A new way to view the High School View

By Ezra Blair - January 26, 2006

The High School View, the Martha's Vineyard Regional High School student newspaper that appears in The Times every week during the school year, has launched a new web site - hsview.org.

The new site features the current week's articles in a simple, easy to navigate layout. In addition, the site includes past editions dating back to 1997.

The articles are presented in a clean, straightforward manner, with the most recent stories immediately accessible from the home page. Older articles are organized chronologically on additional pages.

Users can jump to the View articles from a specific year though a toolbar on the left-hand side of the page. If you can't decide which of the more than 400 stories to read first, a random article generator will pick one for you.

Among the new improvements, the View site now features an RSS (really simple syndication) feed to allow for interactive article searches. An advanced search function is also available, which allows users to search by texts, lead paragraphs, title, and author. Results are listed in order of relevance.

A quick search for "MCAS" instantly turned up nine articles dating back to 1999. As a handy feature, "MCAS" was highlighted in yellow every time it appeared in the selected articles.

The new site is the brainchild of high school senior Mason Fischer, the View 's Internet consultant. He decided to rebuild the newspaper's web site after learning about Plone, an open source web development tool, while working for Vineyard.NET. The Island-based Internet service provider gave the View its web domain name for free.

"I got really interested in Plone and content management framework," said Fischer. "I liked it a lot, and that is basically what prompted me to use it for my design for the site."

Duncan Pickard, a high school senior and the View editor, said the new site is both an improvement for the user and for the View's staff. "The new web site is a great improvement," he said. "It has a new search feature, which allows you to search interactively through an RSS feed, but it is also much easier to update from a technical point of view, which is really helpful for us."

High School English teacher Dan Sharkovitz, the High School View faculty advisor, said he was proud of the students' work on the new web site. He said that they spent many hours of their own time last summer working on the site. "It's amazing to have a couple of kids working on a school project of their own design, on their own, during the summer time," he said. "They worked hard, and I think they have put together a wonderful site."

Along with the new web site, the High School View can be viewed in the print and online editions of The Times every week during the academic year (except on weeks with holidays).

The Times has published the High School View since 1987. Since it was founded, the student newspaper has won many awards including the New England Scholastic Press Association's Highest Achievement Award for scholastic editing and publishing at the state level in Class II, in 2003.

"It has been a rewarding experience for everyone at The Times to make a home for the student journalists of the high school in The Times. Over the years the changing staff of the View has given us, as well as readers, a glimpse of some wonderful, hard-working, fun-loving young people, as well as their dedicated teacher/advisors. The new web site is a terrific extension of the good work the student journalists do each week," Doug Cabral, Times editor said this week.