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.

While the recent foul weather has certainly put a damper on things in the garden state, there is one positive thing to come out of the last couple days. Two actually! Over the last few days we’ve rolled out two new InJersey sites devoted to Woodbridge and Morristown

The former is headed by Home News Tribune reporter Sergio Bichao, while the latter is being spearheaded by Daily Record editor Jim Namiotka and his team.

We hope you register to join these new sites and if you’d like to become a regular contributor, or just have questions about the site, please email Ted Mann, our site administrator.

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!

Our Freehold site editor, Colleen Curry, has a great blog post today on the SeeClickFix blog about all the great ways that our users have taken advantage of the tool to report issues in their communities that need fixing. Check out the full post here:

Hi there, SeeClickFix folks. My name is Colleen Curry, and I run Freehold.InJersey.com, a hyperlocal news website in New Jersey and one of Gannett’s first hyperlocal sites in the country. We’ve been using SeeClickFix on our site for a few months now, and it has helped engage our readers, generate stories, and impel action in our local community. Ben asked me to share a few of these highlights with you.

via SeeClickFix blog

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.

Granted, this is a little overdue. We launched InJersey a month and a half ago now, but we’re only just getting the hang of our screencasting software (ScreenFlow, for Mac) just now. At any rate, better late than never. Here’s a quick video tour of the InJersey site.

Be on the lookout for more instructional videos in the weeks to come. To help educate contributors, we’re looking to create demo videos to walk you through exactly how to add a calendar event or post a video.

And please, if there are any tutorial videos you’d like us to create, please email us with suggestions.

Now you can access all the InJersey towns on your cell phone or iPhone.

We have a mobile-optimized version of the site, that should load up automatically no matter what kind of phone you’re using. Just type in the domain of the town site you’re interested in (e.g. http://cherryhill.injersey.com) and it should load right up.

For InJersey contributors, there’s also a mobile-optimized admin screen, which you can get to by clicking on the “log in” link on any of the mobile sites, or just by going directly to the backend of our blogging software, WordPress, by adding wp-admin to the end of the url (e.g. http://cherryhill.injersey.com/wp-admin)

(from left to right: the mobile version of an InJersey town site; the login screen to the InJersey blog software; the mobile-optimized screen to write and edit posts)

These should render well on ALL cell phones. They look best on iPhones and Palm Pres, but you should be able to load the streamlined version on any other celll phone capable of accessing the web.

Happy mobile browsing!

A hearty thank you to all the early adapters who have signed up to InJersey and begun posting. We sort of figured that it would take several weeks for people to catch on to the sites, and until then it would mostly be us newspaper reporters doing the lion’s share of the posting. Of course, as with just about everything on the Internet these days, the site has taken on a life of its own — in very exciting and welcome ways.

As you’ve probably noticed, we made it easy for anyone to register and post to InJersey and its town sites. Unlike many other hyperlocal news sites that have sprung up in recent years, we don’t exercise any kind of filter between you and the “publish” button.

That said, we want our sites to be the best user experience possible, and thus it’s important for you to be conscientious about how your posts look before you send them straight to our homepages. A few simple ground rules we’d like you to follow:

• If your post is more than 200 words, break it. You can see the word count on what you’re writing at the bottom of the editing window. Use this little icon to insert a “Read More” button in your post. That way, a lengthy post won’t end up completely taking over the front page of the site you’re posting to.
• Add “tags” to all your posts. The more tags you include, the more it helps goose your post’s visibility to Google and other search engines. Which in turn translates into more people reading your content.
• If you’re pasting from Microsoft Word, please be sure to use the “Paste from Word” button. This is important because Word often applies HTML formatting to text written in the application, which then gets carried over to the blog — often making your text look yucky. You’ll need to click on the rightmost “Kitchen Sink” button to see this option.

  

  To read more on how to use the “Past from Word” button, read this tutorial

• Include a Google map if your post refers to a specific location in town. All you need is the same amount of info you might use to look up the address on Google Maps, like this:
  

  Simply plug in a street address, town, and state, and you should be good. By default, the blog will you your post’s title for the map info; if you want a custom map maker, you can use an alternate title and description. Note: You must save your post once before adding a map location. Make sure to click “Save Draft” before putting in your map info.
  

• Use your real name. Any posts published under suspicious or clearly anonymous user names will be unpublished until you attach a real name to them.

Those are just some basics. If you happen to create an extra-long post missing a break, or accidentally embed a video that’s bleeding over into the site’s sidebar, we may go ahead and help you fix it. And we’ll continue to give advice and feedback about how to make your posts look as good as possible.

Thanks again for joining our site. And please, don’t be a stranger. Email me if you have any specific questions, suggestions or feedback about the site at all.

—Ted Mann