Columbia City Paper and Mephisto
Posted by Mike Blake Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:35:00 GMT
Ideas from the Margins
My brothers alternative news weekly in Colombia, SC focuses on stories no one else would write about including a regular feature called Bum of the Week, or and occasional interview with a Nazi.
Content Management
He asked me to help him find an open source Content Management System, and after exploring a few, we choose Mephisto. I was impressed with Mephistos usability and online documentation. I also noticed that there we’re several integration tests written for it’s caching system, and used them as an example in a recent presentation. It has slickly designed admin interface, and the writers at City Paper love it. My brothers not afraid to edit some HTML or CSS, so he quickly got comfortable with the design templates.
Surprise
But the best surprises came after we went live with the site last week. First the visitors to the site began commenting on stories like never before. For some reason the Ocadia template we chose with it’s subtle use of color was inviting.
Ironically one commenter who said
I’m not going to make this a forum for debate. Those who want to debate me can come onto a regular white website …
went on and on after that to post the largest comment posted by anyone, and made that article a forum for debate. It turns out that integration of color is much more appealing to him than he ever knew.
College Football Frenzy
The second surprise came just 2 days later. Editor Todd Morehead published a story early Friday about USC’s quarterback keying a car in the school library parking lot. The story was index by Google’s news bot, and went on to get picked up by the the local daily paper that night, hit the Associated Press wire, and was then published on Sport’s Illustrated’s site along with dozens of sites nationwide.
City Paper received a record number of unique visits over the weekend. Mephisto’s caching performed beautifully. It was a great weekend here in the margins. Congratulations to City Paper for breaking a national new story, and to Mephisto for not breaking.
Very cool. One small thing, though, one of the sidebars is messed up in Safari and appears behind the rest of the content, might be worth hooking up an $50 iPotty/iMac to test with (if you don't have a Mac around already, that is).
Thanks Damien.
Absolute positioning did the trick. I have a mac but must have only checked firefox.