“Hello and welcome in to the Computer America WEBSITE, the nation’s MOST FREQUENTLY-MOVED, RADICALLY-EVOLVING WEBSITE on computers and technology!”
Hello everyone! Aaron Crossman, the show’s webmaster (among other roles), here to explain to everyone a little bit about what is happening. These are really exciting times for the show! If we have been doing our jobs well, what might not be so obvious to our audience is that since June of 2014 the show became a real family project. Ben Crossman, my big little-brother, is now a fixture of the show as the co-host. And Corissa Greene and I have been helping produce content to keep things interesting.
Over the past year, we have been making incremental changes where we can so as not to impact your enjoyment of the show too much. Well, it’s completely different back here and now it is time to start making changes on the other side of the curtain. The plans were made and the groundwork has been laid for some really neat, disruptive changes to Computer America! To help you keep track of these things, you can expect these change logs periodically detailing what we have done.
We felt that the show could become a little simpler, deliver more content, and integrate better with social media if we combined some of the existing features and putting more energy into our social media outreach. So, our principle for these changes was to reduce the show to as few moving parts as possible without sacrificing anything.
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Changes to the website
- The website and show notes have been combined to make a one-stop website for all of the show’s activities. And we are trying out a new banner or two.
- The static front page menu has been replaced with a dynamic feed of show content, which includes the show notes entries, any articles prepared by our staff, press releases we receive for distribution, and other content we know you want. It will all be right on the front page.
- The Google Hangouts feed has been added to each show notes entry, which appears on the homepage. Combined with the new chat applet we added to our sidebar, we present to you the new “Show Lounge”. The chat service integrates with Twitter if you have an account; it is no longer IRC driven. The Homepage is now the Show Lounge!
- When we ported over the website, the website’s menu was re-organized. So check for all of your favorite old pages! For the launch of this new website, we have added more content:
- Social Media Contests! Scroll down to read more about the extensive changes to our Social Media and our Contests.
- Guest Calendar! Visit this page frequently to see who will be visiting the show soon! This calendar is updated in real time.
- Past Guest Lists! Every week we will update a guest list to include names, titles, companies, and links to websites and archives. We have gone back as far as January 2015 for your viewing pleasure.
- Show Staff and Friends! Our Show Staff page and our Correspondents page have been combined into one big, happy family page.
- Our Sponsors! and Syndication! We have been wanting to share this information with you for some time. This change event was the kick we needed.
- Privacy Policy! and Disclosure Notice! Lately the show has been really happenin’ and we felt we owed clear statements to our guests and listeners about how we handle the data we collect.
- Every other page has had stylistic changes either necessary for the new site or we just felt like doing something different…
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Changes to social media and contests
- The show has always had a Facebook and Twitter (for as long as possible, since we’re older, nyah-nyah!) and a Newsletter (yeah, that old). Contests were done every week using the Newsletter subscriber list and every six weeks using Facebook friend lists.
- We have created Computer America accounts on other sites, too; Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+. Follow us on all which you share in common, and tell your friends and family. Going forward, contests winners will be selected randomly from all of our social media rosters. If you manage to follow all of us, you will have six chances to win!
- The Newsletter is about to come to its conclusion — this week’s will be the last. With the consolidation of our website, show notes, show lounge, and our new contest strategy, the newsletter has become just a piece of spam to direct you to our homepage. We have enough class to know when it’s time to move on, but we will miss it dearly. Farewell, Newsletter!