Seattle Times: Q&A with a Washington State Ferries captain

Q: Do boats ever challenge you?

A: Oh, yeah, and sometimes we can’t divert if there are shallows on either side. I’ll give five blasts of the horn, which basically means “I’m in doubt about your intentions.” At 160 decibels, that usually does the trick. Sometimes we have to stop.

Q: On a happier note, do you allow weddings on board?

A: All the time. And memorial services. We slow to a stop so they can scatter the ashes, and we give three long blasts as a salute. An officer notes the latitude, longitude and time and takes that to the relatives. We try to be accommodating but we can’t do it if there’s a lot of wind or we’re on the 5:30 p.m. run out of Seattle.

Viewliner Limited today has put up several pictures from the 1962 World’s Fair. These are the vacation slides of the Reed Family, who traveled over much of the country in the 50s and 60s. Previously they’ve put up this family’s pictures from Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, but today and tomorrow they’re focusing on The Fair. Above you can see the Food Circus, which today is known as the Center House. There are also shots of the monorail, the skyway ride, and the U.S. Science Pavilion as seen from the Space Needle. Can’t wait for tomorrow’s pictures!

The first online effort by former P-I journalists has launched, at seattlepostglobe.org. Chuck Taylor has been hinting that this group was getting things organized and moving forward with launching their own site, but I’m surprised at the speed. It’s less than a month after the P-I closed, and already they have a fully-functional site with several articles being pumped out daily. Good on them. According to Cory Bergman they’ve teamed up with KCTS TV and the Seattle Weekly, and are running the site as a non profit. I hope to see this really take off and work, as I do the online-only P-I, just to show the naysayers that online news is still real news. Also by legitimizing online news they’ll get advertisers to take online efforts more seriously, and hopefully raise online ad rates.

As a website builder myself, though, I have a couple of gripes about the presentation of the site. One thing is that the permalink URLs are ugly as hell. This comes from using Joomla to publish the site, and not doing anything to clean up the links. Just look at this:

http://seattlepostglobe.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=67:unedited&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=18

You’re going to copy and paste that into an e-mail? Or glance at the address bar and try to make any sense out of it? Please.

The other thing is that there is no publish date on the articles. You can kind of get a sense of when it was written by looking at the timestamp on the first comment, but that’s an inperfect way of doing it. Every article online should have a nice big title, byline, and date right at the top, set off in a different font style from the rest of the article. It’s a courtesy to your readers, and it may not be important if the story is the first one on the front page, but if someone six months from now comes back to read the article, knowing the exact date it was published will help give a little perspective. Luckily this is something they can change in about three minutes of dinking around with the templates, so hopefully in the rush to launch they overlooked it and will be adding it in later as they polish the site.

Just a couple of things that by no means diminish the site, but still make it feel “unfinished”, like a work in progress. Which I sincerely hope it is, and that they’ll be learning and changing as time goes on to become a great example of what online news can and should be.