Morning Lineup – October 19

The early shake-down of the new blog adventure, FireEMS Blogs, has passed pretty smoothly. This wasn’t something that just came out of a box and was plugged into the internet. It took many months of programming, designing and “imagineering” to get it up and running. I’m very impressed with Go>Forward Media’s accomplishment. As far as my little corner of the blogisphere goes, it went well. I think there were one or two sudden-panic moments when it first turned on, but they were quickly straightened out.

And the new Comments program appears to have been easily adapted by our readers. It’s functioning just fine, but at my end I’m still discovering some new features of it. As an example, I made an entry on Twitter yesterday referencing one of the postings and it also showed up in the Comments of that story. It’s my understanding that this will also be applied soon to Facebook entries. If somebody posts a link to one of my stories on their Facebook wall, then you can comment on it directly from there. I’m not sure how that works, but we’ll learn by doing, I suppose. As I said the other day, this is the beginning of a new era in digital communications.

Speaking of Comments, one of our readers sent us an email yesterday saying that he wasn’t getting any “confirmation” back after “registering” as a Commenter. In fact, this is something that has been confusing since we first started publishing back in April, 2007. There is a box somewhere that can lead you to believe that you have to register before you can leave a comment. But this feature has always been turned off on our site. I don’t know why the publishing program (WordPress) displays this when it’s been disabled, but it does and sometimes leads to people filling out the little box and sending it in. So I will remind everybody, you don’t need to “register” before you leave a comment. Just ignore that thing.

The value of Comments was quite evident last night and this morning. Following our posting about the Grand Island FD putting bone drills on their ambulances (HERE) we have received many comments from medics who are already using this device in the field and they are very pleased with the way it operates. Now Firegeezer hasn’t seen the inside of an ambulance since the crew of the Bounty mutineed, so this was the first I had heard of this handy tool. But within a few hours, we’re getting lots of valuable feed back on the device. That’s the internet on cruise control ….. doing what it’s meant to do.

And thanks again to everybody who took the time and effort to email us complimenting us on the new design. It’s truly appreciated.

I am sorely in need of some coffee, so I’m going to go get a pot started while you take care of the equipment check. It’s Monday, so the list is a little longer. We’ll meet back in the day room in a little while.