Rush Guides You Through the New RushLimbaugh.com

RUSH: First, I want to thank all of you. We are being deluged with positive comments about the new website design at RushLimbaugh.com. There are just a couple things here that I want to mention to you about this. For those of you who have not yet visited the site and for those of you who are there now, the first thing is about the live Dittocam.

I told you yesterday that this is not a Beta. We’re not going to use you to test things with a bunch of bugs in them. But one of the things that I have found was that there was not a Live Dittocam access button to click on until about ten minutes prior to the show’s start. But those links were not activated ’til right around noon, and that’s a technological reason — and if you don’t refresh your browser, if you’ve been logged on before noon, any significant time before noon, if you don’t refresh your browser, those links will not become active. So if you’re trying to access the Dittocam right now, it is up and running. Just refresh your browser and you’ll get it.

What we’re trying to do is build in an auto refresh for when these links are updated each morning. They’re not going to be there 24/7. It’s going to happen right before the program starts, and about a half hour before the program the daily ‘Total Stack of Stuff’ link will be posted. You can’t miss it. It’s in a bright orange banner right beneath the new colorful header banner that highlights the top of the page at RushLimbaugh.com.

Until we get this refresh built in for when we activate these links for the live Dittocam, you’re going to have to refresh your browser yourself. I imagine some people are out there panicking, ‘The link isn’t active! What do I do?’ If we check the e-mail right now, we’ll probably find a significant level of panic. So we’ll get this one done as quickly as we can. Some of the other features, I just want to briefly run through with you.

We have a new tabbed format that allows to you easily and quickly refer to all of the content on the site: articles, audio, video, from the last week of shows in a single area. There’s less clicking around. You don’t have to click on ‘archives’ anymore to get yesterday’s show, for instance. It’s right there on a tab. The current show and the four previous shows are all there on tabs by date. Click on them and everything that was on those shows on the website will pop up for you. There’s a lot more articles in this new, revamped version of RushLimbaugh.com. The articles now cover essentially every segment of my award-winning program, not just key highlights, and this is a big deal. There are literally two or three times as many daily articles, transcripts, references to what actually happened on the program. In essence, the website’s now a complete online repository of each and every broadcast — and all of this is free to be read without a membership. I mention this to address those of you who complained about free audio, the lack of it. The fact is that the transcripts — virtually the entire repository of each and every broadcast — is all free to read, the transcripts are.

The audio and video live and on demand is now available in both Windows Media and Real RealPlayer formats. There’s more Real Player coverage, and we added that to address Windows Media’s lack of support for Macintosh. They’ve canceled it. They’ve pulled back on it. For all of you questioning us about QuickTime, believe me: We’d love to offer QuickTime for live streaming but the reality is that in our experience QuickTime does a relatively poor job of handling live streaming, and this show extremes live 15 hours a week to multiple tens of thousands of people accessing our servers. So if QuickTime is ever upgraded to be able to handle live streaming with tech support, then we will offer it. It’s Apple. We do the best we can.

There’s also a new daily free e-mail that you can sign up for now at RushLimbaugh.com. It’s the ‘Rush in a Hurry Daily Show Notes.’ Within an hour of the end of the show, even as we are preparing the day’s full website, we’ll give you a fast read in your e-mail box of the key topics from the program of today.

It’s free to everybody, and as an incentive, we’re giving away eight, 80-gig Video iPods, which are specially engraved with my signature in a sweepstakes to Show Notes recipients over the next couple of months. We’re going to do one a week.

There’s now a giant box on the home page with all of our major ongoing web features. The Nap Room, the Algore Doomsday Clock, the ‘Only the Rich Pay Taxes’ page, and so on. It’s bigger, it’s more attractive, and the new format means that we’re going to have more of them in the future, as they spring fully formed from my fertile imagination.

Now, the website, many people have said, looks bigger. It is. The one thing you have to remember, those of you who are using laptops or computers with small screens, you have to understand that web pages are bottomless. There’s no end to them on the bottom. It ends when we decide to end the page. So keep scrolling down beyond what you see to find the full measure of the website.

Now the disgronificator. I told you yesterday it was one of the last holdouts before we could activate the site yesterday, big improvements there. Do not misunderstand this small tool, the disgronificator. It is a big key to enjoying the new website. In addition to changing the type on the page, both the font and the size without distorting the proportions of the rest of the page, it allows you to print a full article, including graphics (snaps fingers) like that.

You can e-mail full articles to your friends, your coworkers, and even those who are less enlightened than yourself. It even lets you keep your own address book online so you can quickly send articles to your list in the future. There’s something brand-new with the disgronificator.

We’ve added a My Stack feature that lets you keep your own personal stack from articles on the website. You can start your own encyclopedia, if you will. Create your own stack of staff that we provide from our stack of stuff. It’s great for students, fabulous for students battling liberal media bias and professor bias in academe. It’s basically your own personal memory division. Every article at RushLimbaugh.com that you read that inspires you, that you love, just put it in your stack. Just click on the My Stack button and add it, and it will forever be there — and you can save any page that has the disgronificator in it, in your own personal favorites. So you never have to hunt around in the future for your favorite pages on my site. Just put it in your stack right then and there, and you can forget having to remember it all. It will be in your stack. Now, we are anticipating here, of course, that many of you will have every page of the site in your own personal stack because how do you say one page is better than another? It’s like trying to choose best-of shows here at the EIB Network. It’s a real challenge.

How do we say one was better than another? I mean, they’re all best-ofs, and the same thing with pages on the website. Trying to pick your favorite pages of my website is like trying to choose which of your kids do you like best. No parent wants to get into that. You’ll also see on every page a little small paragraph called ‘Most Popular,’ and this is a list that’s updated in real time of the most popular links on the website as chosen by you, not just to be viewed, but to be put in your stack. It’s like a web version of Open Line Friday.