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 co

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 No longer will you see out-of-date Google search results with duplicate entries.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.”

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 th

Have you ever noticed yourself straining to make out someone's profile picture? Perhaps you've had trouble seeing detail in an article photo. If so, you'll be pleased to know that tonight we've rolled out an update to The Sacramento Press that should make your pictures clearer and smoother than they've been before. Initially, you'll only see the difference in pictures uploaded after today, but in a few days we'll go back and fix everything uploaded to the site since day one. In addition, article images now appear in the order in which they were uploaded, and we're now accepting a few more image file types (although we recommend sticking with JPEG or PNG files). We also added a few new cap

The Sacramento Press was updated tonight with a grab bag of wish-list items, tweaks, and bug fixes that have been accumulating over the last two months. Recently, we've been using email as a tool to pass on news and workshop event details to you. Now, with this new release, we've started verifying  email addresses on our site. So, for all new signups (or if you're already signed up and you change your email address) you'll get an email that contains a link to visit that lets us know your email address is in good working order. This will help us better communicate with you. We run a lot of free, fun workshops here in our downtown office, and having a working email is really important for u

Another Sacramento Press update just went live. Among the two dozen changes we made to the site tonight are a few that concern storylines. We've noticed that it may take an article or two to get a sense for the common thread in your subject. Perhaps you intended to write about one thing but ended up writing about another. If this has happened to you, you'll be glad to know that you can now rename your storylines. Other changes we pushed out include some icon fixes, tweaks to our RSS feeds, making profile edits more forgiving, and many more tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements.

Hello again. Last I wrote we had made our first few changes to the Sacramento Press website. Time does fly, I suppose, because we're just about done with another update. If all goes well, you'll probably be seeing it in action sometime next week. And like last time, this isn't revolutionary stuff; we're still fine-tuning the engine to make sure everything's solid before we roll out the shiny new features. So, what's in this update? Right now we have fifteen additions, tweaks, and squashed bugs coded up and ready to go, including fixes to an RSS feed that broke last week, the ability to rename your storyline, and a few graphics changes throughout the site (ever notice that the thumbs down

Tonight I'm starting a new storyline (yes, this one). Here I'll be giving you a look at the Sacramento Press from a nuts-and-bolts point of view. Whenever we roll out a sparkly, new feature for you to use or fix a bug that's been causing you trouble, I'll try to let you know about it here. If you ever want to discuss the site or have any questions about something we've added, let me know in a comment! And to christen this storyline, let me tell you about the release we pushed out tonight. It may not seem like a big change, and that's because it's mostly a collection of odds and ends we only discovered we needed after going live two weeks ago. Have you ever uploaded an image when writing a