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 c

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 des

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

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

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

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

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 Departme