October 7, 2003
Re: Could SOMEONE please represent Crookston?    FROM raven@xymase.com

(The following serves dual duty as an editorial/opinion piece -- you're welcome to it, if anyone should want it -- & a plea for change, which I hope someone at Blue Marble might assist.)  Don't mean to harass you or anything... but fer the sake of criminy....Okay, you have no idea as to who the heck I am. Fair enough. My name's Tony Ravenscroft. I live in Santa Fe, NM.(Oh, yeah -- that really clears things up.)

 I'm a transplanted Minnesota boy. As a kid, it seemed like most of my blood kin were in northwestern Minnesota, so I'm pretty familiar with Fertile & Maple Lake & the greater Grand Forks area. Most of all, though, I know Crookston, & like to get up there every year or two when I'm in the state. Despite summertime air you can't cut with a machete, & mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds (making that machete useful), the contrast to the New Mexico mountains is amazing.

 Things in Crookston seem to happen in bunches:
nothing
nothing
nothing
rain of frogs
nothing
nothing
three sets of quintuplets born in one day
nothing
nothing

I check in with the so-called online presence of the Times every week or two. For being a daily paper, the Internet would give you the idea that it doesn't come out but once a month. For instance, when the Schipper house began promising to do an impression of an upturned turtle, I was all there, & my boss cut me some leeway so that I could keep up with the latest news, in case Sixth Street made any sudden moves. As a kid, I got to watch that whole strip get installed, so I figure I have some personal investment.

The Times hasn't apparently updated anything in weeks. I finally figured out a small part of the problem. I'm sure that the staff are, each & every one, talented people & wonderful human beings. However, when they add entries to the website, the new entries are appended to the old ones. That is to say, if you open up the sole lonely "Opinion" piece, you can see what I mean: at my current browser settings, it's 40 screens long. When I stumbled over that fact, I was able to dig out some of the news.

None of the concatenated articles is dated, which leaves me guessing as to whether new stuff is added at the beginning of the list, or the end. The banner doesn't help much. As I write this, it's the evening of October 7, 2003. The site's banner says it's October 4 in Crookston. (This is especially odd, as I'm relatively certain the paper isn't published on weekends.)

Still, this suggests that the HTML could probably be improved upon by most dogs. I'm terrible at code, but I spotted it pretty quickly. Maybe the newspaper could improve its site by turning it over to interns from the high school or UMC?

Fortunately, to keep myself updated, I remembered that KROX sometimes posts a little news -- one of a dying breed, a radio station with a news desk. To my delight, their site did indeed show the continued devastation along Sixth Street. Okay, so their webmaster doesn't seem to know about posting thumbnail photos that load in less than an hour & offering enlargement to the more patient of the world  ("Click here for larger picture"), I was at least able to see what was happening.

Then... nothing.

Maybe I'm especially rare, the only person outside the region who keeps up with what's happening up there. If there's more than just me, though, there might be a small business for someone in running around with an inexpensive digital camera, collecting a few stray interviews (& maybe the occasional relevant sound clip), & posting this every few days to a new Internet site, making expenses & carfare by selling a few ads. I gladly wade through banner ads (as long as they're not annoying pop-up screens, or bulky monsters that take forever to load) if the content is worth the trip. (And, since banners have led me to both an ISP to host my websites, & a place that sells name-brand software at great discounts, I'm one of the oddballs advertisers adore: I actually read the darned things!)

I like Crookston. I'm hoping that there's someone up there willing to spend an hour or two a week letting the world know how pleasant & complex it really is.

Thanks for the soapbox, at least,
Anthony Ravenscroft
Santa Fe, NM
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