The evolution of the Las Vegas Sun website | Hacker News Reader

The evolution of the Las Vegas Sun website

robcurley.com

17 pointsalbertsun7 comments

The last thing I expect to see when I come to HN is a post about the site I work on every day (well... one of the sites). I would love to have some sort of semi-technical blog on our sites to showcase what actually happens behind the scenes more often.

From the thousands of lines of code per month to the multiple tiers of network redundancy to the hours upon hours we spend optimizing page performance for a better user experience, I would love to show some of it off to a technical audience.

I'd love to see such a blog.

With regard to Rob's post, I'd really like to see the templates that power the homepage and the CMS interface for laying things out. Do editors choose the layouts via the CMS, or do you have more technical producers or designers who do that? I'm guessing you're using Ellington, but I could be mistaken.

I'd be really curious to know how the Sun handles getting content into the site and getting it published in a good-looking way. I know that giving users (reporters) the ability to customize a page is both empowering and frightening, and coming up with a system that is as fluid as the one you guys are using is not an easy task.

I for one would love to hear it. Isn't there some place you could write it up and publish it?

I think a couple of us have little blogs that we sometimes post snippets and short notes to, but nothing substantial. I haven't posted anything to my technical blog for over a year now.

Since they are personal blogs, we try to not get too specific about anything work-related. Hopefully we can get something official and work-blessed setup soon. I've got about 7 pages of 'XFS on a 20 disk raid array' benchmarking I'd love to publish.

Rob's been a hero of mine for a long time, but I think what sets him apart is his eagerness to test, analyze, and iterate on news and media concepts, something sadly lacking throughout much of the industry but a familiar formula around here.

His play-by-play through a day at the Vegas Sun is a great example.

We drastically changed the homepage of our weekly newspaper site (http://uweekly.com) and shifted it to a stream that combines, stories, comments and site activity. The past 2 months has seen a increase in uniques, but also a sharp dropoff in return visitors. We've had a tough time finding the right balance between fresh content and the stories from the paper. These are some great insights from Rob that will help us tweak this formula.

alexa and compete both say the lasvegassun numbers are headed downward. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that those services can't do much better than provide order of magnitude comparisons between sites.

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