In the coming weeks, the Monroe Times is headed for a couple of drastic changes. As you’ve been notified already, June 23 will be our last daily publication, and from there we will go to two editions per week.

Another change that will be coming will be our website. And while our editor and staff haven’t figured out exactly how we are going to approach all aspects of our web presence, I can tell you that from the inside I am excited.

During my time away from the paper while at Swiss Colony, the part of my job that gave me the most self-satisfaction was being a part of the team that tested new operating systems before they went into live production. We had to make sure everything we did in our daily job worked on the system and to find any bugs or faults that might come up. 

Now back at the paper, for the past few weeks I have been doing something similar. I have had access to our new web operation system, Anvil. And from Looney Tunes this Anvil is not. 

Unlike our current website, which is vastly outdated, our new website is made for not only this decade but for the next. 

And with that technology comes opportunities for a better overall web experience. Some of my favorite aspects are the loading of more than two photos per story. Since our website, www.themonroetimes.com, went live more than a dozen years ago, we’ve only had the power to put two photos into a story at once. That’s about to change.

When we put in a sports story or a Cheese Days spread, we can give you everything that goes into the paper product – plus more. We can add videos, multiple break-out boxes for information on upcoming events or box scores from games. 

One thing I personally am working on doing is creating GIFs from sporting events I attend for the paper. A GIF, which is an acronym for graphics interchange format, is a video-like web graphic that takes multiple still photos from a series of shots and quickly rotates through them, much like a stop-action film or cartoon. 

When I take a camera to a game, many times I have on a multi-shot setting, so I can get 8, 10 or even 32 photos all in a row and later on can create a GIF. This means the game-winning run on a walk-off hit by pitch in the New Glarus baseball playoff game two weeks ago would have been more than just a single photo. The moment was captured, yes, but the excitement can often grow from a series of shots. There just isn’t any audio.

Another plus that I have noticed working on the back side of the new website will be how we get timely information out. Is there an accident blocking highway traffic? Not only will we be able to post to the website, but we can plot the locations to avoid on a map graphic. Have the WIAA playoff brackets been released, or are there full results to a cross country meet? We can easily link the third-party sites from within our own story.

To me, advancing our website was long overdue. Eight years ago, during my first stint at the Times, we had looked into changing our web provider or host to something newer and ready for mobile use. I helped comb through many options, but in the end, an updated version from our host won out. The technological advancement was not one that was terribly exciting. But this one is.

Our beta test site is scheduled to launch June 18, with the full site to launch June 25. I hope you are looking forward to it as much as I am.

— Adam Krebs is a reporter for the Monroe Times and can be reached at akrebs@themonroetimes.net.