We are trying to get a podcast into Apple Podcasts, but have encountered a number of roadblocks. We continue to receive an error message from Apple that it can't "read our feed." A few Town News teams have diligently been working on this for us for several weeks, but we're still unable to get it validated. We are using the podcast player on our site. 

When we reached out to Apple, they said the reason why it can't validate our feed is because it does not have support for HTTP HEAD requests. 

Town News says at this time, it does not believe its the 400 request, partially because it does not allow those requests and it would affect all podcasts. 

Has anyone else ran into this/issues with Apple validating an RSS feed generated through Town News? If so, what worked for you? 

Hi y'all,

For folks here using Facebook Instant, how are you forcing Facebook to update stories from the RSS feed you've submitted?

We notice a lot that a story that's been "Instant-ized" won't update automatically during the day as the story is updated/saved.

Curious to see if there's a solution someone has found. Thanks.

I am sure we are all getting more requests to take down articles that portray people in a bad light. And even though we are loathe to "rewrite history" by pulling stories off the site, we are sometimes sympathetic to people who are followed by minor past crimes like marijuana possession that now show up high on Google searches. Rather than pulling stories down entirely, can we simply exclude specific articles from search engine updates?

I'm looking for some examples and experiences from other papers who are successfully utilizing (or gave up on) the BLOX calendar feature of their sites.

Ours is currently empty: https://www.galvnews.com/calendar/

But we're looking to see how hard it would be to jump start it and then of course what opportunities there would be to monetize it.

I'd appreciate any thoughts, examples and/or experiences that y'all are willing to share.

Thanks!

What are other sites doing with NIE? We no longer deliver papers to schools, instead giving them access to the E-Edition. We recently went to a metered pay wall, and don't want to give a bunch of accounts out. What are you doing? 

I can't find a solution to this, other than to set a block up to display something for only a certain time. But that still leaves a flag on a story.

I think it would be helpful if we can automate a way to take a flag off a story (for example, keeping a "breaking" flag on a story for only two hours) after a certain time frame, or to set it to last only a certain time frame.

Perhaps there's already a way for this, but I can't seem to find it. Anyone have any ideas?

Webinar recording now avaiable

What’s new in BLOX CMS

Become a master of efficiency and automation with the latest updates from TownNews. At our June customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management, will highlight the most exciting new features from the latest major release of BLOX CMS.

What’s new:

• Super batch processing makes it a snap to update a large selection of assets.
• New promotional button block lets you create dynamic, trackable text buttons.
• New map vendor give you an alternative to Google Maps, no credit card required.
• . . . and more!

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

I've submitted a ticket about this but would like to see how many other would find this useful.

We would like the ability to "feature" a comment on pages other than articles. With the increased focus industry-wide on a more engaged journalistic approach, this is something I think all TN customers would find useful. For us, the reader has become much more involved in every step of our writing process. We want to combat the recent "don't-read-the-comments" mantra that has become so commonplace.

Ideally, there would be a block that can pull in or pin Comments just like blocks can with Assets. This would allow us to have various blocks that show the latest comments in every section on the homepage, or every comment in a given section, for example.

I thought this might also be possible somehow by embedding the comment as a "widget". I played around with Google Console and was able to pull the html for a comment and paste that into an html block to pull it in, which obviously isn't ideal for several reasons (if the user edited their comment, that wouldn't be reflected, for example). But I didn't see anything like a "comment id" in the code, or in the Comments feature in general anywhere, which is how I would assume this would be done.

Has anyone done something similar or want to do this as well but can't figure out a way?

I followed the instructions listed here to set up Firebase and connect it to BLOX. But when I send the test push notification, nothing happens. The error in the log says "The caller does not have permission."

I deleted my keys and redid everything from the start, and same thing. Don't know where I should look or what I need to do to get it to work. Anyone have a similar problem, or any ideas on how to fix it?

I got Firebase / Notifier all set up this morning but was disappointed when I got to this window and saw that I couldn't set notifications to be sent based on Author. I don't love the "Follow Notifications" feature, so my plan was to set up each Author as a Topic in Notifier and encourage folks to follow writers that way instead. For now I'm going to use includes: Keyword and have my writers keyword their articles with "#theirname" but I would love to not have to do that. 

Anyone else think this would be useful? I'm submitting a ticket as well.

We've had several users complain that they have to keep logging back in to our website to view more articles. The login session cookies for our website last as long as the browser is open but I was wondering if we could get an option to have a login session cookie that lasts for a couple of days or even hours after a user logs in. I know a lot of websites have this capability and I think it would help with our user interface.

Hi there -- our newsroom has been frustrated for awhile with the logic in the subscription module that requires users to register for the newspaper's website before buying a subscription. It's creating a bit of friction when e.g. we want to give out a complimentary subscription to an advertiser or other user, and is also a difficult workflow for some of our users if they don't get a confirmation email for registration. 

I understand the logic of registration being different from subscription status; and I also understand the internal logic of someone needing a registration before they buy a subscription. However, I'm wondering if the subscription page could be streamlined, either to allow people to register while buying a subscription or to create a user registration record as part of a new subscription (that is, prompt for a username when purchasing a subscription). 

Thoughts on that? 

Hi all, 

We currently sell print and digital subscriptions online, and are considering doing print only, but there doesn't seem to be a way inside the Blox circulation system to limit print subscription offers by zip code (like most papers, we only deliver to a certain amount of zip codes and have mail subscriptions outside our circulation area). Our older online circulation system limited the print offer by zip code. 

Has anyone run into this, and if so, is there a solution for it? 

thanks, Rob 

We are wondering if anyone has ever done anything with integrating LiveIntent (https://support.liveintent.com/hc/en-us/articles/217205726) into newsletters.

If anyone is using this, we love to find out how the integration went and what you think of LiveIntent.

Dear Town News, currently we have the option of showing how many comments an article receives, would it be possible to show how many times an article has been viewed? We have the block that shows most popular, might be a nice option to show how many people read a story. Many thanks