A Journal website compliment, really

Over the past few months I've taken plenty of shots at the Journal's website. Most of that comment revolves around the lack of control that the paper has over its own online presence.
So today, with Tuesday's election looming I wanted to pay a compliment to two things I have recently noticed there.

First, I enjoy the new opinion poll features that are included with many of the stories. I love expressing my opinion and I see they are getting quite a number of participants in the polls.
The second thing that caught my eye is the Voter's Guide. The Journal, with the work of one editor named Lou in the 1990s used to put together a fair and comprehensive tab that including all the candidates and issues on the ballot.

The former newsprint voter's guide covered races in northern Oakland, northeast Livingston, much of Shiawassee and all of Lapeer and Genesee counties. People really appreciated the effort.
In recent years, and roughly coinciding with the retirement of Lou, the bosses went to a hap hazard format of election stories that ran in the regular paper staring about seven to eight weeks out from the election right up to election day.

Readers had little idea when the stories about their townships, villages or cities would run and there was not much rhyme or reason about the schedule. With the advent of the Internet it seemed obvious that we could use that resource as a new voter's guide, but it never happened, until this primary election season.

This is very comprehensive and unusually user friendly. My only beef would be that except for the major races (U.S. Senate, U.S. Congress and state representative and state senate races) the out county coverage of local races, Lapeer County, Shiawassee County, etc. is a little thin.

Here's the link: http://thevoterguide.mlive.com/index.do

But let's not spoil the compliment. This is precisely what the online presence is for, and frankly should have been done long before. But when the online presence was the investment of one overworked person, it was simply not possible.