Sacramento Press Development

Toward a clearer picture

2009-07-30T08:50:13Z

Have you ever noticed yourself straining to make out someone's profile picture? Perhaps you've had trouble seeing detail in an article photo. If so, you'll be pleased to know that tonight we've rolled out an update to The Sacramento Press that should make your pictures clearer and smoother than they've been before. Initially, you'll only see the difference in pictures uploaded after today, but in a few days we'll go back and fix everything uploaded to the site since day one. In addition, article images now appear in the order in which they were uploaded, and we're now accepting a few more image file types (although we recommend sticking with JPEG or PNG files).

We also added a few new capabilities and crossed some items off our list of known problems. Here are just a few of the 35 fixes and additions we've made:

Improved article pages so the text loads instantly (no more waiting for the whole page to load on your mobile device)
Fixed your personal tag clouds
Made the site work better in Internet Explorer 6 (but please upgrade to IE8!)
Darkened the text throughout the site to make it a little easier on your eyes
Fixed a problem when writing articles with Safari 4
Tweaked our layouts to have Featured Pictures clickable, and added quotes around Featured Comments (see picture above)

As always, let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Forgot your password?

2009-05-11T09:08:31Z

The Sacramento Press was updated tonight with a grab bag of wish-list items, tweaks, and bug fixes that have been accumulating over the last two months.

Recently, we've been using email as a tool to pass on news and workshop event details to you. Now, with this new release, we've started verifying email addresses on our site. So, for all new signups (or if you're already signed up and you change your email address) you'll get an email that contains a link to visit that lets us know your email address is in good working order. This will help us better communicate with you. We run a lot of free, fun workshops here in our downtown office, and having a working email is really important for us to be able to get the word out.

Here's a few other things we've added:

If you forget your password, you can request an email that shows you how to reset it
You can now log in with your email address
If it takes you a long time to write an article, the site won't kick you off when you eventually try to publish it
You can easily cycle through all an article's images when zoomed in
We've increased the font size in our conversations
There's a new RSS Feed for site-wide comments
If you include a large image in the middle of your article, it won't spill over into other parts of the page anymore

The list of minor fixes and features keeps going, but I won't bore you too much with that. Enjoy!

Light Rail Suspicious Activity

2009-04-03T18:11:32Z

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream

This is a live feed from our office window, which is the epicenter of the hazardous materials threat ongoing at the Sacramento Valley Station Light Rail stop.

The feed captures a small fraction of the law enforcement officers involved, but shows the ones at the center of the problem

UPDATE: Live feed was discontinued at approximately 12:45p.m. as all the law enforcement had left the scene.

Making changes to your storylines

2008-12-17T08:12:35Z

Another Sacramento Press update just went live. Among the two dozen changes we made to the site tonight are a few that concern storylines. We've noticed that it may take an article or two to get a sense for the common thread in your subject. Perhaps you intended to write about one thing but ended up writing about another. If this has happened to you, you'll be glad to know that you can now rename your storylines. Other changes we pushed out include some icon fixes, tweaks to our RSS feeds, making profile edits more forgiving, and many more tweaks, bug fixes, and improvements.

Regarding the next update

2008-11-16T06:34:21Z

Hello again.

Last I wrote we had made our first few changes to the Sacramento Press website. Time does fly, I suppose, because we're just about done with another update. If all goes well, you'll probably be seeing it in action sometime next week. And like last time, this isn't revolutionary stuff; we're still fine-tuning the engine to make sure everything's solid before we roll out the shiny new features.

So, what's in this update? Right now we have fifteen additions, tweaks, and squashed bugs coded up and ready to go, including fixes to an RSS feed that broke last week, the ability to rename your storyline, and a few graphics changes throughout the site (ever notice that the thumbs down icon was cut off in a list of articles?).

There will probably be more releases like this in the near future, but we're already working on a list of things to add to the Sacramento Press in the coming months that are shaping up to be pretty exciting. Stay tuned for more.

An introduction and a minor update

2008-10-26T07:43:59Z

Tonight I'm starting a new storyline (yes, this one). Here I'll be giving you a look at the Sacramento Press from a nuts-and-bolts point of view. Whenever we roll out a sparkly, new feature for you to use or fix a bug that's been causing you trouble, I'll try to let you know about it here. If you ever want to discuss the site or have any questions about something we've added, let me know in a comment!

And to christen this storyline, let me tell you about the release we pushed out tonight. It may not seem like a big change, and that's because it's mostly a collection of odds and ends we only discovered we needed after going live two weeks ago. Have you ever uploaded an image when writing an article, only to have it disappear if you made a mistake when publishing? Well, even if you haven't, we've fixed that. Had trouble clicking links in our RSS feeds? Well, yes, we have RSS feeds, and now they're working right! Most of the other changes are too small to mention, but I'll mention a few anyway: we've added favicons to give your bookmarks a little zip. Also, if you have an iPhone and you bookmark our site to your app list, you'll see the icon above.

Look out for more fixes and features in the coming weeks as we speed through our beta process. And, as always, if you're having problems with the site or have suggestions, feel free to bring them up here, but also remember to email our support at support@sacramentopress.com to get a faster response (It's like dialing 9-1-1 versus chatting up your policeman neighbor).

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy the site.