...And now for something completely different

Okay, so you're logging on to LTR now and wondering to yourself, "What the hell happened?"

Well, as promised, LTR got a long-awaited makeover. Hopefully, this will make finding things a bit easier, and open itself up to more functionality.

First off, the old 'tricked-out' blogger template is history. The original layout was heavily tweaked from one of Blogger's available templates. So much that it barely resembled the original. Unfortunately, there was a ton of old useless code bogging the whole thing down. That needed to go.

Last week, after seeing a reminder on Blogger telling me to upgrade to their own markup language, I bit the bullet and tried it out. I wasn't impressed. Blogger's new template... err layout interface is basically stupid-proof. They do away with CSS and all the other goodies. In short, it's designed for the Myspace generation. Ugh! And to convert to it would mean translating two and a half years of work via my CSS layout to this new system. I decided to take a pass. Luckily, I found a pretty nice resource called PsycHo, which is an open-source template generator. Of course, in keeping with LTR tradition, much modification was done from that point, but PsycHo laid the groundwork. Thanks guys!

So, enough fo the geekspeak. What does this all mean for LTR and the faithful readers? You'll still find all the cool stuff you love about LTR here, and even more. You may have noticed the new tagline "the alternative media resource". This signals an expansion of sorts. In addition to the unparalleled coverage of liberal and progressive talk, unequaled by anyone else, LTR will cover other areas that seemingly intersects with liberal/progressive radio. You'll read about grassroots media, the impact of technology (streaming, podcasting, etc.) on the medium, and virtually anything about broadcasting that's non-conservative.

The next question many may have is, "where's all the stuff?" With the move to a three-column layout, many of the elements that are part of LTR will be a bit easier to find. On the left, you'll find a listing of the most recent articles posted here. In addition, you'll find all the cool station, webstream, personality and site links that have long been popular here. Just scroll down, it's a long list!

On the right, you'll find links to the vast LTR archives, as well as LTR feed links for various newsreaders, so you can subscribe in numerous ways. Headline links provided by a host of other sites and services, including Yahoo!, Raw Story, HuffPo, OpEdNews, Buzzflash and others will also be found here. And of course, there's advertising. Near the top are some Amazon links to books and whatnot that relate significantly to the content found here. And every purchase made through LTR helps out a really great resource.

So, without further ado, here is the new LTR. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any suggestions for things you'd like to see here, just drop me a line.

UPDATE: Users of Internet Explorer may notice that this page looks a bit strange. I rendered the whole thing for Mozilla Firefox (which is what you should all be using anyway), but in IE, it looks a bit screwy, with columns shoved all over the place. As much as IE annoys me these days, I realize that the majority of computer users are browsing the web with some form of IE. Sit tight and please bear with the chaos while I try to get this thing IE-compliant.