Week Four: KOMU.com

I spent a large amount of time during my KOMU dot com shift this week working on moving archived stories to the new development subcategory. I am part of the "Growth and development in Columbia: What will the city look like in 10 years?" capstone project, and grouping together these stories will be essential to set up an RSS feed from KOMU, the Missourian and the Columbia Tribune to the new website. I was curious if we should try to pull KBIA pieces on development and create an RSS feed for them as well. Matt Thompson said he isn't sure how to create an RSS feed, so we will have to figure that out soon. Andrew McKibbon added about 30 stories to the development category, and during my shift I found about 15 more to add. In addition to that task, I also created a slideshow for a story Ryan Takeo did on the price of cattle declining, while feed and cattle maintenance prices go up. Because his story was shot on a cattle farm, it was much more visual than the other nightside stories. The problem I had is that I added descriptions and titles for each photo, but they didn't appear to show up on the actual slideshow. I toyed with that for quite some time, but couldn't seem to get it to work. I also added additional images to a story Michael Kelly did on more opposition to Ameren UE's desire to increase rates while building a second nuclear plant in Columbia. My focus during this shift was making sure all the images looked perfect on the web. We had a bit of a snag with photoshop, because the photos were being sized in inches instead of pixels when we went to crop them, but we were able to get that fixed. Some of the reporters had video that was too hot or too dark, so for a couple of stories I had to find generic images to post to the web.