First and foremost I want to point out that the comprehensive event calendar is now pulling in event information directly from Marshall University as well as the various other sources currently aggregated. This adds another great and rich resource so that you can never say you didn’t know something was happening in or around town. There are currently over 3200 events in the calendar pulled in from 17 different event calendars from around town including the Herald Dispatch calendar and the Huntington Museum of Art. If you have an event calendar, or you know of one, that isn’t listed please let me know about it and I’ll add it as soon as possible! I’d like to give a hat tip to John Cummings for his work in getting the Marshall calendar out in an open and consumable format.

Obviously, the event calendar has a ton of information in it – for instance here are today’s events. It is my eventual plan to give you an easy way to subscribe to event types you are interested in with your favorite calendaring program. This way you’ll always know what’s going on without having to go look for the information.

Another new change to the site is the way we support commenting on articles. At times, spam has been a problem with the comments here so, in order to better protect ourselves from spam while continuing to have a zero dollar overhead we have signed up with the disqus.com commenting service. You can now login with your faceboook, twitter, disqus, or openID to leave comments on the site plus their spam filtering engine will be working to help protect us from unsavory comments. We’re pretty excited about this addition and we think it will make it easier for everyone who visits to get more involved in the discussion.