Driving the Online Newsroom

Rex May 8

Our online newsroom builder here at IvyLees is driven by a lot of things. I’ll let Greg cover the tech stuff– here’s what went into it otherwise.

A mission

We want to make it easier for journalists, bloggers and PR people to connect. We felt one of the biggest places they did that was in the online newsroom. So our first step was easy: Make it so PR people can easily create a newsroom where they can connect with journalists, and vice versa.

Inspiration

We looked at a lot of different places for inspiration on the NewsRoom. The biggest so far has been the Social Media Newsroom Template by Todd Defren and the good folks at SHIFT Communication.

Todd’s three column layout was a great start for organizing all the info in an online newsroom. He covered all the bases. We still have a bunch of his elements written in the margins of our drawing boards.

We were also helped by the Richter 10.2 Social Media Press Room, which is very visual, with big, bright buttons and a feature video. The Richter Press Room inspired us to feature the latest release, to get that initial hook that snags the reader.

These tools really helped us along. Thanks to those that contributed to the cause.

Clarity

Our first instinct was to visit some of the press rooms of our favorite companies to see what they did. What we found wasn’t very impressive. Online newsrooms are downright jumbled most of the time. They’re also usually hidden away, three or four clicks away from the homepage.

We’re not naming names. Just look up some of your favorite companies and you may see for yourself. Or, if you’re a journalist, then you’re probably already familiar with this feeling.

We wanted to make something better than what was out there.

Social backbone

The mmph behind our newsrooms is the social media backbone. The biggest “Web 2.0″ feature is the one you see everywhere: The RSS feed. In 2009, it seems like such a basic feature, yet it’s lacking in most online newsrooms. Why would anyone want a newsroom that made it easy for a journalist to find the information once?

We also thought: People use social websites that aren’t IvyLees. So we link to those. Not just for the organization, but for each individual contact listed on the release.

The three Ss

Social, simple, smart. We found that “simple” and “smart” often went hand-in-hand.

The simple route was letting users add contacts with one click. It also turned out to be pretty smart, utilizing the magical technology that IvyLees runs on. We also narrowed down the release building process to just a few text fields, letting users get right to the important part: writing. Image cropping, captioning and smart video embedding round out the package.

We’re dedicated to bringing you the best online newsroom. Get involved: Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and what you want to see added. We’re open to feedback.

Posted in Public Relations, Social Media, Technology | Leave a comment

Where news releases go to die

Rex May 7

People have been talking for some time now about how the news release is dead, or how it should be.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t– One thing is for sure: Lots of news releases are dead.

deadrelease

They’re sitting on harddrives of PR pros who are too busy to worry about them. They’ll continue to sit until they’re wiped to make space,  left on the curb, or forgotten in some network folder.

This is a bad thing.

We could make the argument that news is disposable and doesn’t matter as soon as it’s consumed. After all, newspaper is printed on the cheapest stuff available and tossed immediately after consumption, right?

But if we walk into a library, there’s the microfiche. All of that fragile, disposable newspaper news is kept alive, and made part of history, however big or small. Where is this role in our fast-moving, social media-frenzied PR world?

Companies have histories too. Your company’s history, your clients histories, are being recorded even now, as Google caches and the Internet archives do their thing.

So why are your news releases locked away on a dusty network drive in your office’s closet?

Get your news releases online and keep them there. Archiving is important in preserving your company’s history. Use IvyLees to do it. Or hire a web guy. Heck, use an Angelfire account if you have to– just don’t let them end up on a dusty harddrive. Have a say in your own history.

Posted in Public Relations, Technology | Leave a comment

Optimized for Speed

Greg May 5

News travels fast. This has always been the rule, even when fast was “on horseback.”

Now, fast is measured in milliseconds.

To keep up with our recent traffic increase, I’ve been taking steps to make the site continue to load as fast as possible. Yahoo has developed a firefox extension called YSlow. It analyzes all of the traffic from a website and gives a score on a few categories where improvements can be made.

I decided to start with making the style sheets and javascript files load faster since they are an easy target for optimization. The framework that we use for IvyLees is django and a few people have created an application that we can plug in to help us compress some files.

After setting up django-compress, a website will have css and js files that are minified (excess white space and characters are removed to reduce file size). The application will also give the files version numbers so that they can be cached by the web browser and won’t need to be downloaded again until a change is made and a new version of the file is created.

For the site, this means faster general usage. For news releases, it means they’ll load even faster– but every one after the first will be even faster than that.

We’ve also upgraded and installed some things on the server to increase performance. I’ve written about the technical details of setting up nginx, memcached, and using gzip compression over at Code Spatter, so take a look over there more tech-heavy info.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Biggest Twitter background mistakes

Rex May 1

You don’t have to look too far on Twitter to find a background that just isn’t working. Here are a few things to look out for when designing yours.

Huge file size

800k is the limit, not the goal. Twitter’s servers are getting better, but their growth is also skyrocketing. Don’t add to your load times with a gigantic background image. Keeping it under 300k is a must. Shoot for 20k or less for an ideal experience. Or, if you really want to trim the fat, opt to simply use a color with no background image.

Picking the wrong format

JPEGs are great for photographs or images with a lot of detail. GIFs are great for everything else, and a must if you’re including text in your image.

Take a look at Sarah Evans’ Twitter page for an example of why JPEGs and text generally don’t mix:

sarah1

Her picture looks great, but the text is hard to read because of the compression. On the other hand, a GIF would probably end up making her photographs look like something out of Windows 3.1. In general, if you have text, you should limit the photographs to just one, or multiple with similar palettes, since GIFs are limited to a palette of 256 colors.

It’s a balancing act, and sacrifices are required, but that’s why we have the different formats in the first place. Photoshop, GIMP and similar programs will relieve some of these woes.

Full page backgrounds

fullpage

Never go full page. It might look great on your computer, but it won’t look great on someone else’s.

One day, Twitter will implement a checkbox that lets us center our background images. Then we’ll be able to go full page all we want, putting whatever elements we desire on both sides of the page. But for now, Twitter backgrounds are left-aligned, which means it shows up differently in relation to the content depending on the resolution.

For this reason, stick to backgrounds that work on the left. Keep the content less than 250 pixels wide– 120 if you want folks using 1024×768 to see it.

Of course, keep in mind this only applies to content and framing elements. There’s no problem with extending a simple background schema (a line, a pattern, etc) across the page.

Mismatched color

You don’t need to be an expert in color theory. You don’t even really need a natural eye for color. We color-challenged people have color tools to help us out. If you aren’t feeling confident in your color chops, give the color wheel a whirl.

Forgetting they exist

The last mistake is forgetting all about Twitter backgrounds. With literally hundreds of Twitter apps to choose from, a lot of Twitter users end up skipping the site itself altogether. Don’t neglect your Twitter background just because you made the jump to a Twitter app.

Posted in Social Media, Technology | Leave a comment

Using Sitemaps to Help Google Index new Pages

Greg Apr 1

Google finds new pages by following links when it crawls a currently indexed page. To get new pages showing in Google search results faster, websites can provide a sitemap.xml file that provides a link to every page on the site that should be in google’s index. In addition to that, websites can ping Google whenever the sitemap file is updated so that Google will know to check back and update its index.

We use the framework Django for ivylees.com and it provides an easy way to create sitemap files. Since the framework knows about all of our pages already, we only need to add a little bit of code to tell it how to generate the sitemap.xml file for us automatically. Django also makes it simple to ping google when there are updates.

With django we were able to make it as simple as possible for google to index new news releases as soon as possible.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

IvyLees gets major overhaul, thanks Hacker News

Rex Oct 27

We recently posted on Hacker News asking for feedback on IvyLees.

And they helped us out. Big time. Thanks, guys.

You’ll notice some changes on the site as a result of their feedback. We’re not done yet, but the bulk of the suggestions are implemented. I’ll try to highlight some of the changes:

  • You can now create News Releases without signing up.
  • The front page lets users know what the site is about, what they can do with it, and what they can click on a bit better now.
  • The Tools link is gone. The tools are still there, of course, but they’re presented elsewhere, in more logical spots.
  • We’re now calling Associations NewsRooms, because, well, that’s what they always were.
  • Collections are now piggy-backing on the Contacts page. You can manage all of your contacts (whether mutual or not) in one spot now.
  • We upped pitches to 300 characters. We will probably be tweaking this amount until we find a happy compromise between pitchers and pitchees. Feedback is, as usual, appreciated.

We’ve still got work to do. Stay tuned for more info.

-Rex

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Welcome to Fedorable, a blog for technology and PR. It's updated by Rex Riepe and Greg Allard, the guys behind IvyLees.