Archive for the ‘site news’ Category

Welcome to the New Year.

It’s been several months since either Ethan or I have posted here and the dust bunnies have started to overrun the place. When I first started the Baton Rougean, I had every intention of turning it into a major publication in our area. To me, a venue for hyperlocal news controlled by Baton Rougeans was something that we needed. And Ethan, who believed that we needed a comic focused on our community, brought us the wonderful BTR Toons. We worked really hard and had marginal success. I don’t mean to debase our success, because we really broke through to a fair amount of locals who became very loyal. And for that we’re extremely grateful.

And to those, I guess some sort of an explanation is in order. While I’d love to elaborate on some epic tale of where I’ve been for the last few months, the truth is actually quite mundane. Specifically: life. We both became busy in the final months of 2009. Ethan was recovering from a rough year and I was deep in my third semester of an engineering major, which to say the least isn’t exactly a walk in the park. It’s unfortunate, but c’est la vie, right?

But it’s a whole new year, and so we can look past any previous transgressions and towards another year replete with a local’s perspective of news, analysis, commentary, dining reviews, community features and of course the wonderful BTR Toons.

As we prepare for this year, it is my hope that we’ll be able to get the Baton Rougean into a loftier place in Baton Rouge news and become a more popular choice for local news consumption. I’d also like to increase community interaction (and sponsorships!) and maybe add a few members to the staff.

We invite you to join us in our endeavor and wish you a happy and well 2010!

Hey guys, I just wanted to share with you a little project that I’ve been working on. In no way is this at all related to anything remotely about Baton Rouge, but I know a lot of you are also hardcore Twitter users like myself (@lleger, btw), so I wanted to do some shamless self-promotion here. It’s a simple test to see if you’re addicted to twitter. Check it out and let me know what you think.

http://amiaddictedtotwitter.com

Sunday is Father’s day, and if you haven’t gotten yours a gift yet, then let the Baton Rougean help you out. We’re now accepting nominations for Father of the Year. To nominate yours, just send us a quick email with his name, your name, a picture, a short blurb about why he’s awesome and some hilarious and/or embarrassing story that’d be funny for others to read on the site. We’ll write up a short post commemorating your father, so you’ll look like a fantastic son or daughter and we’ll have something to post on Sunday (because, you know, I’ll be too busy with my father to scrape up news for you). Submissions accepted through tomorrow afternoon, so get them in ASAP!

Recently, I’ve been involved in a new web application called Newstwit. It’s an experimental news aggregator powered by Twitter. I’ve been working closely with Charlie Davis of Baton Rouge-based Liquid Ventures to develop this application over the past several weeks. And after many sleepless nights and countless milligrams of caffeine, I’m excited to introduce it to you. I’m really proud of what we’ve built and excited about the future of the product.

The Baton Rouge Business Report covered us today in their daily report:

Baton Rouge company simplifies news on Twitter
Baton Rouge-based new media company Liquid Ventures has launched a real-time news aggregator today. Newstwit.net utilizes Twitter feeds to pull news stories, commentary and user content into category feeds. Newstwit.net functions much like a news Web site, allowing users to select the type of news content they view, including sports, technology, science and local or regional channels. The aggregator’s Louisiana feed pulls together Twitter news updates from Gov. Bobby Jindal, several Louisiana politicians, Business Report Executive Editor JR Ball, Nola.com, WAFB-TV and numerous other state and local users. Charlie Davis, Newstwit.net’s founder, says the site will eventually let users sort Twitter feeds by sports teams and leagues. “The possibilities are endless,” he says.—Olivia Watkins

We’re just launching locally today, but nationally in the coming days. So, I ask that you help us out by going to the site, browsing around and dropping me a comment if you notice anything or just generally have any comments or suggestions. Thanks!

You can view the site here or view our Louisiana page here.

The weather center is a great tool that we offer on our site. This screencast is a brief introduction to the weather center and shows you how to set up Twitter to receive SMS messages with weather updates.

Click To Play

I just set up the Baton Rougean on Facebook. You can add us by visiting our profile.

Also, there has been basically nothing interesting that has happened in the past few days. What’s up Baton Rouge?

Sidenote: Bobby Jindal turned 38 yesterday, so wish him our governor a happy birthday.

Today I had the opportunity to meet some of my readers as I handed out the prizes to the winners of our JazzyBird Coffee contest. It was really cool putting names to the faces of some of the numbers I see coming in every day. Everyone Iet was very cordial, bordering on some level of personal acquaintance and it was really, really cool. Moreover, everyone was very supportive of my efforts, and that’s the sort of encouragement I need to keep trucking along. Thanks again everyone; you reaffirmed a suspicion I’ve had all along: our readers are awesome.

As always, you can always send me an email with any tips, news, questions or lovely, mindless banter. There’s a real person behind all this excellent journalism. Just hit me up on Twitter or email me.

The contest to win some JazzyBird Coffee product, sponsored by that startup that we covered a little over a week ago, has come to a close. Congratulations to the following on winning the contest:

• Chase Swindler
• Ashton Melancon
• John S.
• Becky F.
• Jeremy Bunner
• Lirahs

Contact me at logan@batonrougean.com for more details on how to claim your prize. And stay tuned as we bring you more local news and contests.

This week we posted another Cool People feature about JazzyBird coffee, a really neat company that started up in Baton Rouge. They manufacture frozen espresso shots which you can purchase at a grocery store (sold in packs of and microwave in a cup of milk for instant espresso for about $0.45 each—talk about recessional savings!

The great people at JazzyBird were kind enough to give us some of the packs to give away as well as mugs and some coupons. To win, just follow these simple steps:

1. Follow JazzyBird on Twitter.
2. Follow us on Twitter.
3. Subscribe to our newsfeed and our weatherfeed.
4. Leave a comment on the JazzyBird post.

Yesterday, I was talking to my friend Richard Felix about miscellaneous geekery. During our chat, he informed me that he always mistypes our url (which is batonrougean.com) as thebatonrougean.com. Which, of course, is the formal name of this blog. As a simple oversight on my part, I had never even considered that this would be a problem. However, starting today you can access this site in its full glory via both urls. Our primary domain will stay at batonrougean.com and we request that you link to it as well. I hope this will alleviate any confusion.