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Free online puzzles?
Came across State Point Media that offers free content -- as well as crossword puzzles and Sudoku. Below the puzzles are "More Puzzles" and "News You Can Use" -- which is their form of sponsored content (and how they make money). Good thing is -- the user is on your page the entire time (unless they click a branded link in the story).
My question is - does anyone use this service? Anyone have any other options for free puzzles? Do a lot of your readers play?
Thanks for the insight.
What are people using for online merchandise sales?
We have been slowly working through the process of getting approval at our university for online sales, and have gotten the ok to use our merchant portal to sell stuff other than subscriptions. (This isn't a TownNews issue, btw -- this is the issue we face for being a newspaper that operates as an agency of the university). So we're interested in setting up an online sales portal for merchandise.
Absent building one ourselves, are there third parties that other TN newspapers are using for sales? This doesn't have to integrate with the site other than being able to access our credit card processor. Any suggestions are welcome.
An alternative to block quotes?
We love the way the block quotes styling feature shows up to highlight pull quotes, whether inline or as content boxes dragged inline.
We were wondering if it would be possible to have another presentation for quoted material.
This might be when you have a series of quotes back-and-forth (maybe you are reporting on a phone conversation), or if you were quoting from a long passage.
These quotes would be the size of the rest of the body copy, but indented and italicized. Ideally handled through the article editor.
Maybe there's a way to do this that I'm missing.
Anyway way to preview pinned assets in blocks that haven't been published yet?
We're trying to transition to a more curated homepage with our editors manually pinning stories to blocks. The goal is to have the homepage feel like a bespoke document everyday.
I've setup multiple layout schedules for each day of the week so that editors can plan out what future layouts will look like but it's difficult for them because if they pin an article to a block that has not been published yet (but is scheduled to be published by the time the layout schedule is active) it will not display that asset in the layout editor. They have to select View Site > Preview at a specific time.
Is there anyway to preview the site at a specific time within the layout editor? Or a way to force the display unpublished pinned items in the layout editor? Or another strategy worth considering for putting together daily, bespoke editions of the homepage?
Better way to auto populate venues in BLOX calendar tool?
Giving the BLOX calendar tool a try on our website. Disappointed to see there's no good way to help auto-populate a venue from biz listings in an event asset outside from the 10-15 I'm told we could store in the venue library. What can we do to find a better workflow for this? We're talking about several hundred event listings per week in print pulling from thousands of biz listing entries.
Hey Kyle!
The Business Directory can be used as a "business hub" without using it on the front end. This way, you can associate Calendar events with venues, and businesses with banner ads, and so forth. Personally though, I would look into the Calendar upsell functionality - it's a great reason to get the full directory.
The venue library in Calendar is meant to be a "quick list" of your most commonly used businesses. You can have more than 10 - 15... there is not a physical limit it's just more that at some point it becomes unwieldy. It does put listings in alphabetical order and allows for type-ahead. But it isn't meant to be a database of listings.
But in general, I would use the Business Directory for most listings, and then the venue library for the ones you're using like every day to save you a few clicks. The venue library is useful for when you're entering things in manually.
Hope this helps!
Keyword Tag Links
Feature Request - Ability to edit the keyword tag links. Instead of clicking the keyword tag and having it go to a generic search page what if it could go to a link you tell it to. For instance you are running an article on garage sales, well why not have that key word link to the classifieds section for garage sales.
Restrict site search utility block to a specific URL/tag
I want to create a microsite on my main website. And I'd like a search block on that page that will only search assets on that specific URL. I can't do that with the "Utility: Site Search" block. I can do that with the "Utility: Site Search Range" block but I'm forced to also include a date range. It would be fine if it defaulted to "any day" but it doesn't. You have to actually set it to "any day" or it will search a smaller time frame. So it seems like the range block has an option the regular block doesn't. Can this be fixed?
Hey Nick,
Both the "Utility: Site Search" and the "Utility: Site Search Range" have a search URL override option.
If you don't see it - perhaps you have a customized version because we did add the Site search version after the Site Search range block.
Note that by default our system will look for the FIRST search-based URL that it sees in order to perform a search. I believe that if this happens we have ways to fix it in all cases now, but if you have a situation where you create a special search URL for "archives" and then find that obits is now re-directing them when you search - then you need to go through and force the other searches into the alphabetically inferior URL.
And, this works really great for obits! The Search Range block was actually specifically made for obits. Firstly, our testing shows that many obits users just want to browse to the last few days of obits, so that's why the ranges are set up that way. And, search is very popular in obits, so having a separate search URL can help with a few things:
1. You can set up your search to be obituaries/search. This way, all of the search traffic actually stays within the obituaries umbrella so you can track it together in terms of analytics.
2. You can assign specialty ads to the search pages, separately from your other search pages. So, you can sell an obits package that gets impressions on the obits index page, article pages and search pages.
In theory, you could do this with recipes as well.
Let me know if you still can't find this and I can look at your site.
Weather inconsistency
We just had a reader point out this inconsistency and I'm wondering if anyone else has ever noticed it on their site. In particular this is with the Email Reach | Email: Weather today block.
I've checked past emails and it seems to be consistently in disagreement with itself. Note the high temperature of 102 in red under the graphic and compare it with the "Highs in the upper 80s..." right below it and the "High 89F" in the text forecast at right.
Print view shows ads on FLEX
Someone just alerted me to the fact that when you click the print icon in a FLEX article the printout includes all of the in-story ads AND any hovering ads. The hovering ads are on every page, usually blocking content.
With Zen when the user clicked the print icon they were taken to a page with "?mode=print" trailing the URL. This mode stripped all of the other elements of the page save for the story and any child assets. It was great.
Here's what FLEX printing looks like...
CNN syndication from TCMS>Blox
Is anyone else able to syndicate assets (article and HTML) from TCMS to Blox when i try to do that with CNN content, I'm not allowed to place a site tag, getting a "Modification prevented by DRM rules."
Package Blocks
Present breaking news or enterprise projects with new "package" block
Once y'all start using this new block on your site I'd love to see some samples. Please share them here if you remember!
Webinar | Google News Initiative fundamentals training for BLOX CMS
From reverse image search to trends and alerts, this course teaches practical skills for reporting in the digital age. Nicholas Whitaker, training and development manager for Google News Lab, presented a Google News Initiative fundamentals crash course specifically for BLOX CMS users.
Topics included how to:
- Finding stories and terms gaining attention.
- Giving important context by building interactive maps.
- Checking the authenticity of an eyewitness photo or video.
- . . . and much more.
Ready to learn more about Google News tools? Watch the recording now.
Feature Request: Save button in the Expanded Editor view of article assets
A lot of our staff like using the Expanded Editor view when working in article assets so they can focus on just the body of their story. They are requesting that a Save button be added into this view so they can save (without closing) directly without having to first return to the standard asset view.
Probably the easier thing would be to simply add another bar at the bottom of the window, below the Stats bar, that contains the Save button on the right side. Alternatively adding it into the toolbar at the top of the screen would work just as well.
Please let me know what y'all think.
Thanks,
Kevin
Upgrade needed in system
Please add the capability of embedding from DocumentCloud.org. They have developed powerful journalism tools that go beyond the usual PDF. Thank you.
Does anyone have experience with VisionData for online subscriptions?
We currently use VisionData for our home delivery circulation management. The intent was to switch online subscriptions over to VisionData too. I'm hesitant to make this switch because it will undoubtedly cause a massive drop-off when everyone who was once on auto-renew has to set up a new subscription in a different system. Their support has also never been stellar. Does anyone here have experience using VisionData for managing online subscriptions?
Customer support service by UserEcho
