NowPublic Blog

It’s a big one this week, friends–we introduced an entirely new welcome page for people coming to us through Flickr requests.

If you’re a member of NowPublic, your first contact with the site is likely through Flickr. If you had a great photo we wanted to use to add context to a news story, we’d contact you and ask you to share it. Joining and sharing your photo was the gateway to being a member–posting stories, sharing more photos, making comments, and flagging other peoples’ work.

This is all still true, but now first time users sharing their Flickr photos are greeted by our fancy new welcome page:

As you can see, this shows you your photo in the story page and allows you to make a comment on the story or tell us how you managed to get that great shot. This way, you’ll be more engaged with the story and the site.

And if you’re puzzled as to what this all is about, have no fear–you can click on the “Questions?” bar on the right hand side of the screen, which will open a tab that allows to you to ask an on-duty editor a question and get a speedy response. Voila!

Cool beans! Got questions? Post ‘em here (as comments), and we’ll answer them!

2:45PM EST: The site is down due to database issues; it should be back up momentarily. Thank you for your patience.

This morning (Nov. 29), around 4AM EST, we’ll be doing a little server-database jump that will result in ten or fifteen minutes of site inactivity. We should be up and running again shortly thereafter.

You may notice some additional hiccups between then and 7AM EST; after that everything should be a-okay. If you have any questions or comments, please post them here as comments or (if the site is up, obviously) in the Forums.

If there are any changes to this schedule, you’ll be notified about them here.

Welcome, one and all, to our weekly tech team update. Every week we’ll gather the changes we’ve made, bugs we’ve bashed and new features we’ve ported (techy speak for “added to the site”) here for your perusal. We’re doing this in the name of transparency: if we ask you to be transparent in your news stories, we have to be the same in return about our site, no?

This week was easy–there wasn’t anything new to port, so we went bug bashing and swept away some of the small stuff causing you guys grief (broken links, for the most part, and a few other small issues here and there).

A lot of the errors that get noticed over the course of the week are tiny (hence the word “bug”) but they do make a difference to your overall experience. That’s why we whack through this stuff every week, but we also can’t spot everything.

If you see something that you think is a bug, send us an email at bugs[at]nowpublic[dot]com. Next week’s going to be a busy one, so get ready! In the meantime, keep kickin’ news and takin’ names.

Hello NowPublic Friends,

We just wanted to let you know about some feature changes we’re rolling out today that will help improve site speed, navigation and overall appearance. Not to worry–everything’s still in the same place; it’s just going to work and look better. During this process, you might notice some site hiccups (if you speak techese: there may be some local caching issues). Refreshing once or twice should resolve these, and allow you to see the changes in real time. Neato!

Here’s a rundown of the new features:

- More changes to our new masthead

- A new style for the right side of the page (more soon on the left)

- A new page border

We’re really excited about these new features, and we hope you are too. We’re hoping the changes won’t cause more than fifteen minutes of disruption. If, however, you encounter further problems, just hang in there. We’ll be fixing them ASAP.

Questions? Concerns? That’s what the Newsroom Forums are for, so go for it. We’ll be sure to answer your questions as quickly and thoroughly as we can.