You may have noticed a slightly different look to Ohio’s Homepage for Agriculture. Last night around Midnight we launched v2.0 of the website. When Lindsay and I launched the Buckeye Ag Radio Network in 2005, we knew our website was one of the most important pieces of the network. While radio is what we do every day for a living, each week between 12 and 15 thousand of you come here for the latest news, analysis, and commentary in agriculture and rural Ohio.

So, with three great years under its belt, we decided BuckeyeAg.com needed a tuneup. Graphically speaking, we’ve cleaned up and refined the style, for a cleaner, crisper look. The real guts of the tuneup, however, are in the user interface. You’ll notice that each news story on the homepage is stamped with a date and time; our news feed is now an RSS feed just like our blogs so you can subscribe to the news in the same way you do Andy’s Angle or Lindsay’s Lessons. This also means, of course, that you can reference any one of our stories with a direct link just like you might a blog post.

Because of the RSS, we also now feature a complete news archive, so any story that we cover on the site will be in the news archive in perpetuity. That means if you’re out of the office for a few days you won’t miss a story; you can just bop over to the archive and see what’s been going on at the site.

The audio and BARN-TV features have gotten a similar treatment – You can now find our regular audio features on a dedicated page for audio, with a clean and easy player built right into the page. Also, you’ll notice BARN-TV embedded into the upper right hand corner of the homepage, as well as on its own dedicated page. That way you can either watch right up front, or enjoy the larger screen on the dedicated page.

Our Stations & Calendar pages are also much more useful now, with a great map of our affiliates and a complete station listing by county, including times each station airs ABN programming. The calendar is also unique with a graphical calendar that shows you which dates include something of agricultural importance; when you click on a date or event, a window will appear, showing you the details and information about the event you’ve chosen.

I’m thrilled with the new site; we had originally intended to roll this out at Farm Science Review, but our designers at Quinton Chandler were hit pretty hard by the remnants of Ike, and AEP just restored their power some 48 hours ago. So while you’ll just have to hear it from me here instead of at the Review, that’s okay; BuckeyeAg.com v2.0 is live!