News-Record.com

As the N&R's newly designated health and medical reporter, I've gotten a new blog called To Your Health. I'll probably leave this blog as a historical artifact (assuming I get a choice), but as long as I've got this beat all my work blogging will probably be over at the new gig.

Thanks for stopping in, and thanks for reading the N&R.

TO: Businesses, government agencies and not-for-profit organizations with Web sites.

FROM: Me and, no doubt, many other disgruntled people looking for certain key bits of info on your Web sites.

RE: How to re-gruntle us.

1) Put your organization's complete street address, complete mailing address if different, main phone number, and primary e-mail address all on your front page above the fold. (The N&R has most of that on its front page now, but we have a contact link that, IMHO, isn't friendly enough. Also, type? Teeny weeny and at very bottom of page; bad on both counts. Props, however, for putting just enough white space around it to make it stand out a little down there. And perhaps this will be addressed, so to speak, when the site is redesigned later this year.)

2) ...

Actually, that's all I can think of right now, but unfortunately it's enough to keep most of you busy for a while.

Is this thing on? I've heard from a couple of people who say they tried to comment on the post about E.H. Hennis, but I've neither seen the comments nor gotten the e-mail notification I'd normally have gotten if everything were working correctly.

We're scheduled to upgrade our blogging system on Wednesday; while that's going on, our blogs will be unavailable for a while. We've gotten more details, but they're along the lines of "this might happen" or "that might happen" so I'll spare you. The important thing is that the blog URLs shouldn't change.

After an overnight blizzard of spam, comments are being moderated once more.

More than one would-be commenter has e-mailed today to say that they're not being allowed to post comments. I'm not sure what's up with that, and I've got a deadline to meet today for print so I doubt I'll have time to run it down.

What I will do, however, is post comments for you if you e-mail them to me. In addition to the comment you want to post and the thread you want to post it on and whether or not it's OK to link to your e-mail address and/or Web site, please describe as specifically as possible what you were doing, where on the blog you were doing it (which post, I mean) and exactly what the error message you got said. That'll aid me in running down the problem later.

Thanks, and I'm sorry this is happening.

From tech god Stephen Paschall to N&R staff:

Folks,

The vendor who provides hosting for News-Record.com experienced a catastrophic hardware failure two days ago which impacted multiple systems in their environment, and they have been working to isolate and correct the resulting problems as quickly as they can identify them.

Translation: News-Record.com will likely continue to perform poorly (to say the least) for several hours yet.

I will provide additional information as it becomes available, and I apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you.

A reminder: I and I alone am responsible for the contents of this blog. No one, likely to John Robinson's occasional regret, edits me except for me, and God ain't the only one who knows I'm not perfect.

Accordingly, if you have a complaint about the contents, take it up with me: Hit the "comment" link below the appropriate post, or e-mail me. Leave my co-workers out of it. Of course, if, after communicating with me, you're still unsatisfied, you're free to communicate with my bosses, but the buck starts here.

We now return you to the usual inanity.

Duuuuudes! My boss is joining the party!

Wait. Does this mean blogging isn't cool anymore? :-)

In my first post I mentioned that I had an RSS feed for this blog lying around somewhere. Turns out I had two, and thanks to N-R.com's Stephen Paschall, they're now active. If you look down near the bottom of the page, you'll see two links labeled "RSS 1.0" and "RSS 2.0."

Fascinating, you're thinking, but how is this going to make my life better? Like this: With an RSS newsreader, you can be notified automatically whenever this blog, or any other with an RSS feed to which you subscribe, is updated. No checking back frantically every couple of hours, desperate for another fix of the bloggy goodness that is The Lex Files -- when it's hot 'n' fresh, your RSS newsreader will tell you.

Well, you're thinking, where do I get one? I don't know, but I know how to find out: Google the phrase "free RSS newsreader." Oh, here, never mind, I'll do it for you.. If you don't want to download a program, you can get a free account to use the Web-based news aggregator at Bloglines to keep track of your blogs and indicate when they've got fresh posts.

Once you've installed your program or opened your Bloglines account, that's where the RSS feeds come in. Right-click on one or the other, then click "Copy Shortcut" and paste that link into the appropriate place in the program or Bloglines screen to subscribe to The Lex Files. And you're done!

Either way -- program or Bloglines -- you can keep an eye on your favorite blogs and know when fresh posts are up. Now, tell me, am I making your life easier or what?

OK, is this thing on?

:: taps mouse several times, mutters "oops," closes Minesweeper window ::

Check! One, two, check!

All righty, then. In three, two ...

Welcome to The Lex Files, the News & Record's second staff-written blog (the first, SportsExtra, is here). I'm Lex Alexander, and I've been a writer and editor for the N&R for a little over 17 years. Currently, I supervise the enterprise/investigative reporting team, in addition to which I'm overseeing some of the political and education writers temporarily while some other editors are on special assignments or cross-training or whatnot. Want something investigated? Get in touch.

When Editor John Robinson gave me the OK to start this blog, I asked the N&R's brand manager what I should say in my first post. She gave me a funny look and said, "Tell 'em who you are. Tell 'em what you're doing. And tell 'em how they can help."

Easy enough, I guess.

I'll spare you the resume, but in the context of this blog, the key thing you need to know about my professional background is that for an English major and a content (the noun, not the adjective) guy, I've got an unhealthy interest in computers. I pushed the N&R to add database analysis to its reporting mix back in the winter of 1990-91, and I led the team of reporters and editors who launched the paper's first Web site, Triad Online, back in late 1994. At the time, we were one of the first 30 or so newspaper Web sites in the country. I also was, so far as I know, the first N&R news staffer to launch a personal blog.

I started blogging in the fall of 1997, although I didn't know that's what it was called, as I kept an online journal of what was going while my wife was pregnant with our first child. This was mainly for the benefit of friends and relatives, of course. I got serious about blogging in April 2002, when I launched Blog on the Run, which I continue to this day.

I encouraged the Powers That Be here at the N&R to get us involved in blogging for a number of reasons, primarily because of the possibilities I saw for the medium to enhance the relationship between the paper and the community. That said, I don't have any grand master plan for The Lex Files. (I didn't have any ground master plan for database analysis or building a Web site either; I figured the important thing was to start doing it as fast and cheaply as possible, first, and then figure out later where we were going with it. That approach has worked OK so far.) What I have is the capacity to blog, without being edited, from home or office, on almost any subject I choose, subject to a few facts and ground rules: