In a similar vein, I had asked for an interstitial or popup ad that would display only if the user wasn't logged in or wasn't a subscriber. The idea being an advertiser could "sponsor" content that would otherwise be behind the paywall --- "This article brought to you free by Mikes Mortuary"

"Creating individual assets sounds like a pain compared to just making and embedding a Google map. I do generally like the idea of multiple locations, though."

Michael, you are absolutely right, it is a pain. I've only done it a couple of times and have since gone back to batchgeo for maps I want to embed.

I know people use geolocations similar to sections (this block contains articles about eastside, that one is northside, the other is beaches) still I wish there was a flag on an article along the lines of "Show Geolocations on a map"

Alternately move location off of the other tab and make it a related item .... That way you can add multiple ones to an article, once a location is setup you wouldn't have to reenter and geocode it every time you wanted to use it

Voted...

I had hoped (long ago) that I could assign multiple geolocations and it would display them on a map. Alas that is not the case.

An option that may work for you is to create an asset for each address and then make them a collection with the presentation mode set to mapped.

Kevin,

No I did not but I'm in the planning stages of doing one. Sara Hardison is the director of online operations there. She was very helpfull but I don't want to post her email on a public forum without her permission. (call and get it)

Nice, I like the over all design. Very Clean. I do like the way you're handling the calendar. I agree with Christine and Phil, for the exposure (time and screen real estate) the $10 price point is a steal.

Edith, I'd love to see what you're currently doing. Can you link to your site.

I just checked my site and "Featured" is not a flag that the "reader" can choose when posting an event... I'm on flex and not zen. If the zen templates allow a user flag their event as "featured" then I would be asking TN to remove that checkbox. Featured should be purely an admin decision.

So advertising wants you to ban former advertisers from posting on the calendar unless they keep advertising. I assume they want you to ban people who have never advertised as well. My question would be, if the editorial staff was writing an article about an event in town would they pull the article if advertising came to them and said don't run it because they aren't advertising the event. I doubt it.

I have sympathy with your situation, I hear all the time about how we want our site to be successful but am constantly reminded we can't do anything "that might hurt print."

I would look at what you can do to enhance the listings of events by advertisers and stand your ground on allowing (but not enhancing) events by non advertisers. I know in my area my calendar is competing with the community calendar of the local public radio station (which has been around longer, is free, and is heavily promoted by the station and associated college), the convention center, several other radio stations, the chamber of commerce, etc. I can tell you which ones are free for anyone to post to and which ones only include events at a certain venue or for member companies.

If that doesn't fly you're going to have to come up with some kind of policy where you only allow events that are free and open to the public or accompany paid advertising. Doing so will likely cut the number of events on your calendar and lessen the value of your calendar as a resource and in turn hurt pageviews. Point out if people are not coming to your site to find out about these events they will be going to (name the competing station, publisher, etc that has a free calendar.)

Lastly it appears your advertisers are more interested in advertising online than they are in advertising in print... Either talk the the advertisers yourself or get on the sales staff to do so.

Edith, I'd be happy to get people posting items to our calendar. Luckily the library, visitors bureau, and convention center all have calendars I can import.

That said I there is a lot you can do on the admin side to really make an event pop in addition to flagging it as featured. Descriptions can be html and include tables and images. You can add logo's and other images as related assets that make the event stand out if your blocks are designed to display them. Find an event, and go to town with it to see what you can do and then put together an "Advertised event package... I list of enhancements you will do to an event if the event is also advertised with you."

Nick, I feel your pain when it comes to one rail or column being longer than the other ... I would love to see a white space filler... some systematic way to detect if there is more than a predetermined amount of white space at the bottom of a column/region and if so stick in some pre determined "thing"... (content or ad something line an AP DNE)

It's something that would have to run client side because you need all third party includes to populate. So say I'm looking at region-front-primary and region-front-secondary as two columns they are followed by region-front-full. Using something like the jquery .height() to determine the height of each div and then at the bottom of each column have a 300x250 ad that displays if the height of that column is at least 270 pixels less than the height other column.

While I don't think the news-site design is anything special, http://www.fredericknewspost.com/ caught my attention because its a blox site with a custom member-center that built on the newscycle(mediaspan) api tying directly into circ-pro (note the member center is hosted seperately and is not blox but it feels pretty seemless)