WISHTV.com has partnered with Tributes.com to provide Obituaries and Death Notices for Indianapolis and Central Indiana.   You can find our obituaries page under News in our main navigation drop-down menu.

Listings are provided by area funeral homes or are collected through publicly available sources.  Friends and family can leave their condolences, share a memory or even “light a candle” as part of their tribute.  Users can also set up email alerts to be automatically notified for death notices by location, family name,  school and military service.

Funeral Homes that are interested in joining Tributes.com’s network can learn more and sign up for a 30 day trial.

Users can also search Tributes.com’s national database to find obituary notices for people nationwide.

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been putting the final tweaks on our new main weather page layout.  This afternoon we made that page live.  Our goal of this new look is to provide you a simple weather snapshot of what going on now and what’s going to happen in the near future.   We’ve also lowered the amount of tabs on the main page to speed up page load time.

We haven’t taken any maps away, in fact we’ve added several new ones.  Click the “more” link below to see what maps are now available and where to find them.

We are also getting ready to unveil a new school/business closings page format that will make it much easier to find out if your school or business has been closed or delayed.  Look for that in the next few weeks.

If you have thoughts, feedback etc. about the new page format, leave a message in the comments section.  While we can’t accommodate every suggestion or request we do read them and use them in building a better WISHTV.com.

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working on a new layout for our main weather page.  Our goal of this new look is to provide you a simple weather snapshot of what going on now and what’s going to happen in the near future.   We’ve also lowered the amount of tabs on the main page to speed up page load time.

You can preview the upcoming changes here: http://www.wishtv.com/subindex/weather/weather_2

Also, we’ve not removed any of the current weather maps/images, just moved them to new homes.  Keep reading to learn about the new categories and what maps are now available.

Please feel free to leave us your thoughts about the new layout.  We’ll apply it to the main weather page in a week or two.

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WISH-TV is now offering most of our daily news clips on YouTube.com/WISH & YouTube.com/WNDY.  It’s just another way for us share our content with the world.    If a clip is on YouTube, you’re free to link to it or embed it like any other video available on the web.

Often users upload a copy of a news story that they aired on WISH-TV.  Because of possible rights issues we try to discourage that practice.  Every so often, we will place a copyright claim on those clips which were not uploaded to the station account.   We have to make certain that we own the rights to upload the video and audio.

Of course, all of the video you find on YouTube, can be found on WISHTV.com & IndyTV.com as well.  We also allow you to link to or embed any video on our site as well.  Just click the “Share” link in the video player.

We’ve received a few comments from our Twitter followers that there are too many items coming across our @WISH_TV Twitter feed.  So over the next few weeks, we’ll be adding several new Twitter accounts so users can pick and choose the content they want.

So starting today, we’ve launched the @WISH_Forecast8 feed.  There you will find all the links from the Forecast 8 Weather Blog and hopefully soon the Forecast 8 team.

More Twitter accounts will be brought online over the next few weeks.  Watch the main WISH_TV Twitter feed for updates.

Over the past year we’ve used Topix.net to power our comment system.  While Topix provided us an easy to use platform, it did have some drawbacks.  As our regular comment users know, we have a few bad apples that posted inappropriate comments very frequently.  We also didn’t want our users to have to leave the site to post comments or read user comments.

So after a long search we have decided to make the switch to IntenseDebate.  IntenseDebate is a commenting system that supports WordPress and several other blogs.  It also has many features that makes it easier to admin.

The million dollar question is… Do I have to register?

For now, the answer is no.  But we encourage users to register and log in when posting comments.  If you have a WordPress.com account, OpenID or IntenseDebate account, use can use that profile to comment on WISHTV.com.  That way you can include your avatar.  To register check the register button the first time you post a comment.

We’ll be adding IntenseDebate to our blog commenting system in the near future as well.  In the mean time, please let us know what you think.

Since we’ve launched our new platform, we get lots of questions on page load time.   Unfortunately there’s isn’t one simple answer.  Several factors can contribute to page load, but for many of our users having the right browser can help make the load time better.

Most users who visit our site use Internet Explorer.  The version is where we run into issues.  A large percentage of our users use Version 7 or better.   But there’s a small percentage of users who still have Version 6 on their computers.  For most, that’s where the problems start.

IE6, was released in 2001.  Since then web standards have changed dramatically, which makes sites like WISHTV.com & INDYTV.com difficult to load.    In some cases the columns don’t display correctly or get push down below another.

If your computer is running Windows XP, you can upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 at the Microsoft Update site.  It’s a free update.  Just so you know, IE8 is just around the corner.  It’s currently in public beta and can be downloaded from Microsoft Update.

Our site works best in Firefox.  It’s a bit more secure and complies with many of the web standards WISHTV.com & INDYTV.com were designed to meet.   Best of all it’s a free download and will run on Windows operating systems including Windows 2000 & Windows ME.

For MAC users, our old site was very difficult to use.  I’m not a MAC user, but Safari and Firefox for MAC should render our pages just fine.

Another issue of course is your connection speed.  Pages that include tabbed browsing like our weather page and home page, may take some time to load.  I see this frequently when working on my mobile broadband card.  Our development team continues to look at ways to improve the load time for slower connections.

As always, if you have questions, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

This morning we pushed our latest code update was pushed to the site.  Based on the feedback from our users, we made several changes to the top story section of our home page.

1. The tabs now automatically rotate among the five sections.  We’re still tweaking to find the right time amount, but for now…it’s set at 12 seconds.
2. Our sub-headlines now click directly to the story page.  This was probably the most confusing part of our redesign, we hope this new functionality will be more user friendly.
3. The most recent stories will display a xx min ago time stamp.
4. A “More Stories” link has been added to the bottom of the headlines, so you quickly access more content.

We’ve also made changes to our story pages, the biggest change is our maps now show up already zoomed-in.  You’ll also see some cosmetic improvements in the story body text, so the random ? will now appear as curved quotes.

Several other features were also implemented today, that will enable us to bring you a much more robust site.

Welcome to my first post.  I’ve been wanting to do this for some time now, offer a forum to answer your questions about WISHTV.com and keep you up-to-date on any new features on our site.  Fortunately, I have a good topic to start with today…

Every time we have winter weather, I receive several emails from our SchoolWatch 8 subscribers about why they didn’t receive their school closing alert.   Here’s the reason why…

Just like email, all SMS messages get filtered by the cell phone carriers before they reach your inbox.  During times of peak demand, cell networks see our messages as spam and will choose to either delay or not deliver them.   In the past week, we’ve learned about a unique issue with Verizon Wireless.  The following was a memo sent from our service provider about Verizon:

Recently, significant text message delivery delays for Verizon subscribers have been occurring.  In working with Verizon network operations and messaging personnel, we have confirmed that all text messages are being delivered by TextCaster to Verizon in a timely fashion.  However, just after the first of the year, Verizon implemented a process that limits the number of text messages they pass through to their subscribers.  The bottom line is that some Verizon subscribers are not receiving the message content that they want and need.  Alltel subscribers may also experience delays, as Alltel has been acquired by Verizon.

We are continuing to work with Verizon to improve message delivery and are hopeful that our efforts, jointly with those of your subscribers, will result in immediate action by Verizon.

For all the Verizon subscribers out there, I’m in the same boat as you.  I subscribe to alerts for about a dozen schools (much to my wife’s chagrin when it goes off at 5 a.m.) and it’s been hit or miss whether I receive them.

Our provider is working very hard to get this situation resolved as soon as possible so you can receive these time sensitive alerts moments after they’re issued.

Now if you receive alerts via email, make sure you add alerts(at)wishtv.com to your safe senders or approved email list.  This should help these messages from being flagged as spam.