Just and FYI we have a pub that is in the process of migrating from newssys to blox. He tried putting in some doubleclick ads in as html ads and they royally messed with the formatting... 

I second the motion...

we are currently using another vendor (who shall remain nameless) for our primary e-edition but using townnews for our special sections etc. we would seriously like to consider switching our e-edition to you (and eliminate the cross site authentication issues) but there are two features lacking...

1. the ability for you all to create a merged pdf(s) and have it(them) available for customer download from the e-edition viewer.
2. the ability to automated the process. We currently upload pages for 20+ publications every night. Our e-edition vendor then reads the filenames, divvies them up by publication and creates merged pdf's for each publication and each section ... Pages are all named "mm-dd-yy PP SSpp.pdf" where PP is the publication SS is the section and pp is the page#. The pages upload and the e-editions are created without any work on our part. 

There are other little nifty features that would be nice but those are the two killers. 
PS ... I like the appearance of your e-editions much better and would love to eliminate the cross site authentication issues as it seems everytime you do a major software upgrade glitches creep into this bit of custom code....

I wondering which would cause a bigger performance hit; an extra http request on pages that need it or a lot of extra css (with the increase in file size) loaded for every page?

Micah,
I was looking at the same thing for School specific sports pages for a site that's currently migrating to blox. (Christine, I think this is what you are talking about, but if there's an easier way or I got something wrong, please let me know)

I updated the site.css with code for each section/school (would love to be able to add a section_name.css file and have it automatically load when that page does... hint hint christine)
see webster_county_trojans versus the home page for the site or this page

The css below changes color scheme, background, logo, and puts an image in place of the block title (actually a background but I laid it out so the block title text is white on a white background

/* Webster County Trojans -- Added by Mike 9/24 */
#blox-html-container.webster_county_trojans {
background: url('../../images/_site/body-bg-wchs2.png') repeat-x 0 -74px #E0E0E0;}
.webster_county_trojans #blox-header-vertical-nav h2 {
background: url("../../images/_site/logo-wchs2.png") no-repeat transparent;
width:948px;
height:95px;
left:0px;
top:0px;
margin: 5px 0 5px 12px;
}
.webster_county_trojans #blox-header,
.webster_county_trojans #blox-header-vertical-nav { background-color: #75191e;}
.webster_county_trojans #extra-nav,
.webster_county_trojans #extra-nav a,
.webster_county_trojans #blox-user-panel.minimal,
.webster_county_trojans #blox-user-panel.minimal #uUser { color:#461414; }
.webster_county_trojans #blox-footer h4 {color: #dec295;}
.webster_county_trojans ul.dropdown,
.webster_county_trojans ul.dropdown li,
.webster_county_trojans #blox-footer { background: #461414;}
.webster_county_trojans ul.dropdown ul li { background: #ffeeee;}
.webster_county_trojans ul.dropdown li:hover,
.webster_county_trojans ul.dropdown li.hover,
.webster_county_trojans ul.dropdown li.active-vertical,
.webster_county_trojans ul.dropdown li.active-horizontal { background: #897c49;}
.webster_county_trojans #index-section-title {
height:94px;
background: url("../../images/_site/wchs2.jpg") no-repeat transparent;
width:600px;
height:94px;
top: -15px;
}
/* End Webster */
 
Feel free to post a follow up or email me at mstickler@messenger-inquirer.com

I think we are back to unchecking urls in the url assigment tab. Disabling services did not work for us as we use custom code to link between Townnews and our external e-edition vendor. Disabling the services caused this code not to work and cut off access to our e-edition. 

Cory and Christine,
Thanks... I've actually looked at the slideshow versatile block (showcase option) and stuck it on our "advertisers" page (kind of a catch all for things we are trying out and a demo for specific ad ideas... There's no link to it on the site ) I really thought the slider_fit_images or slider_fit_height options would be the ticket but they didn't seem to have any effect on showcase

Christine,
Now that's what I call quick turn around... I think I've seen this format on some blocks before and I think it's a definite improvement ... just so happens I was adding a block I don't normally use tonight and had another thought. To the left of the "Edit" and "Change" buttons under "Template Information" add a "Docs" button that opens a browser tab to docs.townnews.com  directly to the template in question. (I'm just never happy am I?)

It would be great is webinars were recorded and available for viewing at later dates/times.

Consider this an upvote on the prompt for replace previews (don't do it automatically please) 

Also on the "Choose closest preview" consider the following 

I believe this block is pulling in a 300px wide preview, however for portraits, if the preview is 300px wide it's 440ish tall, if I create 300px tall preview then the width is only 200ish... If the way previews were handled were smart enough to "know" if a 300px wide isn't available then use a 300px tall one or use the next smaller size we might get more than an eyebrow gallery. 

Alternately add a "center and square" button to the image editor for previews. In the example below it would center the current image in a 300x300 square leaving 48pxs of transparency to either side of the original image.