I've done a little editing on the short URLs and such

I have removed the editionid/xxxxx part of any relative short urls that were in the system. This should make the link work for you if it wasn't before.

I have also removed some OTHER sites that were in there. You MAY NOT redirect off our site in this manner. I will delete these.

A word about the short URL process

Your current URL looks like this...

http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/newspaperid/856/Default.aspx

... and you want it to look like this...

http://my.hsj.org/va/reston/nationaledition

OK. All you have to do is go to the Newspaper Information link on the Dashboard.

Under Relative Short Name: type a word. A single word. In the example above, I would have typed nationaledition.

Hit update, you're done.

BUT... if you DON'T want the at-a-glance page to be your home page, then...

Go to your home page. Click on the link of the section you want the home page to be. Look at the top Web address in your browser. It's something like.

http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/newspaperid/856/categoryid/2541/editionid/25631/Default.aspx


... but WAIT. Because life is imperfect, you must do a small little thing. Go in to the top Web address box and GET RID OF the "editionid/25631/" in this example, leaving you with ...

http://my.hsj.org/Schools/Newspaper/tabid/100/view/frontpage/newspaperid/856/categoryid/2541/Default.aspx

Now copy and paste THAT into the relative short URL field. And hit update.

Now, when you type your short URL, the site will go to that section.

Crazy long lists now gone

As I explained in another post, as part of the push last week, we started putting the lists of your PDFs, archived editions, and other items in the navigation column for SEO (search engine optimization) reasons.

This made for some crazy long lists for some people.

We have now squished them into a little space that says See/Hide that allows the user to choose to see this material or not.

Thanks for your feedback in this area. It really helped.

Oops, I forgot the most important thing

The coolest thing in the new push and I forgot about it.

We now allow you to post background images of your choice!

Look on the Newspaper Info page on the Dashboard and you will see this under the logo upload. It works the same way -- you have to give us an image that matches our specs -- or we will force it. But it will then repeat as the background image behind your site.

Try it. It's really neat.

New push this week

On Thursday, we pushed an update of the site online.

We changed or updated:

* The way video is stored
* The way your archives, PDFs, school information and staff pages displayed

And we made several internal changes.

As a result of this, we made PDFs, archives and some other things disappear briefly.

Some people are unhappy with aspects of this change, so I wanted to explain why we did it and what we are doing to improve it.

Search engine optimization is a buzzword that means making a site better able to be searched by Google, Yahoo and the like. In our case, optimized the site to bring as much to the front page as possible to improve our standings in the search engines. Experience tells us that what we did improves things. The higher we appear in search results, the more traffic we get.

At least one person has told me about her unhappiness with the result. So I am discussing with my developers ways to mitigate this and not make it so intrusive. We hope to have it in place for the next push.

If you are experiencing other unpleasant experiences on the site, please let me know about them -- at support@asne.org.