E-mail addresses on student accounts

When you set up a student account, the e-mail address is used so the system can e-mail the user their user name and password.

Some people put nonsense in there. Others put the same e-mail address they use themselves: j.teacher@schools.k12.blah.us, for example.

These are both bad policies.

The e-mail address is optional, so if you're not going to put a real address in there, you should just omit it. When you put in false addresses, we get bounces here when your user requests their user name and password (plus, they never get the information, anyway). Worse, if you use YOUR e-mail address for all of them, you will be unable to retrieve your login information because the system won't know which one is you.

Bottom line: If you're not going to put real information in that box, omit it.

Media Index explanation

What is the media index?

You will see this if you try to add images or other media to articles at the bottom of the page. Media index is our computer-jargony way of saying media sort order.

All you need to do is assign it a number. The lower the number, the higher it will appear in your article media listing.

We will be changing the name in our next push.

Site statistics back up

The site statistics are back up.

We accomplished this by rebooting the database server that underlies the entire system. We don't like to do this because it completely disrupts the site -- so we did it at midnight on Sunday, normally a pretty low-traffic time.

We are now investigating why this happened and will work to prevent it.

But it's nice to know that if it DOES happen again we know one way to fix it.

Thank you for your patience.

ASNE pushes version 2.2.1

We pushed a new version of the site on Wednesday night.

You will find a few things different.

* URLs can change. You can set your Web addresses within our site. On the Appearance page, the Relative Short Name is the part that appears after http://my.hsj.org/state/city/(here).

* You don't HAVE to use the at-a-glance page as your home page. On that same Appearance page -- just below -- is a place for you to put the Web address you want people to go to when they type your short Web address. Keep in mind NOT to set it to a specific edition (Use something like http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/newspaperid/1661/categoryid/15771/Default.aspx).

* Colors. We have introduced 10 new color schemes to the site.

* RSS feeds. These are now improved and have mobile versions.

* Media rank order. Seemingly arcane, this tool gives you exact control over what order your media appears with an article. We will enhance this capability over time.

* MP4 support. We now support uploading of MP4s as article media.

* Rename navigation functions. Don't like the name of the Contact link on the navigation bar? You can change it now. On the Appearance page it and the others can now be updated.

* E-mail this story. The e-mail-this-article functionality has been improved.

* Issue with non-at-a-glance view fixed. An issue with the regular sections of the site (your front page, for example) was causing these pages to list articles in the order they were submitted rather than the sort order. This has been fixed.

Photos: JPEG, GIF and PNG only

We support the uploading of JPEG, GIF and PNG files to our site. We don't support TIFFs.

Why?

Because those three are able to be viewed by Web browsers and TIFF images aren't (at least not without special software most people don't have).

As a special bonus those files also tend to be much smaller than TIFF files.

To deal with this, you should open the file in a program like Photoshop and do a Save As... to one of the formats we allow.

Site statistics down

The site statistics have been down since at least Friday. What happens is that you click on them and the system times out before delivering them to you (about 30-35 seconds of churning).

We are aware of this issue and my developers have been working on it all day -- recoding the way the page works, examining the data underlying the reports, etc.

We have not solved the issue yet, but I believe we will. Thank you for your patience.

Until we do, we have removed the link from the Dashboard.

Stories don't appear. Why?

Your stories aren't appearing. You don't know why.

Try these things first.

1. Make are the stories are approved. When listing the stories by clicking on Edit Edition and clicking on the numbers OR when clicking on the x stories in queue on the dashboard, you will see the INACTIVE stories by default. Select the ones you want to appear and click on Approve.

2. Make sure the edition is active. From the Dashboard, click on Edit Edition. Click the pencil next to the edition you want to appear. At the bottom of that next screen, make sure it says Active and Backdated = No.

3. Make sure content is in the stories. The Article Summary box is for the blurb that appears on the front page and on section fronts. It's not for the whole story -- only 200 or so characters from it are every displayed. The Article box is for the article itself. If the summary box is blank, the system will grab the first 200 or so characters from the top of the article box to display on the front page and section fronts.

I forgot my staff logins/passwords

If you forget your staff passwords and need to reset them, you have two choices.

1. You can reset the passwords manually using the Edit User pages.

2. You can go to the record in question, save their e-mail somewhere, then set the e-mail of that user to your own e-mail, log off and then ask the system to send the user name and password to you on the login screen. Then log back in and reset the e-mail to what it was before. The system will e-mail the password to you.