The Colby Echo tries hard to be Colby’s #1 source for visual content. Our photo editors are always running about and taking pictures for the paper and our website, and unfortunately some of those pictures never make it into our print edition. This is why we’ve created a new web department: Featured Photo.

Every so often, a photo editor will upload a never-before-seen photo to be featured on the front page and on the Featured Photo page.

But that’s not all. We’re opening up the Featured Photo page to any creative Colby photographer. If you’re interested in having one of your photos on the Echo’s Featured Photo, show us your work!

This post is for those of you who’d like to know a little more about what our site runs on. TheColbyEcho.com is built on top of a custom Content Management System made from scratch in object oriented PHP by the Echo Tech Team. The Echo CMS is comprised of four layers.

1. Display - The Display layer is the outward-facing code in the site. When you view our source, all of what you see is generated by the display layer. If we were building with Legos, the Display layer would contain each individual Lego.
2. Layout - The Layout layer is what organizes and calls the Display layer modules. Think of the Layout layer as the instructions for building a Lego house.
3. Data - The Data layer is what interacts with our MySQL database. Whenever we need to grab a user’s information or the body text of an article, we’ll dip down into the Data layer.
4. Internal Services - Our Internal Services layer deals with things like reverse-engineering the URI from Apache and configuring our database.

Throughout the past two years at the Echo, we’ve been working hard to deliver you stunning visual content. We’ve re-vamped our photo department and created an entirely new video department in order to expand our coverage into the visual realm.

While making the new Colby Echo site, we wanted a means through which we could showcase all the beautiful visual content we were making. We decided to make a large changeable viewbox on the front page.

The viewbox is coded in Javascript and changes images when you click on its thumbnails. When you click the large picture, it brings you to that article.

The articles in the viewbox are custom picked by the editors. In picking articles for the viewbox, we generally like to choose one top news article, two non-news articles, and a video.

We hope the viewbox will give you a bigger, clearer lens with which you can view and enjoy the visual content The Colby Echo is producing.

This is the first in a series of posts introducing the all-brand-new Colby Echo site’s features. If you have any questions, you can ask them here.

We want students to use TheColbyEcho.com as their go-to place for everything Colby. And because we are fortunate enough to go to school in Maine where weather is such a wonderful part of everyday life, we decided it would be super-helpful to give Colby students up-to-date weather reports.

We’re using the Weather Underground API, which is an absolute dream. Weather Underground will give you a simple XML output for any zip code, city, or airport which you can then parse to your liking.

We hope that the new weather feature will benefit students’ lives at Colby. If you have any suggestions, we would love to hear them!

This is a list of things we know are malfunctioning with the Echo site. If you know of a bug not on this list, we would love it if you told us.

Unrecognized Characters
In earlier articles, quotes and dashes will display as unrecognized characters, such as this “�”. This was a problem that happened when we merged the old Colby Echo article database with the new site. We are working on ways to circumvent this issue, so it does indeed have the possibility of being rectified in the future.