InJersey

We’ve been hard at work for several months on a new design for the the InJersey town blogs. In the last year, as we’ve grown our little hyperlocal family, the biggest complaint we’ve gotten about the design of the site is that, once you sign up, it’s not totally clear what you’re supposed to do.

We always intended InJersey to be a simple, easy-to-use blog interface, which anyone could post to. Alas, logging into the backend of our blog software, WordPress, wasn’t exactly intiutive (at least, not if you’ve never used WordPress before). All of which explains why we’re so excited to unveil our new look and feel.

The changes will soon be spread across all of our sites, but for now you can preview them on our newest town, East Brunswick. Some of the important new features:

• A login widget on the right of the blog
• Once you log in, you’ll see a button to “Join blog” — which lets you contribute news stories to the center rail of content
• If you join a blog, you’ll immediately see a simplified set of fields to write your post. Put in your headline, content, photos (if you have them), keyword tags, and an address (again, only if you have it). Hit “Post It,” and BAM!, you’ll be published.
• There’s also another button to “Join Group” — which allows you to post on our new “Chatter” group on the sidebar. This is for short takes, news tips, and quick updates. Given that you might not always be up to the challenge of writing a full-blown story, this area sets the bar lower, encouraging anyone to submit quick, short takes on things in your community.
• You’ll also see a place to contribute status updates and group updates on our root site, injersey.com, which is where you can go to easily switch between towns, view member profiles, browse groups, and interact in other ways on the site.
• You can also sort all the activity on the site using the activity stream on injersey.com, which allows you to filter by news posts, groups, @ mentions, friends, and favorites.

We hope you enjoy the changes. This project was a joint effort between Belmar website development shop WebDevStudios, Gannett NJ, and the site editors on InJersey. A special shout-out to Brian Messenlehner and Chris Cochran at WDS, who did most of the design work and programming on the new themes. The new frontend posting apparatus is made possible by the innovative WordPress theme P2, and the Groups functionality and posting is all done with a WordPress plugin called BuddyPress.

Please send me feedback about what you like and don’t like, as well as any suggestions for further improvement. InJersey is all about making it easier for you to share news with the rest of your community, and we hope these changes will be a giant leap forward in helping accomplish that.

InJersey has had a few upgrades lately, the most notable of which is the new interactive activity stream. If you’ve ever used social sites like Facebook and Twitter, this should be very familiar!

At the top, you’ll find a box where you can post status updates or information you’d like to share with groups you belong to. Very soon, you’ll also be able to post to community blogs you belong to. And around the same time we’ll also be incorporating these activity streams onto the town blogs (Freehold, Flemington, Cherry Hill, etc), so you can use all these neat features right there.

A couple useful things to know:
• If you use @username (putting in a user on the site — e.g. @colleencurry), the person you’ve mentioned will be notified.
• URLs in your posts are automatically turned into hyperlinks.
• You can sort the new activity stream using the “Filter” dropdown (e.g. show only your friends, or only your groups)
• You can reply to other items in your activity stream by clicking the “reply” button next to each item.
• Click on “Favorite” to save an item to your favorites list for future viewing.

For those curious about how this came about, the activity stream is one of the key new features of BuddyPress 1.2, which is a WordPress plugin that InJersey is built on. We plan to make even more use of it in the coming months, and use it very prominently on the site, as this is, we believe, a much easier path for our users to submit their own content.

A visitor to InJersey, Jim Parker, just let me know about a video of my presentation at WordCamp NYC that’s up on the web. In it, I recap what we’re trying to do with hyperlocal jounalism on InJersey, as well as the software we’re using here — WordPress and BuddyPress. Many thanks to Jim for the head’s up, as well as the kind soul who shot this. Enjoy!

Today I spoke at WordCamp NYC about what we’re building out here on InJersey. WordPress is the software that makes InJersey possible, and my talk focused on how we use it here, as well as how we employ BuddyPress to help build up and communicate with our network of community bloggers.

It was a great session — despite being held at 5pm, very near to the end of the day, when I imagine most attendants were more interested in getting their drink on than in learning about hyperlocal journalism. Still, I’m still flattered that we had such great attendance and such engaging questions. Thanks to everyone who turned out, and please, don’t be shy about shooting me any and all questions about how we use WordPress.

Here are the slides from my talk:

One of the things that Day 1 of WordCamp has inspired me to do is upgrade BuddyPress to the latest version. Please excuse any wonky behavior while I set out to do this in the next day.