My ‘has been done’ list

Photo by Liz Henry

My ‘has been done’ list is considerably shorter than my ‘to do’ list, but nonetheless here’s a quick roundup of what’s new on www.chad.co.uk: 

• BLOGS! Believe it or not, we now have eight regularly updated blogs – and a ninth will soon be added. So far we have blogs on books, technology, film, sport, food, Mansfield Town FC, Ashfield news . . . along with this here humble blog.
• PODCAST! Our second regular podcast, Sports Talk, is gathering momentum. It’s not technically a podcast yet because I’ve not got around to all the xml/iTunes admin, but watch this space. We published our second episode yesterday and we feel we’re really hitting our stride now.
• SPORT! You can watch Premier League Highlights on our website now. Yum.
• VIDEO! Do you know the names of all your local political leaders? The good people of Mansfield have some brushing up to do . . . 

The great embedded video adventure

Anyone who regularly watches videos on our website, or any other Johnston Press website, will know that we don’t have embedded video on our news pages. Well, now, we do.

It’s a short-term solution, but I’ve found a way to embed a YouTube player into a news article. I’m hoping it will make it easier to watch our video content, as a number of people have told me they’ve had trouble with our pop-up windows media player.

There are a number of drawbacks, which I won’t bore you with. In short, I think it’s an improvement, but, please, judge for yourselves.

Great balls of fire!

If you can tear yourself away from that footage of Tom Cruise raving like a lunatic about Scientology, you can judge for yourself whether this apparent footage of a UFO over Shirebrook and Pleasley is genuine, or just another hoax.

We reported it last week – before Central got on the case, and we’re carrying a report on it in tomorrow’s paper for good measure, seeing as it’s been a very popular story on the site.

Also this week, we’ve got some footage of a naughty fly-tipper caught red-handed by the watchful eye of Mansfield District Council’s ever-vigilant CCTV operators (I’ll put the link up tomorrow), and hey Stags fans – don’t forget to listen to our latest Stags Talk discussion show. Back of the net!

You tube, I tube, we all tube

I’ve finally loaded all of our video reports so far onto our YouTube channel.

The big question, though, is whether making our precious video content available on an external site is a good move or not.

The naysayers, they say: “No! Don’t drive traffic away from our own website and onto YouTube. We don’t get any advertising revenue from YouTube.”

The yaysayers, they say: “It’s no good letting chad.co.uk exist in a vacuum. You need to cater to the various viewing habits of internet users. YouTube is a great way of letting new people discover your online content, and that’s the most important thing right now.”

Let battle commence.