What's Happening at The Tampa Bay Times Website?

If you're reading this you probably get a lot of your news and information on the internet. I do and I hit most of the local websites every day.

Recent upgrades to the Tampa Bay Times website are causing some readers problems as evidenced by an overlay that pops up when you try to access the site:

Try this tip for a better tampabay.com experience

Having technical problems on our website? Try clearing your Internet Explorer cache.

For quick and easy directions, click here.

If you're willing to try a new browser, we recommend Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, for a better experience on our website as well as on others.  

To download Firefox, click here. To download Chrome, click here. Both are free and easy to install.

The Times recently upgraded their on line site to a very nice looking page, but it is causing access problems for a lot of on line readers as evidenced by the overlay that runs up front. And it takes forever to complete the download even on a fast internet connection.

Those browsers they recommend are much more advertiser and widget friendly than WINDOWS. Translation: They make it much easier to get information about you out of your computer.

By the way before you go download any of those recommended browsers, be sure to do some checking. My personal experience with CHROME was not very good.

Other Social media sites, some local, have had similar issues.

These upgrades can be especially troublesome if you have an older computer.

That cache the they talk about is a memory area on your computer reserved for control and program information to be downloaded and stored on your computer so the site can use it as you use the page.

In many new and  most computers 2 or 3 years old the cache memory is relatively small and unless you have your computer set up to delete all those files every time you log off, it creates havoc with sites trying download all of that blinking, flashing, and scanning crap into your system.

The major issue is most of these sites, the Times page included, down load a huge bunch of files, ads, widgets and other things that crawl around in your computer so they can target your ads and generate more advertising dollars.

Just watch the bottom of your screen and look at the stuff that downloads before the page actually comes up and you can navigate around.

Most of this stuff is to support information mining, and ad click through monitoring as media sites attempt to make more ad dollars from their on line sites.

Some sites perform better that others, Patch has a quick and functional Home page as does TBO, Bay News 9, and most of the local TV stations.

Once deployed these sites, which are expensive to buy and set up, are frequently  very expensive and difficult to modify.

The on line demographic here in the Tampa Bay area includes a lot of people who don't rush out and buy the latest computer every time something new comes up. And moving an older computer to a modern browser may create a nightmare of problems.

Before content providers buy the newest social media software hyped to produce tons of information and  revenue, they just might want to keep a 2 or 3 year old computer around the office and access someone using the proposed system.

Could save them a lot of grief to say nothing of the embarrassment and lost viewer count.

e-mail Doc at: dr.webb@verizon.net, or send me a Facebook Friend  request.