Beginning this month, visitors to Northwest Prime Time’s website will find some changes. In this post I’ll go over the how’s and why’s for anyone interested in such behind-the-scenes decisions, plus tips on navigating the new site.
Navigating the Site
At first glance, NorthwestPrimeTime.com looks very familiar, but upon closer inspection differences emerge.
First, what remains the same: You should feel right at home reading articles on our story pages. Plus, the general look of our homepage has the same large photo greeting viewers at the top, followed by topic boxes like FEATURED OUTING and WHERE IN WASHINGTON. The big image high on the site often hosts our “cover story” and maintains its privileged position. However, instead of a static article throughout the month, new posts of all types may move in an out of that spot.
Other changes could have some viewers exclaiming, “Hey, where are the categories I’ve grown accustomed to and want to search through?” Our former site was organized by topics that marched down page: Local, Health & Wellness, 50+ News You Can Use, Travels Near & Far, Featured Columns, and Retirement Lifestyles.
Don’t worry, those categories are still there, and links can be found at the top with other menu items like Home, Calendar, Contact, etc. …Look for “Content Categories” up there and you’ll find a drop-down menu allowing you to link to our long-time categories and their associated articles.
New Features
The main site is organized to display recent posts no matter their category, meaning that readers will be greeted with the newest articles when they visit instead of having to hunt for them further down the page. Look for a button below “Recent Posts” allowing you to “Load More.” There are plenty of new posts so feel free to continue loading more!
What else is new: Check out READER INTERACTIVE, which is home to our popular Where in Washington contest and also houses daily puzzles and the new weekly Senior Trivia. Other new features include: This Week in Northwest History; Senior News Briefs with an easy-to-use slider; plus another slider at the bottom of the site — Welcome to the Funnies. We have 130-and-counting senior-themed cartoons there. I think of the slider like a senior comic book. Each time you open the site anew, the Funnies should reorganize themselves so that, Voila! You always see fresh funnies… Hopefully.
Speaking of “hopefully,” as with any new launch, we’re still working out a glitch or two. If you encounter problems on the site, feel free to let me know by emailing editor@northwestprimetime.com.
Now for the Whys
Back in the day when our print publication was the main concern, a website wasn’t that important and served primarily as a place for people to learn more about the newspaper, where to find copies, our contact information and such. Sure, there were some articles thrown in, but content wasn’t the focus. We wanted readers to pick up our print newspaper instead of reading articles online. Then along came SPMG, the Senior Publishers Media Group. SPMG developed a website platform and invited all the senior newspapers from around the country to join for free. We would post our articles, they would maintain the technical aspects of the site, post additional content, sell national ads and pay us a large percentage of their ad sales. Wow… An offer we couldn’t refuse.
It was a great plan that unfortunately didn’t pan out. I hate to think of how much money SPMG lost over the years, but I’m sure they recouped some of it when they sold their senior newspaper website platform to a large company. The new company kept the “free” part for a while, thus getting us all to agree to go with them. But over the years, the monthly fee grew and grew (and grew and grew). That was bad enough; even worse, they owned the software that ran the site making it impossible for us to manage any technical aspects ourselves. Sure, we could post our articles, but each time we needed a fix or minor change to the design or administrative portion of the site, we could count on a bill for close to $200 even if it took less than five minutes to accomplish our request. One big project cost thousands.
As you can imagine, on and off over the years we contemplated developing our own site, particularly on WordPress, a popular and free website hosting platform. That discussion became more focused three years ago when we switched from a print publication to online-only. However, we put it off for many reasons… time and money, yes, BUT the biggest concern was around “proprietary software” computer language developed and owned by the company hosting our site. It was incompatible with WordPress, and there was a good chance we might lose our archives in the switch, archives with 5,000 articles plus associated photos.
But, finally, we took the plunge and our new website is the result. We save money, we control the site, and, most importantly to me, we managed to preserve our archives!
The Hows
Jason Reynolds, Northwest Prime Time’s handy-dandy, problem-solving production manager extraordinaire took the lead in this monumental effort. (Jason has been with us for 20 years, from designing ads to slogging away on deadlines laying out the paper for the presses, then helping us navigate from print to digital). Sure, I told him what I was looking for, but he is the one who made it work.
He, and Artificial Intelligence, that is.
Jason tells me, “I remember over a year ago when I sent you that list of what would need to happen to make it work, but I really didn’t know what to expect.” He did know that transferring the archives from the old system into WordPress was the biggest sticking point.
Jason looked for outside companies that specialize in this type of work, but the pesky “proprietary software” kept getting in the way. He consulted his tech-wiz brother-in-law, who had some ideas, but Jason later realized those solutions wouldn’t maintain the integrity of the articles, losing crucial elements and basically not working.
It wasn’t until Jason learned about the capabilities of the artificial intelligence platform, ChatGPT, that he began to wonder if he could use it to solve our problems. “I was like a kid in a candy shop,” says Jason about playing around with ChatGPT and learning what it could do. “This is amazing,” he thought to himself. He wondered if ChatGPT could transfer content from our existing website and archives to WordPress, so he entered as much as he could to ask the AI platform.
ChatGPT quickly responded, “Of course I can, and this is how you do it.”
While initially thrilled, “I came to find out it wasn’t that easy,” says Jason.
“ChatGPT told me about a coding language called Python that would format all of our articles to preserve their structure and images, and convert it to whatever we need,” he added. Okay, great, but since Jason doesn’t know anything about Python, he asked ChatGPT to explain it to him. Soon enough, he had to amend his request to, “Explain it to me like am five years old.” It said, okay, you will have to use command line. “Okay,” responded Jason. “I have no experience with command line, so please explain THAT to me like I am five.”
From there, ChatGPT walked Jason through how to set up Beautiful Soup, which is a tool inside the Python programming language, and how to run it.
Once Beautiful Soup was in place, Jason says, “I took our whole website and threw it in, and suddenly ChatGPT didn’t know what we’d just been talking about. I quickly learned that you have to break everything into smaller chunks, and frequently check, ‘Are you still with me, do you remember what we were just doing?’ It can only spit out so many lines of code before it starts forgetting.” It might keep trying by going in circles and making no progress whatsoever.
Another issue with ChatGPT is that it makes things up if it doesn’t know the answer. Jason soon found himself utilizing three different artificial intelligence platforms to double check the progress and accuracy of the steps. Once, during a tricky section when ChatGPT didn’t have any ideas on how to correct an error, Jason checked with the other platforms, which offered a solution. When he asked ChatGPT if the solution would work, it responded, “That is brilliant! A fantastic bit of problem-solving.”
The entire process was slow-going, starts and stops, trial and error, line by line. Jason had to narrow everything down to specific functions to develop the code and to figure out why it wasn’t working.
“ChatGPT could not figure out the entire process, and I had to prompt it in very specific ways,” Jason tells me. Then he recalled something he had learned “in the olden days” from school, a debugging program that can tell you where the code is going wrong. He asked if ChatGPT could use it to debug their code, which responded, “You are absolutely right, let’s debug the code.”
Then Jason asked it why it hadn’t figured out that solution itself instead of offering different ideas that didn’t work. “It was so apologetic.”
I asked Jason if it felt like he had developed a relationship with Artificial Intelligence. “It can feel like a real being sometimes,” he responds. When Jason refers to ChatGPT, he may say “it” but often says “he.”
“Part of me thinks of ChatGPT like my boss, and part of me thinks of ChatGPT like an intern, whose work I have to double check because it will make mistakes. It is both something that I completely depend on because I don’t know how to do what it’s telling me to do. But it is also like a dependent, because I have to double check everything it does.”
Jason says, “ChatGPT originally came up with 40 lines of code to transfer the files from one program to the other. It was a good start, but grossly inadequate for what we needed. The Beautiful Soup script we ended up writing to FINALLY accomplish what we needed ended up being 1,521 lines long.”
ChatGPT summarized the process this way: “Without Beautiful Soup and Python, we would’ve had to reformat and retype thousands of articles by hand. That would’ve taken months—maybe even years. Thanks to this approach, we were able to preserve the full history of Northwest Prime Time… while making sure it’s now easier than ever to search, read, and share them online. We may have changed platforms, but your stories are still here–and now they’re easier to access than ever.” Notice that ChatGPT considers itself as part of our team!
Jason knows for sure he could not have transferred our website and archives without artificial intelligence, which continually provided him with solutions that he didn’t know existed.
The impossible made possible Thank you, ChatGPT. We owe you one.
Most of all, our heartfelt thanks go to Jason Reynolds, our production manager extraordinaire!
It’s a Crazy World
Jason asked a different Artificial Intelligence program to write a song about Northwest Prime Time’s change from a print senior newspaper to an online publication. It took the program all of 10 seconds.
You can listen to the song at this link Paper Dreams and follow along with the lyrics, listed below. Note, you should be able to listen without signing in to the program.
(by the way, Chris — referenced in the song — is my partner in crime and co-founder of Northwest Prime Time):
Paper Dreams
Michelle and Chris in a digital spin,
Adapting fast but where to begin.
Northwest Prime Time
Now just a screen
Chasing the echoes of what used to be seen.
Senior hearts longing for ink and page
Stories of life
Wisdom
And age.
The rustle of paper
A tactile grace
Lost in the void of this digital space.
CHORUS
Oh paper dreams where did you go
Tangible stories that used to flow
Fingers tracing lines of the past
Now we scroll through memories too fast
Michelle edits with a heavy sigh
Chris sells ads but wonders why
The warmth of print feels so far away
Replaced by clicks at the break of day.
Change is a storm we cannot deny
But the heart holds tight to the days gone by
The smell of newsprint, the morning light
Now just pixels glowing in the night.
CHORUS
Oh paper dreams where did you go
Tangible stories that used to flow
Fingers tracing lines of the past
Now we scroll through memories too fast
