Product development

Sacpress mobile site has landed

2011-09-21T16:06:56Z

As of today The Sacramento Press has an official mobile site. The great thing about this mobile site is that it can be found at the same location as our regular site, it's way more readable on your average smartphone. Our great development team optimized most of the pages on our site for the mobile browsing experience and those pages include:

Sign-up
Log in
Front Page and Tag Pages
User Profiles
Search

The other big feature we are launching is a developer API. An API or Application Programming Interface is a way for someone to interact with our site programatically. So if someone wanted to make an application for a phone or the Web that used our publicly available data, now they can do so easily. You can sign up for an API key at the following location: http://www.sacramentopress.com/usertools/apisignup.

Beyond that, as usual, we have fixed many minor issues and implemented many new tools for our support staff – tools to help our site function better and more effeciently. And though you may not see those tools directly, you will see their results through increased coverage and quality on our site.

I hope you enjoy the new mobile site and API. As always please feel free to send me feedback directly by emailing feedback@sacramentopress.com

Disclosure yourself, or else

2011-07-06T22:13:32Z

You know who you are, but when you write for The Sacramento Press, our readers might not.

That’s part of the impetus behind today’s site update concerning disclosures.

We have added a new section to our “write article” page that pokes and prods everyone from staff to community contributors to disclose personal and professional affiliations to anything discussed in stories.

This update goes hand-in-hand with an update to our terms of use policy, which now requires a disclosure in any circumstance where a contributor has a “personal or professional interest in the subject matter of such article.”

The interface is clean and simple and is just a text area that allows you to add a short description of your affiliation with anything in an article. It’s obviously optional if you don’t have personal involvement with the article!

It also saves your last three unique disclosure statements, so if you regularly need to disclose an affiliation, such as public relations professionals, it is one click to pop in a previous disclosure.

Once you add a disclosure, it will show in a consistent way at the bottom of each article and be offset from the article text, as seen in the screenshot below.

Our goal with this new feature is to make all personal affiliations as clear and transparent as possible. When you have more than 1,000 unique contributors to your site, a mark we just passed last month, it requires an enormous amount of transparency to help build trust. We hope that this update is another step in that direction.

Beta no more

2011-04-21T18:39:43Z

It’s been nearly two and half years since we launched The Sacramento Press, and today we released a few changes (more than just the temporary purple color), one of which is removing the beta stamp from our navigation.

What is a beta stamp, you ask? Well, since you can no longer see it on our site, I grabbed this screenshot of what it used to look like.

Beta generally indicates that a company is still working out the kinks in their core product. But we finally are happy to say we feel pretty happy with what we have, so no more beta!

Does this mean we stop working on new features? Absolutely not. We will in fact bring new and increasingly cool features to The Sacramento Press over the course of this year and beyond.

To that point our co-founder and VP of technology Joel Rosenberg has assembled this quick overview of what else will see changed on our site as of today.

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Highlighting the Comments of an Article's Author

An article author's comments will now stand out in the conversation. This allows readers to quickly know when the writer may be providing greater detail, correcting a mistake, or just jumping into the action.

No more "107 Weeks Ago"

We're changing how we show the age of comments and articles in search results and lists. Currently, we show how old an article is in terms of minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Now we'll be removing weeks, adding months and showing the year and month an article or comment was published if it's more than a year old.

Facebook and Twitter links

We now promote our official Facebook and Twitter account at the top of every page.

Curated front page RSS feeds

We're adding RSS feeds for all laid-out front pages (and tag pages). This allows us to have a feed that represents curated content that is changed daily. We can give these feeds to third parties knowing that spammy or offensive articles won't show up and surprise us.

Trimming down RSS entries when things change

When we have to fix a typo in an article or when a user updates his comment, some RSS readers will often add a new entry instead of updating the old one. This change will help RSS software see changes as updates to old entries, not new entries.

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So there you go, lots of new stuff to play with. In the coming weeks, look for even more changes such as video and audio on our homepage and even more exciting features.

Sacpress search, take four

2011-03-17T04:48:45Z

Previously I wrote an article mentioning how search no longer sucked. And while that was true, it wasn’t great either. Yesterday’s improvement to search makes it even more usable.

The biggest difference is that now our search results are displayed in order of relevance, with significant weight given to more recent content, instead of strict chronological order. Chronological order made sense, since, well, we’re a news site and the more current the content, often the more relevant it is. However, sometimes nothing new has been written about what you are searching for, but you still want to find it at the top of your search result. Now we have a balanced mix of relevance and chronology.

We also added exact phrase matching. This means that if you encapsulate your search phrase in quotes, you will only get content that has that exact phrase in it. The nice thing is that most of the time quoting isn’t necessary since we already give lots of value to the order of your search terms.

For a quick visual comparison, check out the screenshots of the searches for strong mayor below.

Notice the difference?

At first glance the searches seem to return identical sets of data, at least for the first two results. But take a closer look.

The number of results for the quoted string is far fewer, 599 versus 3,094. This is because only content that contains the exact phrase “strong mayor” is present. The second search result will have any content that contains the the words “strong” or “mayor” in it, in addition to the content that contain both, even if they are not next to each other.

As usual, please feel free to leave your comments, questions and criticism in the conversation below. Alternatively, you can e-mail me via the newly created suggestions e-mail, suggestions@sacramentopress.com. That email goes directly to me.

Captions, credits and continuing changes on Sacpress

2011-01-18T08:55:23Z

Now you can add captions and credits to images that you upload to the site.

Because we have added captions and credits, the interface has changed for adding pictures to the slide show at the top of each story. The interface will allow you to give yourself a photo credit and assign multiple captions at the same time. Captions are optional, but image credits are required.

You can also rearrange your pictures by simply dragging and dropping the rows into the appropriate order. You drag a picture by clicking the gridded dot icon located just to the left of your picture.

In order to display this new information, we had to change the look and feel of the article’s slide show gallery. Captions and credits will appear next to both the small and large versions of your pictures. If you have never played with the large version of the slide show, you can view it simply by clicking on a picture.

Your image credits will show up on pages that are laid out by our editorial department, such as the front page. You may have already noticed these during the past few weeks. They appear when you hover your mouse over any image.

Check out the slide show for this article – there are several screenshots that illustrate these new features.

Please feel free to ask any questions or put any comments in the conversation below or e-mail me directly at feedback@sacramentopress.com.

Sacpress search updated

2010-11-10T23:40:45Z

Search on our site no longer sucks.

We spent the last few weeks digging up our original search system and revamping it entirely. No longer will you see out-of-date Google search results with duplicate entries. Now you will find custom, up-to-the-minute results parsed into three different types: articles, users and comments.

You’ll also notice that there are now new icons to represent the different content types, and you will find them to be consistent site-wide, not just in the search results.

One other noticeable change is the search box in the navigation bar. Now it is much more visible with a white background and clear in purpose due to the button saying “search” and not just “go.”

All these changes are brought to you by our great tech team, whose newest member, Andy Ford, started only a few weeks ago.

But enough with the explaining, check out some screenshots in the gallery above, or just play with the new search yourself.

Cultivating a healthy comment ecosystem

2010-06-24T10:25:51Z

Comments are a crucial and highly valuable part of our site. The core vision for The Sacramento Press is an open media platform to inspire ongoing, healthy conversations and reporting. In addition, when conversation is lively but civil, we see tangible business benefits in terms of page-views and visitor loyalty.

When conversations are dominated by bullying, name-calling or off-topic comments, we see a tangible loss in terms of unique visitors and page-views. Most importantly, it is a severe detriment to our purpose and philosophy and angers our community.

In the last few weeks we have made big pushes internally to correct this. As head of product development, I have had a big part in these changes. Today we are releasing a revised version of our terms of use that explicitly lays out appropriate behavior for our site. We have also made improvements in our ability to ban and suspend users.

By making that last change we have banned our first user from the site. The user we have banned goes by the moniker “bbbbmer.” Our operations staff has had to remove more than 50 comments from this user, and has sent the user more than 40 e-mails and one official system warning. More than 10 users of varying backgrounds have e-mailed us to complain about comments this user has made. For more than any other reason, we are banning “bbbbmer” because he has single-handedly degraded the quality of conversations on our site, primarily through personal attacks and instigation.

This is a sad day for us. While “bbbbmer” had many comments removed from our site, he also made over 1,000 comments which were not removed and often has been a vibrant and positive member of our online community.

This is only the beginning of our planned changes to the commenting system. We have many more changes in the works, from how we operate to technical changes to policy changes.

I personally have attended conferences and led sessions focused on finding long-term solutions to running a healthy comment system. I attended one such conference in Detroit only two weeks ago.

Please let us know in the conversation below what you think of our decision to ban “bbbbmer” and our changes to our terms of use. And please, be courteous, respectful and civil. I will be here all day answering people’s questions, addressing their concerns and removing comments of those who feel the need to express themselves by violating our terms of use.

Thank you for reading and participating on our site. Let the conversation commence!

We don't need no stinking badges?

2010-02-01T04:27:28Z

How do you know if community contributors on our site are using their real names? How do you distinguish staff reporters from community contributors? How do you know who has been featured on our front page?

This weekend, The Sacramento Press launched badges to address all those concerns and more. Badges come in two varieties: merit and identity. Identity badges identify our users, what they do and their role on our site. The staff of The Sacramento Press assigns all identity badges manually.

Assigning badges will start slowly and take time. We have eight identity badges: Editorial Staff, Sacpress Staff, Editorial Interns, County Government, City Government, Law Enforcement, Fire Department and Verified Community Contributor. When an identity badge is assigned, The Sacramento Press stands behind it.

If you are a community contributor and would like to have your name verified by our staff, you can do so at most workshops as well as some Sacramento Press events.

Over time, we likely will add identity badges to identify different types of users on our site. While badges help to increase transparency on our site they are not a replacement for contributors stating who they are in their profiles and articles.

In addition to identity badges, there are merit badges, which certify achievements by members of our site. Some of them are assigned by our staff, such as workshop badges, while others are assigned automatically by our system, such as front page badges. We hope that merit badges will help readers identify talented and hard-working writers, and encourage community contributors to learn more in order to earn them.

In addition to badges, you will find many other small updates to our site, including new and more prominent RSS feeds on the profile page, as well as the ability to easily browse all of a user's articles and comments.

We hope you like the new features on our site and encourage your feedback. There is always room for improvement, sometimes, lots of room. So please feel free to dig in below with as much constructive criticism as you can think of, plus any questions you might have. We all have thick skins. If the comment section is not your forte, please send your feedback to feedback@sacramentopress.com.