Car Talk Web Site Update

The Show
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Hi Folks,

Every now and then, one of us at Car Talk Plaza will wake up and do something useful. Now is one of those moments.

It’s time for an update!

Later tonight east coast time, we’ll launch a new version of the Car Talk web site. The new Car Talk site features a much cleaner look, and is fully responsive. Meaning, it will play nicely with your desktop computer, your laptop, your phone, your tablet, your… you get the picture. Literally. The new site has been six months in the work, and we’ve had to update a variety of our content. Older, less-visited features have been dropped, too.

The Car Talk Community will be largely unaffected by this change. The only difference you’ll notice is a new ad unit, which appear when you first visit the Community. Once you close it, you won’t see it again for another 24 hours. Please bear with us— advertising is vital to covering the costs of the site. We’re working with NPR and deepen our relationship with underwriters and ad networks, so the ads are as relevant as possible.

Once the new responsive site is launched, we’ll tidy things up for the ensuing month or so. Then, later this spring, we’ll continue to tap into some of the more powerful aspects of our new community platform. Stay tuned for more info on this front.

Message me or post below you have questions or suggestions. I can’t always reply quickly or to every note, but I’ll do my best.

And as always, thanks for your continued time here. For those loyal CTC’er who have been here for years, thanks for your hard work for our community visitors with questions.

All Best,

Doug Mayer
Senior Web Lackey

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Thanks for all you do to keep this valuable site up and running!

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No complaints on my end. But it seems sort of unlikely those ad pages will be very effective. Are you folks at CT Plaza pretty certain about the effectiveness & efficacy of that advertising method? You might ask: “What does George in San Jose know about advertising?” Good point. Absolutely nothing. People in high tech advertising here tell me they can sell snow to Eskimos with the right method. But it seems like advertisements that are intermingled with the content here would be more effective. I click on those between posts ads once in a while myself.

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Hey George,

I hear you. Believe me, I come with the same skepticism and have had to learn online advertising as we have grown, over the years. The “interstitial” ad we’re talking about here generates the highest revenue of all the ads, which is why we’re seeing them show up on other sites. My own guess is because we’re all forced (sigh!) to look at them and close them out-- you end up reading the ad. We’ll be watching the performance of the ads in the coming months, to see how it does, and plan to revisit this from time to time. I watch the community closely, so am sensitive to the ads as a user, too! :slight_smile:

Thanks for the note. All I could ever sell to eskimos would be studded snow tires, and even that would be hard.

Doug

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Nice to see the Puzzlers are still there - but where are the answers?

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Hmm. Missing a template there. It’s on our high priority fix list! Stay tuned.

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I’ve been away since Friday’s last post. I can not get into the community on my work desktop as normal ( this is my phone ) "page can not be displayed"
What am I missing ?

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hey guys
i notice i can no longer comment on the car talk posts. it appears it now has to be thru facebook, of which i am not a member. am i missing something?

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Same issue here – can see the Puzzlers, but there’s no link to the answers.

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I would say you are missing something or you need to check your profile and settings. I have never had a message saying respond any certain way.

@cdaquila Look at the post by zebulon

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Really want to check my answers on the puzzers as well. the link from the email sends me to the “puzzler archive” but there are no answers! was really waiting on the answer this week and was glad to see the email, then disappointed that the new website does not post the answers anywhere! keep working on linking those answers to us please!

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thanks. I attempted to comment once again on the current dear car talk post. once typed, there does not appear to be a way to post the comment without clicking ‘log in to post’…this leads to a pop up box that provides only a facebook log in. I cannot find any way around this facebook sign in to post my comment.

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Did you try scrolling down (if on a phone)? There are user name and password fill-in boxes below the ‘sign in with FB’ area for those of us who don’t.

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thanks. I am using a desktop PC and chrome. I see no other post icons on the page.
checked ms ie…same problem.

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Have you tried signing in at the top right corner before going to the blogs?

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yes, thats how i am posting here. no problems here in this forum.

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You need to put back in a way to get to the weekly puzzler answer!

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You’re right…also does it on Mac/Safari.

Looks like Mark Zuckerberg’s tentacles have embedded themselves into CarTalk.

;-]

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in poking around my profile, ALL of my comments since i joined in 2012 are gone. in looking at recent posts, it looks like all comments made by anyone in the past are gone.
looks like the baby got pitched with the bathwater.
sad, i enjoyed viewing previous posts from commentators.

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Eskimos I served with in the military bragged to each other about their “snow machines” (snow mobiles).