Tag: Santa Cruz

AUDIO SLIDESHOW: “The seals are talking to me” – Sentinel Multimedia

Ryan SholinLeave a comment

I’m looking for some feedback on this one. I had some idea of what I thought we could do with it before the reporter and photog went out, and gave them some ideas. Pretty happy with what they came back with. Let me know what you think.

AUDIO SLIDESHOW: “The seals are talking to me” – Sentinel Multimedia

Halloween debriefing

Ryan Sholin3 Comments

With all this talk about the Death of Newspapers going on and on and on, I started thinking, “What about the undead reporters?”

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Best interview of the night?

Dick Cheney: He kept saying “It was a hunting accident, I swear.”

Then he pointed the plastic shotgun at me.

Video of all the chaos and skin that is Downtown Santa Cruz on Halloween is online.

Not that you asked for my opinion*

Ryan Sholin

*In which I make another disingenuous attempt at a regular feature, reviewing several items that have come across my desk/eyes/ears in the last little while.

  • The Departed: Best Scorsese flick since GoodFellas, although some might debate the merits of this one vs. Gangs of New York.
  • This year’s Santa Cruz Marching Band Review: Substantially more peaceful than last year’s, as far as my block was concerned. Also, we left the house for most of the day, which helped. (We live right across from the high school field where the buses start dropping bands off at the crack of dawn. Then they start working through their scales. Even the bass drums get warmed up.)
  • Bay Photo ROES, the online photo printing service my local lab runs: Once you get the Java applet running, it’s simple, relatively intuitive, and most importantly, the prints are perfect.
  • New Morning, an old Bob Dylan record: Contains “The Man in Me,” which you heard in The Big Lebowski. The whole thing is just as good.

That’s all for now. If you have opinions of your own about any of these, drop ’em in the comments.

Newspapers: Make money online, minus the news

Ryan Sholin6 Comments

Who knows more about Santa Cruz, California than the Santa Cruz Sentinel?

Well, that’s debatable, but let’s put it another way: Who’s bothered to put together a modern, readable Santa Cruz site for tourists?

That’s right, the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

DestinationSantaCruz.com is live, and it looks like a damn good idea.

Destination Santa Cruz

Build a site that has nothing to do with news, don’t put your brand anywhere on it, fill it up with valuable content for tourists looking for hotels, restaurants, etc., and sell some ads.

The site looks and feels new and real, not like the sort of cheap hotel aggregator site full of paid links and annoying pop-ups I often find through search engines.

Instead, the Sentinel used Joomla, an open-source content management system, without worrying about shoehorning all this content into an existing database on its existing, conventional, and slightly outdated newspaper site.

I love it. I would tell friends and family to use this site to find a hotel here. If I’m willing to recommend it to my Mom, that means you did a good job, folks.

I’ll be interested to see where this site comes up in search engines. Hopefully, the use of, y’know, actual content, will help it beat out the crud.