Article summaries not showing up

In some instances you will update your article summaries and they won't change or appear -- ever.

What is happening is that when an article is saved WITHOUT an article summary initially, the system is inserting the top of the article text in its place. But when you go back to add the summary it doesn't update. You can only set it once.

We are aware of this issue and it is on our list to fix.

In the meantime, always save something in the summary field -- if only to come back later and change it. Apparently, that was wrong and does not fix it. This is on the list to fix.

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.