About
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Hello and welcome to News Off The Press, the one-stop resource for Santa Barbara's news! News Off The Press collects the most recent headlines and stories from local newspapers, television and radio stations, and blogs and presents them in one place. For more information about this project, read on.
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News Off The Press means a number of things. First of all, we're trying to help the many people that are boycotting the Santa Barbara News-Press find news; News Off The Press is news for those who are "off the press". In addition, the name invokes the idea of "news hot off the press" which is exactly the type of content we provide- freshly published stories are aggregated by our software and presented on our homepage.
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Here's how this works. Content publishers update their websites and the newest stories appear here. The homepage displays the 100 most recent items. To see the previous 100 items use the "Skip to page" links.
To read a stories description, click on its title (in bold) to expand it. To read the full story, click on the name of the publisher to open the original in a new window.
To make sure you have the most recent available stories, try clicking the "Update" button.
On the left hand pane, under "Feeds", you can sort what format of media you want displayed (Print, Television, etc) or you can select a single source (The Independent, The Daily Sound, etc). If you select the "Categories" tab, you can choose between North County and South County publications. Under the "Tags" tab, you can browse by subject (note that these are automatigically labelled so they might not be perfect).
Stories are visible on our site for 30 days, after which they are removed to keep the number of items from becoming overwhelming.
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We've picked sources we feel contribute valuable information. Most of our sources syndicate their content using self published feeds (if you prefer, you can subscribe to those in a personal feed reader yourself). A few of our sources don't and so we use available tools to create feeds for them. If you would like to suggest a site, its best if they have a valid feed (you can check it using Feed Validator). If not, go ahead and suggest it anyway but know that it might take awhile for us to create a custom feed. All suggestions should be directed to newsoffthepress AT gmail.com
Future sources: We are watching the expansion of alternative media in Santa Barbara and are eagerly awaiting the launch of new media outlets. Some that we plan to add once they go live are Santa Barbara Newsroom, Santa Barbara Independent Media Center, Santa Barbara Citizen News, the Santa Ynez Valley Times, and possibly a few others currently in development. Stay tuned!
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So who's behind this project? This site is run by Liam Keane, a college junior majoring in Global Studies at UCSB. It's powered by Gregarius, an open-source web-based feed aggregator licensed under the GPL. The site is hosted by DreamHost in Los Angeles.