We don’t know where our online headlines will end up. Our article headlines are what the search engines use to figure out what we’re talking about. In print, you have all sorts of context. Online your context is not guaranteed. The headline is the most-often piece of linked text, which means it’s got to be able to stand by itself in the middle of nowhere dot com and still make sense.

With that in mind, here are some tips on making headlines work better on the web. The examples included are from the morning’s headlines on denverpost.com, and all of them have since been fixed (thanks, Demetria):

Use place names and people names as often as possible.

Labels like “city” and “state” should never be a headline’s only word used to describe location. Be specific. Column widths don’t control your pen like they did in the past.

• Example: “Growers cheer as rains put state totals near norm” works much better when it’s “Growers cheer as rains put Colorado totals near norm”
• Ex: “Police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” makes no sense on its own, “Montrose police investigate two-way mirrors in apartment” helps a little more.
• Ex: “More farmers losing hope” could apply to farmers anywhere in the world. “More Colorado farmers losing hope” fixes that.
• Ex: “Justice not on city’s to-do list” could apply to any city. “Justice not on Denver’s to-do list” makes it clear which on we’re talking about.
• Ex: “Lottery a loser in current economy.” — “Colorado lottery a loser in current economy”
• Ex: “Star’s status does affect at-risk kids” — “Brandon Marshall’s star status does affect at-risk kids”

Abbreviations make sense to us, and the people who are familiar with us. They may not make sense to search engines, or the non-Denver Post lingo savvy.

• Example: ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Springs’ — ‘Girlfriend sentenced in “boob job” murder plot in Colorado Springs’ is much more explicit about the location, and that this happened in Colorado.
• Ex: ‘No doubt Nugs are for real’ is not hard to turn into ‘No doubt Nuggets are for real’

Puns are nonsense, and explicit trumps cutesy 95% of the time.

Here are some cutesy heds — try imagining if you saw those links on a list of headlines, and whether you have enough information about what’s on the other side of that click to consider making that click.

• Example: “High dudgeon — and other bits”
• Ex: “Hard slog on dimes and nickels”
• Ex: “Heart was dialed in on caring”
• Ex: “Forget that game, but not this team”

Watch out for label headlines.

If you have a label headline, often there’s a subhead, and often that subhead is what should be the headline online.

• Example: “Facebook time travel” — this one had a great subhead, “Old friends are new again using social networking — from the comfort of their own laptop”. There are a couple ways to approach this rewrite, and “Facebook time travel: Old friends are new again using social networking” gets the point across best.
• Ex: “Hoop Dreams” could have easily been “Hula Hoop Dreams: A rigorous workout with meditative benefits puts a new spin on an old toy”

If you’ve got any more resources about writing headlines for online, or suggestions, add ‘em in the comments below.

In my college days back in the 90s I used to photocopy my clips. I’m sure people still do that. Photocopying is easy — it’s just paper, getting copied to another piece of paper. Clips online? More complex. Caveat: I’m coming at this from a “I know a lot about online and this is what I would do if I were in this situation” angle, not a “I am a reporter looking for another job as a reporter and this is what I’ve found success in doing.”

There are two main ways to save your online work: saving the words, and saving how it looked.

Saving the words of your clips

This is useful in case you someday create an online portfolio of your work. It’s also useful for creating things like a PDF collection of your clips. Saving the words makes sure you don’t have to resort to scanning or retyping the printed version of your work just so you have something that plays nice on a computer. Go find your work. Select the text, copy it and paste it. If your article spans multiple pages, then the printer-friendly version is your friend. I would paste the text into a Microsoft Word or Open Office document, and save it. Make sure the date the piece was published is included in the information you save. If you have a lot of clips, I would save each in its own document. If you don’t, putting them all in one doc oughta be fine.

If there are photos, copy and paste the photos w/ captions into the Word doc, at the end of the article. If you’re technically inclined or a perfectionist, I recommend saving the photos to the folder you’re saving the documents with your words in them, adding the caption information to the file’s EXIF data, and using this naming convention for the photo: SLUGNAME20090114.jpg, where the date would be the publish date of the article.

Saving how your clip looked

This goes in tandem with the words, and it’s proof that some day in the future, after the NY Times is dead and gone, that you really did pen that piece for the NYT. The best way to prove this is to take a screenshot of your article. There is screenshot software out there, and I’ve used most of them. The best way to save a screenshot of a web page is the firefox browser plugin Pearl Crescent Pagesaver (note: if you don’t have firefox get it get it get it).  Pagesaver takes a shot of the entire page, not just the visible portion. It does a lot of other things. It’s free (though there is a paid version, with extra geek functionality). It made my screenshot-making life a panoply of rainbows and happiness.

I recommend keeping the filename pagesaver suggests, and prepend the filename with the year-month-date that the article ran (such as 20090114, if it ran January 14th of 2009). This makes it easier to sort and to find your screenshots.

Hope this helps,
Joe

There were a few weeks at my last online news job where the CMS we used was consistently buggy. Sure, bugs happen. This bug happened because of a new RAM chip in one of the database servers has something wrong with its wiring, and was hosing that particular server. But, since there were multiple database servers, and when you were in the CMS doing your thing you weren’t always dealing the one that had something wrong with it, that problem didn’t happen all the time. When it did happen, pages would take 30-60 seconds to load. But it didn’t, and it was a hard problem for the developers to track down.

It’s difficult for non-web geeks to grasp everything that goes into making a website run, and it’s easy to complain when the tools you use don’t work perfectly. Thus, I give you my explanation of all the places things could go wrong when things go wrong. It’s not complete, because I don’t know everything. And it’s generic, which means different content management systems in different server environments may have issues with things that I’ve never heard of. It’s intended to help those not familiar with the ropes and pulleys behind the software used to publish their information understand what goes into those ropes and pulleys.

Note: I include a lot of links, some to some incredibly basic concepts. These links are intended to act as a glossary, because if you’re a computer / web noob and you don’t know the difference between a hard drive’s memory and RAM memory, or what HTTP means, it’s likely you will remain a noob. If I’ve made a big-wham omission / oversight / generalization, please do correct me.

1. The web servers.

Servers are computers. Kind of like the computer you’re on. Your computer isn’t designed to serve web pages — it’s designed to help you get the things you need to do done. Servers are built to serve files. Not you. That usually means servers are put in containers, stored next to other servers in giant tall racks, often in something called a “Data Center” far away from normal humans. Sometimes that data center’s in your building, and sometimes it’s not.

What can go wrong with a server?

Hardware. That means hard drive, RAM, power supply, CPU — any of those things could fail. It’s possible that the publishing you’re doing — especially if you’re involved in a high-traffic web site — involves more than one server. That’s because one computer can only deal with so many “requests.” (That’s the fancy term web professionals use for what happens when you go to a web page — you’re making a request for that HTML file, a request for that CSS file, a request for each of those images, etc.)

Recommended reading about servers

Wikipedia’s article about servers
Web Server Basics

2. The operating system.

Windows XP is an operating system. Mac OS X is an operating system. Linux has scads of different operating systems (called distributions). An OS is the visible layer between the server’s guts and the software that runs on ther server. I know I’m getting all fancy with the language here … bear with me, I’m writing this for the folk at the newsroom I work in.

What can go wrong with the operating system?

In the context of web publishing, not much. However, if some of the web software (or code on the web software) is insecure (read: vulnerable to attack), malicious software and people could leverage that vulnerability to take command of the OS and do nasty things.

Recommended reading about operating systems

Wikipedia’s article about Operating systems
Linux.org

3. The web server software.

In order to handle these requests made by the outside world for your web site, you need some software that knows what to do when it gets told “GET /tippler/Guestbook/guestbook.html HTTP/1.1? (that line is an example of one request your web browser makes when you visit a web page). Apache is the most-used server software on the web, as of April 2008.

What can go wrong with the web server software?

Configuration, and the stuff that happens when your site gets a traffic spike. Set up Apache wrong and Apache will start gobbling up your server’s RAM (RAM’s the stuff that provides the space for your computer’s programs, whether it’s Apache or Microsoft Word, to run. If your programs ask for more RAM than your computer / server can provide, that means your computer has reached the end of its limit and will probably start performing very slowly). Your server’s RAM won’t matter if 5 people visit your site each day, but if your site gets “spiked” (as in, a page on your site gets linked to by a high-traffic website, and all of a sudden you’ve got hundreds / thousands of people requesting pages every second) then your site could go down.

Recommended reading about web server software

Wikipedia’s article about web servers

4. The database.

Odds are most of the information on your site is stored in a database. There are many types of database software — Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL are a few of them.

What can go wrong with the database?

Most of what can go wrong with a database results from ineffeciencies and issuse with the back-end software / content management system (CMS) that’s asking the database for information. That said, if you’ve got a database that isn’t indexed / keyed properly (indexes and keys being the fields most often used by the back-end software to reference the information it’s looking for), you will have problems. Also, there’s the whole topic of caching database queries — the idea behind caching being that many of the same requests are made to the database, and instead of processing every request like it’s a new request why not save that information for later.

Recommended reading about databases

Wikipedia’s article about database management systems
Database Basics (slightly more technical)

5. The programming language that your content management system uses.

I’m talking about languages like PHP, Python, Ruby and Java, which are all often the language that the CMSes used to publish web sites are written in. These programming languages are also used to perform other tasks, but, here, we’re talking about them in their capacity to publish web sites. Why use a programming language? Because programming languages are a tool that allow you to repeat and perform common actions without you, yourself, actually doing them.

What can go wrong with the programming language?

There are things that can go wrong with the language, and there are things that can go wrong with the CMSes running on that software. It’s good to know that there’s a difference. The programming language isn’t as error-prone as the stuff that’s using the programming language to do whatever it is you’re doing on the web &emdash; that’s because there are legions of computer science professionals (and, often, corporations) working on that software. There are quality assurance and testing processes to make sure the software does what it’s supposed to, and doesn’t do what it’s not supposed to. Security is important in a programming language, because these languages can be made to do harm to the servers they’re on.

Recommended reading about programming languages

Index of the most-used programming languages
Wikipedia’s article about the front-end and the back-end of software

Read part 2 of What can go wrong with (the back end of) your web site, which looks at exciting topics such as what can go wrong with CMSes, external servers and Content Delivery Networks, vendor software / servers, and what can go wrong with you

Valentine’s Day: Before the 14th

• Got plans for Valentine’s Day?
  ( No, and I’m not making any / No, not yet / Yes / Yes! / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many Valentine’s Day cards are you writing?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )

Valentine’s Day: In General

• When was the last time you sent or received flowers?
  ( Inthe past week / The past month / the past year / the past three years / the past ten years / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How much do you believe in Valentine’s Day?
  ( None / A little / Some / A bit / A good amount / A lot / Tons / I don’t know / I don’t care )

Love

• How many people have you told “I love you” in your life?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many people have you told “I love you” in the past year?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many times have you been in love?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many times have you had your heart broken?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many hearts have you broken?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )

For those who are married

• Do you still believe in Valentine’s Day?
  ( No! / No / Yes / Yes! / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many times have you thought about leaving your spouse?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )

• How The Locals Fared: I went to Portland in December for the holidays, and I was leafing through the sports section of the Oregonian when I ran across a column of agate titled “How The Locals Fared.” In it were stats for pro athletes, and what connection (high school / college attended, mostly) the athletes each had to Oregon. Well, the 2008 Beijing Olympics are coming up, and what better way to localize the events than a database-driven web app that keeps track of the performance of those who have called your town “home.” Better yet, get your corporate parent to build / update this app — that way they can repurpose it across all their properties, large and small.
• Fix My Street: Okay, so this isn’t a new idea — it’s ripped right off from FixMyStreet.com, a British site that takes reports of poor streets and sends them to the appropriate municipality. But it’s a good one, and a useful one, and one that’s way too easy to duplicate.
• The Photos Near You: Any newsroom that shoots photos can geotag their photos. If you want to be fancy, you can even get plugin doohickeys that record the lat/lon of the photos you take (Sony’s GPS thing). Geotag your photos and publish them online — then allow people to get the photos that happened 1 mile / 2 miles / 5 miles of their home emailed / RSS-fed to them. It’s a great hook for news: This Is An Image Of What Happened Right Near Where You Live. And, on the advertising side of the coin, what happens when you start organizing your information by the exact-specific pin-point place it happened? That’s not hard to see. But, I imagine, the challenge here is corralling photo / ad departments into participating.

World Series: Before ticket sales start

• What’s the most you would pay for a single World Series ticket?
  ( I wouldn’t / $50 / $100 / $250 / $500 / $1,000 / $2,000 / $5,000 / More than that / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• How many games have you been to this season?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6-10 / 11-20 / 21-50 / 50+ / I don’t know / I don’t care )

World Series: Before the Series starts

• How many people do you know who have tickets for the World Series games?
  ( None / One / Two or three / 4-8 / 9-15 / 16-30 / 31+ )
• What percent chance to do you give the [your team name] of winning the World Series?
  ( 100 / 90 / 80 / 70 / 60 / 50 / 40 / 30 / 20 / 10 / 0 / I don’t know / I don’t care )
• What do you think the result of the World Series will be?
  ( [Your team] in 4 / [Your team] in 5 / [Your team] in 6 / [Your team] in 7 / [Their team] in 4 / [Their team] in 5 / [Their team] in 6 / [Their team] in 7 / I don’t know / I don’t care )

World Series: The day after a game

• Did you watch / listen / go to last night’s game?
  ( Yes, I went to it / Yes, I watched it / Yes, I listened to it / Yes, I followed it online / No, but I wanted to / No, and I didn’t want to / No, I forgot about it )

World Series: During the Series

• What percent chance to do you give the [your team name] of winning the World Series?
  ( 100 / 90 / 80 / 70 / 60 / 50 / 40 / 30 / 20 / 10 / 0 / I don’t know / I don’t care )

World Series: If your team gets swept

• We got swept. How do you feel about that?
  ( The [your team name] embarrassed us all / I’ll be in the seats next season / I’m glad the other team won / Let’s find somebody to blame! / I’m a little bit devastated / I’m a lot devastated / I don’t know / Still don’t care )

World Series: Anytime Polls

• How much of a [your team name] fan are you?
  ( Dyed-in-[your team color] fan / I’m a passionate fan / I’m a fan when they’re winning / I’m not a fan / You could call me an anti-fan / I like baseball, but not the [your-team-name] )
• Making any wagers on these games?
  ( Yes, with my friends / Yes, with my bookie / Yes, with my co-workers / No, gambling is illegal / No / I don’t know / I don’t care )

Spring: At the beginning

• How many times have you been to the park this month?
  ( I’m allergic to parks / 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6-10 / 11+ / I don’t know )
• How many t-shirts have you worn this month?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6-10 / 11+ / I don’t know )
• Do you believe in spring cleaning?
  ( Yes / Kind of / Not really / No / Only if somebody else does it / I don’t know )

Spring: In the middle

• How many times have you gone out without a jacket this spring?
  ( 0 / 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6-10 / 11+ / I don’t know )
• Does this weather make you skeptical of global warming?
  ( Yes! / Yes, a little / Maybe / Not really / Not at all / I don’t know )
• Does this weather make you skeptical of global warming?
  ( Yes! / Yes, a little / Maybe / Not really / Not at all / I don’t know )

Spring: At the end

• Looking forward to summer?
  ( Yeah! / Yes. / Maybe / No / No way! / I don’t know )

Spring: Just for fun

• Birds or bees?
  ( Birds! / Bees! / A little bit of both / I don’t know )

Without a voice from the newspaper giving advice to the reader on how to use the newspaper, each reader gets to figure it out on their own. While it may have been a good thing that every reader gets to figure out how the newspaper fit in their life, these days, more people are deciding newspapers don’t.

So this is a guide about what information might go into a guide to a newspaper-dot-com site.

Here are some questions the guide would answer

• What articles appear every Monday? Tuesday? Every Wednesday?
• What kind of content is exclusive to your site, and where do I go to find it?
• What do you (the people behind the site) like most about your site’s content? What do you like in particular? Why?
• What blogs have the highest frequency of posts? What blogs are the “most useful”? Do you categorize your blogs? Do you recommend any non-newspaper blogs?
• Your columnists — how did they get their jobs? What’s their background? Why should I care?

Got any ideas for other questions?

Most-Useful Extensions

Do you want to email a long link to a page? Use this to create (and copy to your clipboard) a shorter version of that link. I use this multiple times every day. When the link to a story page is really long (like those created by IPS), when you paste a link to it in an email, it will often break. When replying to customer emails this is unacceptable … so tinyURL it instead.

Web Developer toolbar: If you don’t know what this is and you do stuff for the web, you oughta. It’s an arsenal of tools that make many parts of web development easier: You can edit CSS “live” on a page, you can automatically fill all the form fields on a page, you can view a page with all the javascript references included inline, you can resize your browser to specified widths…

Good screen-capture program. This puts a button in your top button area that saves an image of the entire browser screen (even the stuff you have to scroll to see) in your My Documents folder. I use this regularly with IPS support, and it’s also useful for certain customer-service requests.

Extensions Definitely Worth Considering

• PDF Download “Allows to choose if you want to view a PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML)”
• Greasemonkey allows you to run custom javascript on your browser on particular sites. What does this mean? It’s basically a way to fix all the stuff you don’t like with the sites you regularly use.
• SiteDelta “Highlights changes made to a website since last visit.”
• Colorzilla “Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.”
• MeasureIt “Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.”
• Advanced Dork “This small, yet powerful extension was designed to give quick access to many of Google’s Advanced Operators.”
• JSView “All browsers include a “View Source” option, but none of them offer the ability to view the source code of external files. Most websites store their javascripts and style sheets in external files and then link to them within a web page’s source code. Previously if you wanted to view the source code of an external javascript/css you would have to manually look through the source code to find the url and then type that into your browser.”
• Text Complete “The text complete extension adds shortcuts and auto complete functionality to text fields within web forms, the thunderbird message composer, and various other fields within the firefox browser.”

Extensions Worth Considering

• Table2Clipboard “If you want to paste data in Microsoft Excel and make it work right use Table2Clipboard.”
• Dilbert “Adds little button to status bar and when you click it, it will show today’s official US Dilbert from
  www.dilbert.com. “
• Html Validator validates your HTML. Why do you want valid HTML? Because it’s one of the first steps to figuring out all the cool stuff you can do with the internet.
• Custom Buttons “Gives a possibility to create custom toolbar buttons.”
• Operator “Operator lets you combine pieces of information on Web sites with applications in ways that are useful.”

Snowfall: During

• How are you planning to get to work tomorrow?
  ( By foot / By car / By skis / By mass transit / By bicycle / I’m not going to work / I don’t work / I don’t know )
• Is your car snowed in?
  ( Yes / Yes, but not that deep / No / No, I don’t own a car )
• How much longer did it take for you to get to work today?
  ( It didn’t / 30 minutes / 1 hour / 2 hours / 3 hours or more / I don’t work )

Snowfall: After

• How much time did you spend shoveling snow?
  ( None / 30 minutes / 1 hour / 2 hours / 4 hours / 6 hours or more )
• Have you broken out your sled yet?
  ( Yup! / No / I don’t own a sled / I live in Chicago )
• Have you had to push your car out of the snow yet?
  ( Yes / No / I don’t own a car / I don’t know )
• Have you helped push somebody elses car out of the snow?
  ( Yes / Yes, multiple times / No / I don’t know )
• How many slush puddles have you stepped in so far?
  ( None! / 1 / 2 / 3-5 / 6 or more / I don’t know )
• Do you think the local news gave too much coverage to the snow?
  ( Yes, lots / Yes, some / Not really / Not at all / I don’t know )

Snowfall: After (if the snow sticks around a while)

• Is your car still snowed in?
  ( Yes / Yes, but I don’t care / No, not anymore / No, I don’t own a car / No / I don’t know )

Snowfall: Severe

• Did you get your newspaper today?
  ( Yes / Yes, but it was late / No / No, but I don’t subscribe / I don’t know )
• Have you gotten blisters from shoveling snow?
  ( Yes, lots / Yes / No / I don’t know )

Winter-Specific

• Have you slipped and fallen on ice this season?
  ( Yes / No / Maybe / I don’t know )
• How many snowballs have you thrown this season?
  ( None / A couple / A few / Lots! / Too many to count / I don’t know )
• Have your pipes burst this winter?
  ( Yes / No / Not yet / I don’t know )
• What are your feelings on slush?
  ( Yuck / Meh / Necessary evil / I don’t know )
• How much do you like it when it snows a bunch?
  ( Lots / Some / Meh / Not much / Not much at all / I don’t know )