Join us on February 2nd @ 10:30 AM CST

What's new in BLOX CMS!

At our February customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management at TownNews.com, will highlight the exciting new features in this latest major release of BLOX CMS.

We'll cover:

• An exciting new Twitter search panel which helps reporters and editors easily find and incorporate tweets into articles.
• Enabling HTTPs to enhance your site's security, search engine optimization and speed.
• A sneak peak into new Google Tag Manager tools and integrations.
• . . . and more!

So, Blox CMS is awesome. Our site gets visited and content is easy to add. Our city loves the site. Our sales people have no problem selling the site. But THEN...

...its time for billing. When we do our billing for our OTHER products, we press a button and the invoices, affidavits and proof of performance pop out of the computer. Brilliant!

When we do billing for Blox CMS, it's a long and tired slog through the mud finding each individual ad, printing the report, looking for the next, printing a report... etc, then we capture a picture of each ad on screen and print it out individually as well. Then match them up.

Its tedious, its time consuming, it makes my bookkeeper grumpy!

I don't like having a grumpy bookkeeper.

If anyone has a suggestion, I'm listening. I'm willing to pay money for this.

If such a product does not exist, I would ask and implore for one to be invented. Again, I'm willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to solve the problem. Make it easy for us!

Thanks all!

Bruce McKirdy

Revenue resolutions: Easy ways to make more money from your site in 2017

At our January 2017 customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management at TownNews.com, will share exciting tips and techniques to help you find ways to make money in the new year. We'll talk about:

• Boosting ad revenue with advanced targeting techniques.
• Tapping the Content Exchange to create sponsored "niche" sections.
• Using SearchBoost to improve the reach of your print-to-online ads.
• . . . and lots more!

Keywords can be a little daunting when you're starting out but have a huge archive. We've never been big on using keywords but it's something I'm trying to change in the new year. Something that would make the job a lot easier would be to set a list of keywords and have BLOX comb through our assets and assign those keywords whenever the exact match is found.

There will undoubtedly be errors in the form of keywords being assigned incorrectly but the benefit of them being auto filled would surely outweigh the errors. And to help maybe you could have certain sections not be affected by the auto filled keywords, for instance obituaries.

And the responsibility to make sure the keywords are specific enough would rest on the individual webmasters. If there's a city official named John Smith, it wouldn't be a good idea to have a keyword of "john smith" auto assigned.

TCMS is a system that prides itself on being automated when it comes to web publishing. And it is for the most part. But TCMS requires a lot of clicks to get an asset to have all the info it needs before publication. There could be an easier way for assigning keywords given the proper pre-planning. I think adding a pre-set list of keywords that would then be auto assigned to assets would be a really big help in this automation.

Anyone else think they would benefit from this?

Hi all,

We have a unique situation at the Columbia Missourian which is that we have students cycle in and out of our newsroom three times a year (gotta love a teaching newspaper). We're trying to get better with story metadata, specifically to help out our archives (in Merlin) to be more searchable.

I'm wondering if anyone has implemented any sort of metadata/tag list suggestion function in their systems (note, I'm talking about something different than the suggestions from Open Calais or the Content Exchange) -- along the lines of suggested metadata that would be internal to a newsroom. e.g. "Columbia police department" or, say, the mayor's or a public official's name. The idea would be to provide a list of frequently used local tags to help newbies know what to add to stories.

It's contest season, and we had several "breaking" news articles that we want to present. We want to show how we covered the story incrementally. A story about a police shooting has 132 revisions, but only the last 20 show up. Is there a way to capture and view those earlier revisions?

Is anyone currently delivering their GA and Quantcast tracking code to their AMP pages? Is that automatically included in the markup that TN is providing to Google AMP or do we need to add that using their insertion macros in option.head.utl?

We have entered a feature request to improve the printout of images in e-editions, so the images can be scaled to fit on one page.

Better printing of graphics (such as crossword puzzles) for our customers.

We have several customers who like to print the crossword puzzle from the e-edition each day and solve the puzzle. Right now, the image prints out across 3 or 4 pages -- even when you try to scale it. Also, when a user prints a story from the e-edition, he has no control over the size of the printout.

3) How often would you use this feature?

Readers would use it daily.

4) How many people in your organization would use this feature?

I intend to send this as a ticket too, but we've discovered that when adding a keyword to an asset that there is a bug that creates a new blank keyword field below the keyword that you've added. Blox automatically saves all keywords typed into these fields, so I discovered even the blank ones are automatically saved. Yesterday, I cleaned out HUNDREDS of blank keywords out of our keyword list in the admin. I wanted to mention it for anyone else noticing that the keyword auto-dropdown isn't working quite right.

When a story is updated and you choose to declare it an "important update" so the story says "updated" with the date and time the story was updated, the original publication date no longer shows in Flex. In Zen we were used to the original publication date remaining on the page and the updated date/time showing up next to it.

For example: Published: March 26 Updated: March 27

Now it just says: Updated: March 27

You have no idea when it was published!

Please bring back this feature! Without the original publication date showing, it is not clear to readers when the story was published.

Hello!

We currently host our own online store for things we sell such as books and page reprints.

I just noticed Blox has that ability through forms using PayPal and others. I would love to see some examples of how other newspapers have used forms to sell products.

Please share some links. :)

Thanks!

The Herald-Dispatch has entered a feature request to add email and social media sharing options to the e-edition.

1) What problem(s) does this idea solve?

Our previous e-edition vendor had this option. Of the complaints we have received about the Town News e-edition (the vast majority of which is customers having trouble getting used to the new format), the top request has been “bring back email and social media sharing on stories.”

2) Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

Subscribers are accustomed to the option from our previous vendor. They have come to expect the option in our e-edition.

3) How often would you use this feature?

Subscribers would use it daily. It is a very popular feature with older readers.

4) How many people in your organization would use this feature?

Subscribers would use it daily.

Would any other newspaper that uses the e-edition benefit from such a feature?

Thanks!
Andrea

I've gotta imagine this would help all of y'all. Our Users list in TCMS continues to grow as we have employee turnover, meaning we increasingly have to wade through former staff members to find current ones.

We can't delete the users because it'll break some link, so Town News recommends just demoting them to normal users instead of admins which is fine.

The missing piece of the puzzle is the ability to then not see these normal users by default and only see admins when you go to add an author to an asset.

1. Greatly speeds up the process of adding an author to an asset. For hosted this weeds out all of the subscribers by default showing you only staff members. For TotalCMS this would show only current staff members and not former staff members who have been demoted to regular users.

2. Every single day.

3. Every single employee who uses TotalCMS.

I'm experimenting with some things. Currently, I'm testing a "job" that imports CSV file(s) and makes some assets in Blox.

I'd like to add some custom property to some of those assets depending on some data from the CSV file. Is that possible?