Webinar: Introducing TownNews.com iQ Standard

At our March webinar, Wesley Farris, TownNews.com iQ program manager, will introduce the all-new iQ Standard tier, designed to help sites of all sizes use data to extract superior results from their programmatic and remnant advertising campaigns.

We'll cover:

• Trends in programmatic--where the market stands, and where it's going.
• How to instantly boost CPMs on your unsold inventory--using the data you already have on hand.
• How TownNews.com iQ Standard makes programmatic advertising easy and affordable--and how you can get started!

Join us on Thursday, March 3rd at 10:30 AM CST.

Just wanted to open this topic up for discussion:

Facebook will open Instant Articles to all publishers on April 12

I'm skeptical on the value of this to publishers. What do y'all think?

This is a nice feature! Thanks for adding it.

it would be great to have a couple of setting options:

- the option to move it to the right of the headline

- the option to use a custom icon (like an image used as a favicon)

We need the same ability to drag and drop the order of keywords in the asset admin--the same way we can drag and drop the order of section tags.

For example, upon entry a reporter may enter them in a more random order. But and editor would rearrange them in order of importance. (I wasn't able to drag and drop keywords in Firefox or Chrome.)

So we learned today that if a user unsubscribes from an email newsletter for any reason or through any method, the system will then prevent them from resubscribing to that newsletter in the future.

To me the worst part about this is that when that user attempts to resubscribe it silently fails. They receive no error message or warning that they are unable to subscribe. The mange newsletters box appears to show they are now subscribed but if they leave the page their subscriptions don’t “stick.” They’d only see this if they left and then returned to the same screen.

This became apparent with a call from a frustrated reader this afternoon. To them our website is simply broken.

I understand that Town News has to work within the confines of the Constant Contact system, but it really seems like there needs to be some additional functionality added around this feature.

We’re working hard to promote our newsletters and increase our subscribers to be more attractive to advertisers. This “bug” has the potential to cost us revenue.

For every reader that actually takes the time to reach out when they still don’t receive the emails, how many simply don’t bother and assume we just don’t know what we’re doing? 1 in 10?

Any thoughts?

I’m posting this here as part of my feature request to see if it would be helpful to anyone else.

Right now if you assign a redirect to a URL in BLOX you can no longer edit the underlying blocks in the Design screen. My request is to allow the blocks to still be edited while the redirect is in place.

This could be useful for when you want to undertake a major redesign of a section over a period of time without allowing readers to see the work in progress.

For us personally it is in relation to a yearly special section we publish. We’d like to redirect the main URL to last year's E-Edition while we totally rework the blocks on the section front. Unfortunately we can’t do it with the current way the system works.

So if you think this is a good idea give me an upvote please!

You know how you can drag child assets into a story, creating in-line photo galleries, videos and links? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to do that with related content, too?

The description on an HTML asset acts as a summary, which is good. But click through on that HTML asset and the description shows up under whatever was entered as HTML. That means we're telling people to "take this quiz" only after they've scrolled past the quiz. That seems very silly to me — anyone else interested in trying to get descriptions to appear above HTML assets?

(I know I could add the HTML to an article asset and write whatever text and summary I want around the HTML. But that's a lot of extra steps.)

Many news sites these days are presenting the first couple paragraphs of a longer story, then fading out the rest of it and including a "read the rest" button. I presume this translates to an analytics event that says someone voluntarily engaged with your content, which is valuable information for advertisers.

Anybody else thing this would be a neat feature to include in Flex? Anyone out there using custom code or a third-party solution?

Any interest from TownNews in making this a toggle-able feature?

Hello!

I've been lurking a few months, but this is my first time posting. We launched Blox back in September 2015 at www.Herald-Dispatch.com.

Anyhow, I am starting to look ahead to election night and how we will use Blox to deal with returns.

Previously, we had a home-grown system built by a programmer who no longer works here. It worked OK, but is a pain to set up -- especially getting it to work with a new platform.

I saw where Blox had an Election Stats feature, but apparently it does not anymore.

So, I am wondering if anyone else is already thinking about this. Or, is there some other solution out there that I do not know about?

Thanks!

At our February webinar, Jon Winters (BLOX Total CMS product architect) discussed the latest improvements, updates and additions to BLOX Total CMS's Page Tracker tool.

Highlights include:

• Improved wireframe view now shows asset status and Live e-Edition segmenting.

• Updated gallery view displays more information and larger previews.

• New linear budget format looks cleaner and makes sharing asset budgeting information a breeze.

• Bonus: Revamped installer makes updating the BLOX Total CMS InDesign plug-in easier than ever.

For more information, watch the recorded webinar today !

We live in a world where people increasingly want to save media(songs, TV shows, movies, YouTube videos, etc) to view at a later date. For instance YouTube has its "Watch Later" list where users can flag videos they may want to watch in the future. I use it all the time.

I've heard a few people mention that they frequently save articles to read later. I see in the BLOX user dashboard there is a section called "Saved Items" but it seems like that's just for classified listing. I would like to see a feature where users can save articles.

Some people would also like to have a place to save articles that they want to just keep indefinitely. Sure bookmarks exist, but they don't always transfer from device to device.

And it would be great to have a very noticeable button to save the article to a list so people will see that it is a feature.

We need maps to display in calendar assets when the address is provided

by simply filling in all address fields for the venue--NOT JUST with a

venue linked to a business listing.

From what I can tell for the map to show, a venue must be added as a

business in the Businesses Manager. However, the option to search for

the address is not obvious to the front-end user.

So when the user chooses to skip the search--because it's function isn't

obvious to them--they fill in available fields for the location.

3. Generally, the user fills in all of the fields. Since a user has

filled in ALL the fields, I would expect the Google map to

generate--very similar to how it is generated when the business listing

is used. I would think this is also similar to how maps are generated in

our Blox Classifieds. I think Classifieds require a street address and

zip code to generate a map.

This feature would be useful for the end user--generating a map for

readers searching events on Blox Calendars. This would also be useful

for Blox customers that do not manually approve events in Blox Calendar.

In that case, Blox admins aren't approving events and enhancing the

event asset by linking to the business listings. But the end-user still

gets the benefit of having a map to the event.

Can you please tell me if this is an option and how to have it set up?