Drawdown of the St. Anthony Pool
Wed., Feb. 20, noon-2 p.m.
Stone Arch Bridge, Minneapolis
Pre-registration required, see below
Come take advantage of this rare opportunity to see the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls lower than it has been for over 20 years!
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be drawing down the river about 13 feet between Upper and Lower St. Anthony Falls locks and dams. The Corps is conducting the drawdown, which they do every 20 years, to facilitate a tunnel inspection. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Friends of the Mississippi River and the National Park Service will offer an interpretive tour of the Mississippi River at St. Anthony Falls.
John Anfinson and Dave Wiggins, from the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service, will lead a walking tour of the area. Starting on the Stone Arch Bridge overlooking the river, John and Dave will discuss the site’s historical significance, provide an overview of the lock and dam’s construction, and identify important points of interest exposed by the lower water level. The tour will head across the bridge to Mill Ruins Park where participants will get a close look at the exposed river bottom. National Park Service rangers will also be in the area to answer questions throughout the day.
If you are interested in attending this tour, please sign up in advance with Friends of the Mississippi River at spt[at]fmr.org or 651/222-2193 ext. 16.
Please include your name, full contact information and the number in your party. It is imperative we be able to reach you in case of weather-related changes; for this purpose, consider including your personal and work e-mail addresses
“As if we needed another reason to tackle global warming, now even the Green Bay Packers could be affected,” said LuCinda Hohmann, Field Organizer with Wisconsin Environment. “Congress and the state legislature must get serious about global warming before rising temperatures fumble away the Packers home field advantage.”
National trends from recent seasons suggest that a home field advantage for cold weather teams over their warm weather rivals may truly exist. Wisconsin Environment pointed to the National Football League’s 14 cold weather teams having won 65 percent of their home games played after Halloween against warm weather teams from 1998 through 2005.
But wasn’t Green Bay’s playoff loss one - if not the - coldest playoff game in the history of the NFL? Don’t let an outlier like that get in the way of the larger trend:
The Green Bay Packers had the largest temperature increase during the last seven seasons, a 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit increase as compared to the previous thirty years. This is significant in comparison to the next highest temperature rise of only 2.9 degrees.
As far as I can tell, global warming really started impacting the Packers after the 1998 season. You can’t blame the 1998 Superbowl loss on global warming, but you could blame the next 10 seasons on it.
The Deets’ Senior Rust-Belt Reporter, James, snapped this show of a Curves workout location directly above a Coldstone Creamery. Talk about your perfect combination of locations for the yo-yo dieter.
I received some emails from people asking about what other sites besides the StarTribune.com are link unfriendly.
Here is a list of the Top-10 sites I’ve linked to in the past who’ve broken the links I’ve given them:
www.startribune.com
story.news.yahoo.com
daily.misleader.org
slate.msn.com
www.animalhumanesociety.org
www.rakemag.com (update: The Rake changed platforms [and with that, story URLs] but did a great job with redirects. See comments.)
www.swjournal.com
www.latimes.com
www.minnpost.com
www.wcco.com
I’ve linked to photos of dogs on the Humane Society website. Those pages have been removed rather than updating the status of the dogs. Adopted or dead? Who knows?
The Pioneer Press didn’t make the list because I hardly ever read that site. And if I don’t read it, I probably won’t end up linking to it. It doesn’t help that I keep having to log in to read the news. I imagine they’ve broken more links than just about anyone due to their domain changes over the years from pioneerplanet.com to pioneerpress.com to twincities.com. I’d like to a TwinCities.com story about the changes but that’s not possible. Instead, here’s an Entrepreneur.com story on the issue:
Knight Ridder’s St. Paul Pioneer Press operates twincities.com, but in Minneapolis, the Star Tribune labels its site simply startribune.com.
Same locale, same market. What happened?
In 1995 St. Paul started with pioneerplanet.com to demonstrate the site’s intended reach beyond its franchise. “We wanted it to be more than the newspaper on-line, but all our research indicated consumers still thought of it as such,” says Site Director Mike Peluso. “We even considered renaming it pioneerpress.com.”
A year ago, as part of the Real Cities strategy, the site was renamed twincities.com.
“The name could not be better,” says Peluso. “We include things you would not find in a newspaper, such as an extensive annotated directory of local web sites and more entertainment listings than the alternative weekly. You put that together with the newspaper and you have a package that is the best way to extend what the newspaper provides in local news and what the national site can offer.”
I predicted the Minnpost dead links. They’re all from MinnPost’s pre-launch site where they created a bunch of press release pages and later threw them away creating dead links. Dumb move, considering that MinnPost’s pre-launch press releases were getting quite a bit of press.
Mainstream media sites tend to be the worst offenders. Apparently, they don’t think their news has any value after a week. If they’re in the ad delivery business, they should make it easy for people like me to send traffic to their ads.
Notice that no blogs made the top-10? The highest ranking blog was MNPublius, which appears to have changed blogging platforms without updating their CMS system to redirect their old URL structure to their story’s new locations. It’s a problem that could be fixed with a little work (301 redirects).
The Minneapolis StarTribune is my favorite Minnesota newspaper and also my favorite newspaper to hate to love. Why? Because they keep screwing The Deets’s readers by breaking links.
How so?
I recently installed a plugin on The Deets that reports links within posts that no longer work.
What did it find?
The StarTribune has created more broken links to The Deets than any other site.
What am I talking about?
Let’s say I find an interesting news story at StarTribune.com. I decide to write about it and link to the story I’m citing. A month or more goes by. Suddenly, the link to the original story stops working, so visitors to The Deets can’t click through to read the original story.
The site, in many cases, doesn’t even tell you whether the story can be purchased. It just throws up the error message shown above.
From my perspective, the StarTribune’s behavior is hurting my reader’s experiences. Why should I link to a site that isn’t interested in serving my readers? I shouldn’t.
So, until the StarTribune changes their link destroying policy I’m going to try to go out of my way to find alternative sites to link to after reading stories I originally found in the StarTribune. While the StarTribune may be my original source for a story, I simply can’t continue to knowingly link to a site that destroys links over time. While that may be acceptible behavior at the StarTribune, that’s no way for me to treat my readers.
The Deets is the personal blog of Ed Kohler. Views represented here are his own. Views of comments on The Deets are their own and Ed does not necessarily endorse the views of commenters. Ed's wishlist can be found here.
