thebatavian

Most viewed posts for October:

• Ron Paul: We're going to destroy the dollar, by Howard Owens

• Stabbing in downtown Batavia, by Philip Anselmo (Yep, it's that mug shot!)

• O-A stuns Pembroke in final seconds, by Brian Hillabush

• Blackboard awards at Batavia schools, by Philip Anselmo

• Oakfield-Alabama gets nine GR all-stars, by Brian Hillabush

• Liberalism has changed to Socialism, by Guy Gabbey Jr.

• Three Questions: Mike Ranzenhofer, by Philip Anselmo

• A sad loss for the Section 5 football family, by Brian Hillabush

• The case of the missing Democratic congressional candidate, by Howard Owens

• From Batavia to Radio City..., by Philip Anselmo

If you have a "favorite" post that maybe wasn't one of our most viewed for October, please add it in the comments section. This is a great way for folks to go back and check out what they may have missed. I'm going to go ahead and nominate my two videos on Rolling Hills Paranormal Research Center—the interview and the tour—along with Jim Nigro's coverage of the Notre Dame loss in the finals as my favorites of the past month, not including the few that already made it onto the most viewed list, including Hilly's great coverage of the first O-A vs. Pembroke match—sports writing at its best. That's if I'm allowed to nominate my own posts.

We're going to get a little air time on WHAM tonight. Evan Dawson has invited me to appear on the the station's 10 p.m. election coverage.  I'll be there to talk about the 26th District Congressional race.

For anybody visiting The Batavian for the first time from the link on Evan's blog, you can check out our congressional race coverage on this link or this link.

And Evan called me a Libertarian.  I'd never use the big L -- being non-partisan, or the slightly insulting "blank" in New York political lingo  -- and I think more apt is decentralist and localist, and of course a strong belief in individual liberty.

Thanks to my friend Rottenchester of the Fighting 29th blog for arranging this. It will be the first time 16 years that I've been on TV as a journalist to talk about elections.

OK, I've never called out a listing placed in our classified section before, but man, I'm drooling over this boat.  It suits my needs and tastes so well -- wish I could afford it!.

Ever since moving to Western NY, I've dreamed of owning a boat. My boss has gotten me into fishing. There are so many neat lakes around.

A couple of people have asked how to make friends ...

Well, I could recommend a good book, but on The Batavian, there are two easy ways.

First, go to the People link up top and scan all of the people who have registered and look for people you would like to be friends with, click on their names, go to their profile pages and you'll find a link that says "Add to Friends." Click that link and then click "Yes" on the next page.  You can go through that same process for as many people as you like.

The second method is to click on the "My Friends" link in the left-side navigation.  When you go to that page, you'll see a series of links across the top of your friends list that allows you to manage your friends (haven't we all been tempted to do that sometimes!).  There is one link called "Invite Friends."  You go use the form on that page to invite people you know, people you have an e-mail address for, to sign up for The Batavian and become your friend.

Also, a word about guestbooks: We've added the guestbook function so you have a more direct way to communicate with other members of the site. Guestbooks are not private messages, but they do allow for more direct communication (rather than, say, through a comment on a post).  I've already noticed one member has left a couple of messages like, "Hey, didn't I go to high school with you?"

I'm already having fun with the new "Friends" feature. I see other people are, too.  If you haven't tried it yet, please check it out.

Many of you noticed a week or so ago, we added a box on the left side of the site called "Our Towns" and we list links to the towns of Genesee County so you can view news for just those towns.

The links are proving very popular.

If you live in one of those towns and want to add any kind of news about your town to the site, here's how you do it.

1. You must be a registered users and logged into your account
2. When logged in, on the left side you will see a link called "Create Content." Click it.
3. Then click "Blog Entry."
4. Fill in the title field -- try to use a sentence to describe what you're going to post about.
5. In the tags field type the name of your town, such as "Bergen" or "Oakfield."
6. Write your post.

Note:  Step #5 is the key to getting your post to show up on the proper town page.

If we think your post is interesting beyond just your town, we'll add it to The Batavian's home page (front page).

If your post is about some church dinner, government meeting, fund-raising drive, birth or wedding, you can also have it show up on the "Announcements" page by tagging it (using that Tag field) as "announcements."  If the post is also about local sports, tag your post "sports."

What is news? Anything you find interesting and want to share with other people.

"Social Networking" is a wonky term for the ability of people on a web site to connect with each other by, among other things, tagging each other as "friends."

We now have this "friends" feature on The Batavian.

Now you can go to a person's profile page and see all of their blog posts and comments, sign their individual guestbook and, if you want, invite that person to be your friend.

You can then go to your own profile page and look at your friend's activity.

This is a brand new feature on the site, so your feed back is welcome.

Over the next few days, I'll invite all registered users to be my friend -- this will make me, I suppose, a bit like Tom on MySpace, but we want to be sure everybody gets introduced to this new feature.

Most viewed posts for September:

• Responding To Mike Wrona, by Robert Harding
• Your thoughts on the Republican veep..., by Philip Anselmo
• See you at the Pole, by Nancy Baxter
• Letter to the editor flat out wrong about Senator Obama, by Philip Anselmo
• Chris Lee appears to be dodging debates and questions, by Howard Owens
• The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, by Tom G.
• Alice Kryzan's position on financial crisis and bail outs, by Howard Owens
• Palin stumbles in first televised interview. Just the jitters? Or more?, by Philip Anselmo
• Muckdogs sweep Jamestown to win NY-P crown, by Howard Owens
• Driving in Batavia, by Melissa George

We tried this once before: A secton on the site for blog posts about issues in the nation/world outside of Genesee County.

It didn't get a lot of traction, but then I didn't configure it right and it was hard to post to and leave comments.

But we've done some political posts recently that have gotten a good deal of attention, so I thought -- let's see if we can do it better this time.

There is once again a "Nation and World" tab on the top navigation.  First post: About Barack Obama's foreign policy.

If you want to post something in that category, tag your post "nation and world" and it will show up on that page as soon as you save the post.

We used to do some headline aggregation on the home page of nation, world and political headlines. It doesn't seem to have been missed since we dropped it, but we might give the same idea a try on the "Nation and World" page, but this time the headlines will appear mixed in with posts.  I'll do a couple shortly so you can see what I mean.

Why would a locally focused site include such non-local news and commentary.  Well, three reasons:

• The Batavian readers have shown some interest;
• Studies/survey's show that people who are interested in local news are almost always interested in non-local news, also;
• When we say "Online News. Community Views." we mean that we think when people sharing the same community are interested in what fellow community members think on a broad range of topics.

We added two new sections to The Batavian this morning.

First, "Housing." We didn't call it real estate because that implies only homes for sale can be listed there.  We also welcome rental listings.  Ads, of course, are free to both FSBO (for sale by owner) and agents/brokers.  We just ask that agents and brokers submit listings only, not general marketing messages. 

If you click on the "Housing" link now, you'll find a post of home sales since January.  We'll post real estate transactions each month under "Housing" from now on.  This data is public record and provided to us by the County.  It's a common bit of public data to share by news organizations in most communities, but it seems to be a new idea in Genesee County.

The second new section is "Announcements." This is a place for individuals and community organizations to post information about upcoming events, engagements/weddings, births or anything else appropriate to announce to the community.  Click on the "Announcements" link on the tabs above and read the first post, which instructions for posting.  Tell your friends.

Yesterday was crazy and I never got a chance to formally say hello.

I started my day at 9 a.m. in Fairport, which for me was a heck of an accomplishment, came home and took a short nap and then was out at the Muckdogs game. Throw in the photography and writing and it was insane.

Now that I've got a moment to actually sit down and think, I would like to tell you all a little about what I'm going to be doing here at The Batavian.

I love high school sports and want to take the coverage I gave readers at The Daily News for eight years and take it to a new level here. Print newspapers are fading fast (ask Jay Mariotti) and the Internet gives me the opportunity to do so many new and exciting things.

I have some blogging experience but am still pretty raw, so bear with me as I work on that writing style. 

I will be trying to get out to as many games as possible to shoot video, take photographs and blog, giving the great local athletes the best coverage possible.Video intrigues me a ton because I've done very limited work with that and think I can do some excellent work with that. Expect to see video highlights and interviews with local athletes in the very near future.

I am a huge football fan and you can expect to get the best coverage of area teams here in the coming weeks. My quick previews that I wrote at 3 a.m. is just the beginning of what you will see every Wednesday or Thursday.

I'll be covering games Friday night and Saturday afternoon, then doing some in-depth stuff during the week to preview games. Come sectional time, you will get to know everything about the squads making runs here at The Batavian.

I did a basic roundup of local scores last night, but I would like to get local coaches involved with posting blogs to give great coverage of their own teams. I will start making calls next week and asking soccer, volleyball and cross country coaches to directly post their results on the sports page.

Rather than having to wait for tomorrow's Daily for a couple paragraphs on each game, you will be able to come here and read exactly what the coaches saw just after the game ends.  Imagine how well you will get to know, for example, about the Alexander girls soccer team if coach Chad Flint posts after every game. Please let your coaches know about this opportunity if they have not seen The Batavian yet.

Those coaches that do post regularly will stand a much better chance of seeing me out at a practice with my video camera, doing special features on players and the team. 

High School athletes, parents and fans can also register and post comments on any blog. 

Please feel free to contact me at any time if you have story ideas or just want to talk high school sports. My AIM screen name is hillabush12, my cell phone number is 585-993-4662 (expect to hear anything from rap music to Jimmy Buffett when you call) and my e-mail is brian at thebatavian dot com. And don't be shy if you see me at a game, come say hi.

I'm looking forward to meeting many new people and giving my home community the best sports coverage in the coming years.

Now that we have a sports writer, I just wanted to make the point that not all sports coverage will appear on the home page.  If you're interested in local sports, you should regularly visit the sports page by clicking on the "Sports" tab in the top navigation.

Brian posted some scores from last night as well as previews of upcoming prep football games.

And so long as I'm posting reminders, don't forget you can post free classifieds under "Buy, Sell & Trade," as well as free help wanted ads under "Jobs."

In Genesee County, if you follow local sports, you know the name Brian Hillabush.

Brian has been covering sports, mostly high school sports, for the Batavia Daily News for eight years.  In that time, he has developed a solid reputation and built quite a popular following.

Today, he joins the staff of The Batavian.

Brian will be the full-time sports editor for The Batavian (you may have noticed we added a sports tab to the top of the home page the other day).  He’ll cover local sports and help anybody who wants to post their own team or league information on the site.  Besides being able to blog about sports (something he wasn’t allowed to do for the Daily News), he’s also excited about shooting video for the site – so looks for more local sports video on The Batavian.

A native of Oakfield, Brian has spent his entire life in Genesee County. He attended Genesee Community College where he studied broadcasting and managed WGCC.  He even spent a couple of months working for WBTA before embarking on his print career.

In hiring Brian, we fulfill one of our earlier promises – that as we grow, we will hire local staff, people who live in and love Genesee County.

We’re also excited to bring Brian onto our team because he’s just so dang good – a good writer who really knows local sports, has a wealth of contacts and is highly regarded by the people he deals with. We’re confident that with Brian covering sports for The Batavian, we’ll have the most timely and comprehensive Genesee County sports coverage you’re going to get anywhere.