InJersey

Today we launched a new service to give you better grammar, spelling, and style-checking on your InJersey posts. Here’s a quick video about how it works:

It’s an incredibly powerful tool, which uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions.

Click in the editor to check spelling, style, and grammar to perform a check on your post before publishing.

We’ve been hitting the interview and conference circuit lately to talk about what we’re trying to build here on InJersey.

In addition to speaking at several events (from WordCamp to the Citizens Jouranlist Conference to HyperCamp), I also gave an interview to WPMU.org — which covers WordPress MU, the software that powers this site — about how we’re trying steer the hyperlocal conversation here.

Check out the full Q&A here.

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.

This last Tuesday I appeared on WordPress Weekly, an internet-based radio show, to talk about what we’re trying to do here on InJersey.com — and in general about the whole hyperlocal news trend.

It was a fun show, and I’m grateful to the host Jeff Chandler for featuring us (even if he did keep referring to me, erroneously, as Todd). Here’s a replay:

You can download the show as a podcast on iTunes here.

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.

To help make InJersey even more Twitter-friendly, we’ve added a retweet button to the bottom of every post on our town blogs.

This button taps into a service provided by Tweetmeme, which also does a count of how many times a given post has been tweeted.

It’s far from exact, and there’s definitely a lag time, but it adds another tool to help facilitate community conversation. If nothing else, we hope it makes the process of tweeting posts a little simpler.

Happy Tweeting!

One of the best things about using the WordPress blog software as the backbone for InJersey is that there are lots of different ways to publish a post — even without a computer!

You can, of course, log into the site and use the “Add New Post” screen. But say you’re in the middle of downtown Freehold and see a major accident or a fire or a new store. You want to share the news with your neighbors right away, but it’ll be hours before you can get to a computer. All you have is your trusty cell phone.

And, as luck would have it, that’s all you need to be able to log in and post news and photos to InJersey.

No matter whether you’ve got the latest iPhone or an older, more basic phone, as long as you can access the web, you can log into the site and post. Here are three of the best ways that we reccomend:

1. If you have a Blackberry, download the WordPress Blackberry app at http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install

It takes a few minutes to install the app, and you’ll need to already have an InJersey login and password to get set up. Make sure that you specify which InJersey town you want to add. For example, you might want to put in cherryhill.injersey.com as the site domain.

Rather than walking you through all the set up steps, check out this quick video:

2. The WordPress iPhone app works much the same way as the Blackberry app. Again, make sure you have a username and password before attempting to add a blog. Here’s a quick video demonstrating how the iPhone app works.

3. Finally, even if you don’t have a smartphone like an iPhone or Blackberry, you can still access InJersey to make a post by using our mobile-optimized backend. To get to this, type in the URL of the town you’re interested in contributing to, plus add “wp-admin” to the end of the URL. For example: http://flemington.injersey.com/wp-admin

From there you’ll see an option to enter the “mobile admin interface.” Make sure to check this off.

Next you should see a stripped-down and mobile friendly version of the backend of the blog, where you can easily write and publish posts.

If you have any trouble at all getting any of these to work, please email ted [at] injersey.com.

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!