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Lowell Area Bloggers/Forums
Lowell Politics
Mass Bloggers
- - Leftyblogs MA Blogroll - Almost all of my favorite lefty blogs in Massachusetts can be found here. Linking here keeps my own blogroll short but still up to date! Below are some other MA blogs which are not listed at LB.
- H2Otown (Watertown, MA)
- MargeBLOG (Williamstown)
- Michael Forbes Wilcox (Western MA)
- The Gazebo (Worcester area)
Media in Lowell
- Community Connections The online archive of many of WUML's radio shows.
- LTC :: Our community cable access channel (8 & 10). Excellent people, I've worked with them before.
- Open Source :: Chris Lydon's new show, broadcast on WUML and WGBH locally.
- The Lowell Sun :: Love it or hate it, it's the big newspaper in town.
- WCAP radio :: Talk radio in Lowell - still locally owned, and in transition.
- WUML :: The student- and community-run radio station of UMass-Lowell. Lynne hosts a radio show, Thinking Out Loud, 10am on Fridays.
Media in MA
Other Daily Reads
Politics Online
- City Council Agenda Past City Council agendas, posted in a mostly timely manner
- Lowellma.gov Official city website
Progressive Local Orgs
Snark and politics
The Arts in Lowell
- 119 Gallery - Art gallery with exhibitions of many local artists, interesting events, and living, breathing culture.
- Arts League of Lowell (ALL) - Artist community group, a recent but welcome addition to the arts scene in Lowell.
- Brush Art Gallery - Come and meet working artists in their natural habitats!
- Cultural Organization of Lowell (COOL) - Great local calendar of events.
- Lowell Opera Company - Community opera.
- Lowell Philharmonic Orchestra - Local community orchestra.
- Lowell Poetry Network
- Lowell Rocks - List of live music events
- Merrimack Repertory Theatre - A local theatre "presenting an exciting mix of contemporary and new plays in historic downtown Lowell."
- OUtlET - Paper and online 'zine making a splash locally with events in art, poetry, music, and everything in between!
- Revolving Museum Contemporary, local, public art space with a plethora of children's programs and art by and for the community.
- The Fine Print - Socially aware, themed, arts and issues periodic publication available throughout Lowell.
- The Image Theater - Theatre company which puts on all original works by local playwrights.
- Whistler House Museum - A great collection of contemporaries of Whistler at his historic birthplace.
February 21st, 2008 at 5:10 pm
god, that is brutal. hideous. confusing. hideous. how can you get it so wrong? it really is amazing. could they have buried the links to their blogs any lower? not that they’re worth looking at anyway for the most part. but i do find that gourmet gal blog to be one of the only useful and readable features on the site.
brutal.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Sites that host ads, and particularly those that host a lot of ads can result in slow loading times as the browser waits for slow loading times for those ads. The ads can mess up the host’s site if it comes in a packaging that the host page doesn’t expect. In some cases, it can help to complain about particular ads. Those ads with audio can be really annoying in an office setting.
I find the Nashua Telegraph similarly awful in its page layout. The thing is that newspapers think that they have to cram in a ton of ads to get revenue when this actually results in people learning how to ignore ads and zoom in on the information of interest. One thing that really annoys me is that many newspapers serve an ad if you click in the whitespace of an article. I’m not bothered enough to use an ad-blocker extension but it is annoying to lose page focus.
Google seems to get it right on ads - minimalist, text, context sensitive. If I want the product, I click on the google ad.
February 21st, 2008 at 10:12 pm
WOW! Exceedingly slow! I had just recently gotten used to the lack of speed of download of the former Sun website. Now, it takes 10 times longer.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:12 am
I really like the new look. Much cleaner than before.
Overall I think they did a nice job with the re-design.
I’m a Firefox user. I didn’t have too many problems with the navigation. I also thought it was nice that they added dates to the arrest logs. Before you really had a tough time navigating through them because there would just be 8 or 10 links that all said “arrest log”
Perhaps it’s the time that I looked at the site, but the load times for me were about the same as before.
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:04 am
I agree. The Sun’s website was not the best designed site before this make-over, now it is simply awful. I agree with Lucy that the blog is the only useful thing that the Sun’s website has.
February 22nd, 2008 at 8:32 am
I’m using Firefox, and I find that it loads significantly faster
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:22 am
I just had a look at the site and I think that it looks much better than before. I found that it loads a lot faster than the old site. I’m using my own high-performance build of Firefox on a three monitor system with Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:32 am
When I use my work server, the Sun’s website loads down faster and I like the format. Differant story when I use my dial up at home.
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:30 am
It sounds like they have faster servers but there’s more graphically and programmatically complex content on the page now.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:59 pm
For me the homepage loads and then I cannot open a single story!
February 22nd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I just tried the site from home. The performance issues with the site are in the big number of offsite web objects that get displayed. Browsers typically have pipelines set to a pretty low number. On Firefox you can set it higher than the default setting - maybe to eight.
I modified the code in my build to set the maximum pipeline to double or triple the max setting in the official browser so that it loads pages like these more quickly. I guess that you could call it a design issue in the page if it has to load stuff from all over the web and if the browser essentially serializes those loads before displaying the page.
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
The site loads fine and all the stories open fast. The contact information is found where it is on most sites at the bottom under info. The lay out however looks sloppy and unaligned and too much crammed into the home page. Are we just picking on the sun today?
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Fast compared to what, the Hindenburg? CNN.com has five times the content and loads twice as fast.
I’ve always hated the Sun website, and though this redesign is marginally easier on the eyes, they still have major interface design issues. As someone who does interface design for a living, I feel I have enough expertise to be critical. Your mileage may vary.
Poor little Lowell Sun…getting picked on all the time. Riiiiight.
February 22nd, 2008 at 6:06 pm
It’s not the speed of loading the content. It’s the speed of loading the ads. Try viewing the site with an adblocker.
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 am
The redesign is an absolute disaster. Today we had a reference to a Web site that said “go to www.blahblahblah” and it wasn’t hyperlinked!!
Worse, there is simply no sense of design to make things easier for the user. It’s as bad as the poorly designed front pages of the newspaper itself.
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Lynne,
I am sorry but this just seems like a truely useless subject. It loads fine to the average user. I Have verizon dsl and have the ads blocked and it opens the same speed as all other sites I open. (which is pretty much instantly) I do marketing and open many sites through out the day. I do agree with you Lynne that it is confusing and distractive to the user and that some important information is obscure. I guess I just feel there are much more important subjects to talk about like Obama, stem cell research, this stupid war etc.. The only statement you can make to get the paper changed is in thier pocketbook. Maybe you should add a news section for people of the city to read? “lowellnews.com” taken???
February 23rd, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Disclosure- I am a mother to a 2 and a 4 year old and have had very little time to follow local politics. I came to this site to get up to date or even “educated”. I signed my daughter up for private preschool in the city which brought back old feelings about how truely liberal I am. I withdrew her 2 weeks later when they complained that her tree was supposed to be painted green not orange. So Lynne, my statements are truely someone that has been ignorant of local politics and I thank those who have helped me with some local issues I have had. A special thank you to Joe who made me realize that my fear of sending my child to Lowell Public schools (which I want to do) is not justified.
February 24th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
“It loads fine to the average user. I Have verizon dsl and have the ads blocked”
Then you are not the average user
…and that’s why the site loads fast for you. For others, it does not, and it’s in part due to poor designing of how those ads get loaded.
I generally don’t do things like shut off ads, because as a web designer, there’s a good chance that I will need to test websites with things like ads being turned on.
I just love that more and more people are doing things like turning ads off, which means less revenue for the manner in which the Sun operates its websites…we really do need a new model for online commercial newspapers.
And kpem, I already am straining to keep up this blog. Unfortunately, I and other bloggers don’t get paid. So no, I have no interest in really expanding LiL into a newspaper. I do not have the resources. Well, that’s not true, I’ve fantasized about it, but unless some rich investor wants to hand me some free money to start one, and hire real reporters and an editor, it’s not going to happen.
February 25th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Firefox comes with a built-in popup blocker and it will block images from domains that you specify. You can right-click over an image to block images from that domain. To fight the more complex ads, you need something more sophisticated. It may be that Firefox adds more complex ad blocking in the browser itself instead of in an addon.
In general, you can toggle Firefox extensions on and off so you can just disable an ad-block extension if you want to see the ads.
I had 8 GB worth of content downloaded from my website yesterday. All free and I take requests sometimes.