It looks like for newer articles, you have pretty permalinks (/article-name instead of ?node=23242). But a lot of the old articles don't. That's weird.

All in all though, it looks great! I know how hard this transition must have been -- so nice work.

- Evan '07

Evan and Jim, Thanks for posting your thoughts on the new site. The comments will be imported soon; that's just something we're still working on.

Emily Babay, online editor

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