What a crazy year. I kicked it off by moving out of the metro department, where I’d been a reporter and computer-assisted reporting specialist for more than six years, and onto the editorial web team. That meant a move out of the newsroom, down a long hallway, and into a different building. (Do click on that last link, as it’s so totally sweet.)

More recently, following this summer’s cutbacks, there’s been a lot of restructuring around the office, both managerially and physically. And there’s been quite a bit of strategery over what to do with all the awesomeness, most of which you haven’t seen, we’ve worked on under the banner of Backyard Post. (That’s also why I haven’t updated the Backyard Post blog since, oh dear, July.)

Hopefully I’ll be able to write more about the course for Backyard Post soon, but for now the news is that the gang has moved, both literally and organizationally, from the editorial side of The Post to the Internet Operations group. (The guy who used to be in charge of the department described it as a sort of newspaper Switzerland, neutral ground between the editorial and business operations. Much less so now, but that’s the idea, in a way.)

Not much day-to-day change on our part, but there is definitely a significant, positive philosphical change behind the move. More later, etc. More tangible is our cubicle pod up on the fourth floor, in a windowless area we plan to turn into a literal geek cave by killing the harsh overhead lighting.

Here’s the great north-facing view in the main part of our new department, the part where we do not work:

And here’s the west-facing view we do have:

Here’s the hallway leading to the geek cave. Is that not a bleak, straight-out-of-The Office shot, or what? And I mean the original, super-depressing, set-in-Slough British version.

I meant to post this four weeks ago based on a Twitter update from Nick Bergus, but I’m only getting around to it today after spotting some particularly silly examples: How embarrassingly mislabeled are so many newspapers’ “breaking news” sections and items?

Most news doesn’t truly “break,” after all, despite the re-branding of some local news and metro departments as “breaking news teams.” So mixed in with headlines of a more credibly breaking nature (”Meteorite impact levels orphanage, causes bus plunge, closes 48 lanes of I-95″) are some of a more, well, pedestrian nature. As always, not to pick on anyone in particular, but to illustrate the breed with a few specimens:

• Draft of Troutdale’s land use plan available for comment
• Sheriff puts training director in charge of jails
• Palm Beach County moves zoning meetings
• Local SPCA needs help with Hurricane Ike animal rescue
• Dolphins have only one turnover, and want to keep it that way

News? Perhaps. Interesting news? Maybe. But breaking news? More like, as Mark Hamilton offered, “the scheduled event is about to begin,” or “stories we happened to have just finished and posted.” Or in all too many cases, if we’re being really, really honest, “stories on which you’ll instantly regret clicking that we almost certainly should not have even bothered writing.”

Not to pick on any one newspaper, because we all know none of us are truly putting it all together online, but does this screenshot, grabbed less than 24 hours before Ike’s expected landfall, strike you as shouting?

Or this one, from about the same time?

The immediate message I get from those pages: Just another day at your link-laden local newspaper website.

An event such as a hurricane (a “local armageddon,” as Will Sullivan called it) is the time to try some of the simplification Mark Potts described here. There’s only one story about which everyone is talking, so why overload your page with 30 links about the same event, not to mention the other 50 links that are usually there? Why not just one big picture or, better yet in the case of a hurricane, interactive map? Throw in a gigantic headline, and you’re accurately reflecting both the gravity of the event and its natural grip on your readers’ attention.

Easy to use trumps everything, after all, and lots of words, sentences and paragraphs are the very last thing people are looking for when a hurricane is headed their way, no matter how cleverly they’re written. I’ve done the oh-no-it’s-coming-right-at-us dance six times since 2004 and, believe me, stories are of very little use. Just give me a big map.

Even if you don’t go that far, at least have a special armageddon design ready to drop onto your site:

Here’s some musical inspiration to get you going:

TOP 10 POSTS

1. More Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros: HBO version lyrics (July 20, 2007)
2. Google Maps vs. Virtual Earth: A geocoding accuracy showdown in West Palm Beach (Jan. 15, 2008)
3. Tropical Storm/Hurricane Fay: A real inconvenience (Aug. 16, 2008)
4. Stormpulse now appearing at The Palm Beach Post; Coming soon to a site near you? (July 19, 2008)
5. Bird’s eye view party at my house; No one’s invited (Dec. 30, 2007)
6. Jobs. At newspaper. Jobs at newspapers. Newspaper jobs. (June 19, 2008)
7. What to do when a tropical storm is headed your way: Embed the free Stormpulse tracking map (Aug. 4, 2008)
8. Playing with code-free Google Maps (April 4, 2007)
9. Got tired old lede based on a trite advertising slogan? (Aug. 1, 2008)
10. Please review the fantasy soccer league lineup of a complete moron (Aug. 13, 2008)

TRAFFIC SUMMARY

• 3,848 visits (39,969 lifetime)
• 3,375 unique visitors (32,356 lifetime)
• 6,020 page views (75,523 lifetime)
• 1.56 average page views (1.89 lifetime)
• 1:14 average time on site (1:50 lifetime)
• 78.17% bounce rate (73.18% lifetime)
• 85.52% new visits (80.99% lifetime)
• 3.4 GB bandwidth used
• $12.67 AdSense earnings

TRAFFIC SOURCES

• Search engines: 79.55% (65.11% lifetime)
• Referring sites: 14.53% (26.71% lifetime)
• Direct traffic: 5.93% (8.18% lifetime)

FEED SUBSCRIPTION SUMMARY

• 92 minimum (5 lifetime)
• 141 maximum (141 lifetime)
• 121 mean (67 lifetime)
• 122 median (74 lifetime)
• 132 mode (22 lifetime)

BROWSERS

• Firefox: 1,719 visits, 44.67% (45.83% lifetime)
  • 48.8% FF 2
  • 48.3% FF 3
  • 2.9% 1.5 and below
• Internet Explorer: 1,660 visits, 43.14% (43.83% lifetime)
  • 71.99% IE 7
  • 27.83% IE 6
  • 0.18% IE 8
• Safari: 400 visits, 10.40% (8.60% lifetime)
• Opera: 37 visits, 0.96% (0.79% lifetime)
• Mozilla: 23 visits, 0.60% (0.26% lifetime)
• Camino: 3 visits, 0.08% (0.19% lifetime)
• Netscape: 3 visits, 0.08% (0.26% lifetime)
• Palm750: 1 visit, 0.03% (<0.00% lifetime)
• Samsung-SGH-I617: 1 visit, 0.03% (0.01% lifetime)
• Unknown: 1 visit, 0.03% (0.01% lifetime)

OPERATING SYSTEMS

• Windows: 3,050 visits, 79.26% (81.02% lifetime)
  • 73.64% XP
  • 22.26% Vista
  • 1.93% Server 2003
  • 1.64% 2000
  • 0.23% CE
  • 0.20% 98
  • 0.07% ME
  • 0.03% 95
• Mac: 715 visits, 18.58% (17.12% lifetime)
  • 73.57% Intel
  • 26.43% Power PC
• Linux: 44 visits, 1.14% (1.22% lifetime)
• iPhone: 24 visits, 0.62% (0.23% lifetime)
• Unknown: 10 visits, 0.26% (0.22% lifetime)
• Nintendo Wii: 2 visits, 0.05% (0.02% lifetime)
• iPod: 2 visits, 0.05% (0.12% lifetime)
• Danger Hiptop: 1 visit, 0.03% (0.03% lifetime)

TOP 5 SCREEN RESOLUTIONS

• 1024 x 768: 1,115visits, 28.98% (31.26% lifetime)
• 1280 x 800: 768 visits, 19.96% (16.16% lifetime)
• 1280 x 1024: 707 visits, 18.37% (22.12% lifetime)
• 1440 x 900: 370 visits, 9.62% (8.15% lifetime)
• 1680 x 1050: 256 visits, 6.65% (5.65% lifetime)

It’s been amazing sitting next to Matt at the day job and having a front row seat for the massive and sudden popularity of his hurricane tracking site Stormpulse.com. He looked like Squidley Diddley last week, arms flying around, furiously juggling two phones, e-mail, instant messages, text messages and even one whacko lawsuit threat, all hurricane-related. (Does anyone else remember Squidley Diddley, the octopus cartoon character from Hanna-Barbera, or am I making that up?) Then there’s his full-time job at The Post, not to mention two young kids at home. Maybe he’s just conducting an elaborate sleep-deprivation experiment.

Since the embeddable Stormpulse map debuted on PalmBeachPost.com seven weeks ago, it’s spread to dozens of media and weather sites across the country. Then hurricane season heated up to 2004 and 2005 levels in the past two weeks, and everything just sort of blew up. New features, exponential traffic growth, and  they even made TechCrunch on Friday. Congratulations to Matt and his partner Brad for the recent, stunning and well-deserved success of Stormpulse. It’s a powerful lesson, one from which newspapers could learn, in the power of identifying and solving, meticulously and obsessively, a real world problem or need.

In case you missed it amid last week’s hurricane excitement, Stormpulse now has a product page on Facebook, so go there and become a fan. They also added Tipjoy, a virtual tip jar, to the site, which allows you to easily leave micropayments (or big, fat macropayments if you’re feeling generous) as gratitude for the awesome resource they’ve built. I like to leave 10 cents for every forecast that doesn’t show a killer storm smashing into my house. Looks like the Tipjoy thing is gone now that everyone asking how they could support the site had the chance to pledge some change. Now I just hope they remember to actually make the payments on those pledges.

In case you were anxiously waiting for a six-month update, it’s still hugely aggravating. And today I had the added pleasure of trying to find individual staff contact info at a particular newspaper that is generally praised for its otherwise admirable online efforts. Best I could find: An explanation of the e-mail address format used by the paper (firstname.lastname@annoyingnewspaperwebsite.com), but no staff list to which I could then apply that convention.

(I also learned, while wandering sections of the site that appear not to have been updated since 1997, that while they accept press releases via e-mail, one should always follow up with a phone call to confrim that the press release was received. Because that’s not annoying or superfluous.)

All I ask for: Street address somewhere obvious, perhaps even in the footer of the index page itself, and a “contact us” section that actually indiciates how I might go about, you know, contacting you.

Not content to annoy only the thousands of drive-by visitors who land on the juggernaut Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros lyrics post with my AdSense-fueled pursuit of the dirty dollar, I just added it to my feed, too. Now even my most loyal and long-suffering readers will be confronted by my shameless, if not terribly profitable, capitalistic tendencies. (Earnings to date total just $14.00.) Why all the recent money-grubbing? Just embracing the current newspaper fashion of charging readers more for much, much less, that’s all.

Now, I’m not saying whether I agree or disagree with Seth Godin’s recent contention that ads are the new online tip jar, but I will say this: I won’t be mad at cha if you feel like dropping a few ad clicks on me.

Tropical Storm Fay, likely to become Hurricane Fay, couldn’t be headed toward Florida at a more inconvenient time. Not only are most South Florida schools scheduled to start Monday, but my employer is scheduled to begin a relatively small number of layoffs, too. Relative to the nearly 300 employees who took buyouts and worked their final day last week, anyway. “Less than a dozen” people will be laid off in the newsroom, we’re told. Then there was the fun news, also last week, that our corporate overlords are taking what certainly appears to be but the first step toward an eventual complete exit from the newspaper business. So, yeah, bad timing, Fay, really bad timing.

As always, head to Stormpulse for all your hurricane tracking needs. It’s good enough for The Palm Beach Post and the Orlando Sentinel, among a growing list of others, so it should be good enough for you, too, pal.

Update: Post edited, edited and edited some more. What a day.