“ASHAMED: Got my butt chewed out by a woman who was most upset that the Post-Dispatch/website reported the use of an ax in our Sheley coverage. She felt that we were sensationalizing the story by making it unnecessarily graphic and not caring about the families and friends of the victims. I mentioned that we generally report how people die in murder stories (gun shot, stabbed, burned, etc.), and she felt that blunt-force trauma would have been more sensitive. And she said to tell everyone who worked on the story that they should be ashamed of themselves. I thanked her for her call and now I’m passing along her comments.”

Would you prefer to be shielded from such graphic details? Does consideration for the families of the victims trump the public’s right to know? How much is too much?

But it’s a lot.

Finding them isn’t very hard. I don’t mean to sound like a broken record about the drop-down navigation on STLtoday. But the truth is, it really can be your friend if you warm up to it. And that’s the easiest way to get to the obits.

Recapping: Run your mouse over the navigation channels just under the STLtoday.com logo at the top of the page. If you’re over News, you’ll find all the news subsections and related content. Same with Business, Sports and whatnot.

Obits are under News. Click and go.

There’s also an “Obits” link in the footer on every page of the site — the big black box at the bottom of every page.

And to be perfectly clear: That link will actually take you to our paid funeral notices. To find any of the obituaries written in our newsroom, look for a link just below the list of death notices that says, “News obituaries from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Associated Press.”

Finally, if you’re really a nut about obituaries, you can subscribe to our RSS feeds with updates each day.

To put it simply, the place you’re looking for is called “subscriber services.” And we think we’ve made it pretty easy to find. Take a gander at the top of the page, on the right side where the weather is located.

Right below that, you’ll find a link called “subscriber services.” On that page, you can find:

• The e-mail address to get newspaper home delivery information;
• The snail mail address in case you have some stamps to get rid of;
• A phone number to call for home delivery information;
• A link to start a home delivery subscription;
• Links to stop your home delivery for vacations and to pay your subscription bill;
• Links to join our EZpay program or to change your delivery address.

You should be able to find that subscriber services link in the same spot on every page of STLtoday.

We have a pretty deep horoscope section on STLtoday. And with the redesign of STLtoday.com, we haven’t really moved it. We’ve always kept it in the “Entertainment” section of the site. So, how to find it?

From here, the link above will take you right to it.

But don’t forget to use the dropdown menu in the top navigation. If you put your mouse over “Entertainment,” the menu drops down and you’ll find Horoscopes listed in there. Click there and off you go.

Plus, we have a short web address you can just type into your browser: http://www.stltoday.com/horoscopes.

Oh, and I’m a Capricorn. In case you wondered.

The site search can always help with that, but sometimes, it’s just nicer to browse a page that is organized like the newspaper. We hope we’ve helped to meet that need with the “Inside the Post-Dispatch” section.

Just above the logo of STLtoday.com on every page of the site, peek over to the left and look for the words “Find it in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”Click on those words and you’ll find a page that looks something like the one over there on the left of this page.

Below, you’ll see a close-up of the link at the top of every page.

“Inside the Post-Dispatch” includes the top stories that appeared on the front page of the newspaper, then some of the top stories in each section of the paper — A-Section/Metro; Business, Sports and our feature sections.

Each of those includes a link to a simple index of every story that appeared in that section each day.

Oh, and, of course, if you just like typing in the web address, it’s http://www.stltoday.com/todayspd.

Tops on the list almost every day: Weather.

Weather is certainly a big deal, especially these days, so we appreciate that our readers are looking for weather information from us.

Now, some people just like using the site search to find what they’re looking for. That’s fine. But if you’re interested in quicker access, just look in the upper right corner of every page on the site.

You’ll find a quick glance at current conditions. Click on the current temperature and, voila, you’re on the Weather page. And if you just like to type the address in your browser instead of clicking around, you can get there directly at http://www.stltoday.com/weather.

You can also find a link to weather in the News Channel’s dropdown menu.

Those ways include IWitness, our reader-submitted photo albums; our forums; comments on our blogs; specific reader-driven blogs such as the Punch Line cartoon caption contest, the Talk of the Day and Letters to the Editor; the weekly news quiz; and our weekly schedule of live online discussions.

There’s more to come; stay tuned. This is just the start. We’ll be offering readers ways to start their own blog about whatever interests them; ways to comment on every story on STLtoday; and to meet and interact with other members of the STLtoday community.

The Interact page features some of the most interesting interactive features available each day. The “top story” on the page is typically updated at least daily.

Click “Interact” in the menu below the STLtoday logo at the top of every page on the site.

Actually, 57 words about the Iraq war appeared, on Page A6 in the form of the third item in the World Digest report.  She laughed when I pointed out that “story,” which she had overlooked in reading the paper.

(”A U.S.-allied Iraqi council member sprayed American troops with gunfire Monday, killing two soldiers and wounding three and an interpreter, Iraqi authorities and witnesses said. The attack occurred minutes after they emerged from a weekly joint meeting on reconstruction in Madain, Iraq, southeast of Baghdad. U.S. troops shot and killed him at the scene.”)

It’s very easy to overlook such a short short.  And her overall point is valid: Day in and day out, the war doesn’t get a lot of attention from the Post-Dispatch and other media. Larger developments merit longer stories, like the status of training Iraqi security forces and progress in establishing a functioning government. But actual accounts of the fighting tend to get short shrift, unless there’s multiple soldier or civilian deaths or massive injuries.

Families with soldiers fighting in Iraq must be incensed with our performance, she said.

Today begins a series of blog items on The Editors Desk in which we hope to clear up confusing issues, provide tips and tricks and address questions that might come up. The redesign was a huge job involving many people at the Post-Dispatch, so if I can’t answer the question, I’ll track down the right person and get an answer.

To start with, let’s talk about getting back to the STLtoday.com home page.

One of the goals of the redesign was to make it easy to get anywhere on the site from anywhere you might be. For example, suppose you’re reading about a major accident on I-270. That story would be part of the news section of STLtoday.com.

From there, you might want to move directly to the Cardinals page and find out the pitching matchup for the night. The dropdown menu at the top of the page is the key.

And it’s one of the keys for getting back to the home page — one of three choices.

1. The simplest way to return to the home page is to click the STLtoday.com logo at the top of every page.
2. In the dropdown, there’s a link to the home page along the bottom on the left, regardless of which dropdown you pull.
3. Finally, all our story pages and section pages include “bread crumbs” near the top, under the logo. Those bread crumbs let you jump back up a left — from a story, to a section, to the home page.

That’s all for now. More tomorrow as we continue this series of entries.

Lambrecht observed: “Looking around, it seems like a lot of Obama coverage over the weekend, especially columns and editorials, was laudatory to say the least — even NY Post and George Will. I would expect it to toughen up in a hurry.”

• New York Times‘ Krugman writes if Obama wins in Nov., “it will be because our country has already been transformed.” Obama’s nomination is “possible today only because racial division” has “lost much of its sting,” thanks to B. Clinton ending welfare, “the decline in urban violence,” and possibly the emphasis on political correctness (6/9).

• Philadelphia Inquirer’s Eichel writes, “Obama’s ability to reach a comfort threshold with large numers” of voters, including those “hesitant to support a black candidate,” will “have a huge impact” (6/9).

• New York Times‘ Mabry writes, Obama “left it to the media to point out the racial accomplishment” of winning the Dem nod, and “downplayed” race for much of his campaign (6/8).

• Crisis magazine ed. Jabari Asim writes in the Washington Post, Obama will accept the Dem nod “exactly 45 years after” MLK’s “historic speech at the March on Washington.” For some “civil rights loyalists,” it’s “hard not to feel a spine-tingling thrill. But for a surprising number of others, the overwhleming feeling last week was apprehension” (6/8).

• New York Post’s Avlon writes, “Obama is well equipped to heal the wounds left by the late 1960s. He can fulfill the promise of Bobby Kennedy’s unfinished campaign by building a broad coalition across racial, geographic and political lines” (6/8).

• New York Times‘ Herbert writes, “A victory lap is in order. Not for Senator Obama (he still has a way to go), but for all those in every station in life who ever refused to submit quietly to hatred and oppression. They led us to a better place” (6/7).

• Los Angeles Times editorializes, “By any measure, our nation has demonstrated laudable maturity in this campaign, overcoming many myths” (6/7).

• Orange County Register editorializes, “We’ve come a long way, baby.” But “none of this is to suggest that anybody should vote for or against Barack Obama based on anything other than the content of his character and the quality of his (still less-than-vague) policy proposals (6/8).

• Chicago Tribune’s Schmich writes, “Win or lose, Obama is virtually guaranteed to write a third installment of his life story.” He is “fundamentally and temperamentally, a writer as much as he is a politician” (6/8).

• George Will: “Obama’s words mesmerize a nation accustomed to leaders who routinely use words with antic indifference to their accuracy” (Newsweek, 6/7).