For the last three years, customer service functions, outreach and moderation of The Sacramento Press has been more than ably handled by Casey Kirk. Her thoughtfulness and consistency helped improve community engagement and civility. Now Casey is moving on to a fabulous new position outside our company. From now on, Allison Joy Tritt will be the new community manager. She is taking the reigns of these very difficult functions. I’m writing because this transition will be smoother if we all remember to treat one another with respect on The Sacramento Press. Our help will allow Allison to better support community contributors and conduct outreach to get accustomed to her new role. Plus, she

Notice anything different about the site today? Yup, our article page got a facelift. You’ll notice if you look closely that we haven’t changed any of the buttons that were there, just moved stuff around. We did this in order to accommodate for a new ad space and a brand-new advertising product we just launched, AdGlue. You can read all about AdGlue here, but I want to give you a short overview. The basic idea is if you are a small business advertiser, anytime you see an AdGlue ad that doesn’t have an ad already “glued” in place, you can click a simple button (only visible to participating advertisers) and glue your ad right in that place. That ad then stays there for 30 days. We think i

As an owner of Macer Media, publisher of The Sacramento Press, I have never made a political statement on this site. Today I will, out of self-preservation, and a concern for what is just and good for this site, and the people of this community in general. Wikipedia went black Wednesday due to its strong opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Google also voiced its opposition with a link on its homepage. Many other Interenet companies took similar steps. So the first question is: What is SOPA? SOPA is a piece of proposed legislation in the House of Representatives aimed at, you guessed it, stopping piracy. The main proponent of the bill is the Motion Picture Association of Ame

As of today The Sacramento Press has an official mobile site. The great thing about this mobile site is that it can be found at the same location as our regular site, it's way more readable on your average smartphone. Our great development team optimized most of the pages on our site for the mobile browsing experience and those pages include: Sign-up Log in Front Page and Tag Pages User Profiles Search The other big feature we are launching is a developer API. An API or Application Programming Interface is a way for someone to interact with our site programatically. So if someone wanted to make an application for a phone or the Web that used our publicly available data, now they c

You know who you are, but when you write for The Sacramento Press, our readers might not. That’s part of the impetus behind today’s site update concerning disclosures. We have added a new section to our “write article” page that pokes and prods everyone from staff to community contributors to disclose personal and professional affiliations to anything discussed in stories. This update goes hand-in-hand with an update to our terms of use policy, which now requires a disclosure in any circumstance where a contributor has a “personal or professional interest in the subject matter of such article.” The interface is clean and simple and is just a text area that allows you to add a short des

When 34-year-old Elizabeth Jackson was a first-time mom staying home alone to raise her son, she felt isolated and sometimes unsure of herself – but a creative outlet her mother never knew of when she was an infant helped her feel connected and confident – her blog. “The community was the best thing,” she said. “Being a mom is so isolating.” The isolation, she said, comes from not being able to have a conversation with an infant – who was the only one home. For Jackson, the isolation was made harder, as she was new to Sacramento, but her blog gave her a ready community of people going through the same things, and they were always just an email away. “You have all these questions,” she s

Men of all ages and shoe sizes gathered at the corner of 18th Street and Capitol Avenue, ready to walk one mile in women’s high heels to support WEAVE’s first “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” event. “There are so many men that are affected by sexual assault, and this is a way for men to show their support,” said Amber Stott, WEAVE director of communications relations. Stott estimated that since Friday WEAVE has raised over $63, 000. Stott said all proceeds will go to WEAVE and benefit the various services that WEAVE provides, including counseling, WEAVE safe house, legal assistance, prevention programs and 24-hour support and response teams to help survivors of sexual assault. In addition to

It’s been nearly two and half years since we launched The Sacramento Press, and today we released a few changes (more than just the temporary purple color), one of which is removing the beta stamp from our navigation. What is a beta stamp, you ask? Well, since you can no longer see it on our site, I grabbed this screenshot of what it used to look like. Beta generally indicates that a company is still working out the kinks in their core product. But we finally are happy to say we feel pretty happy with what we have, so no more beta! Does this mean we stop working on new features? Absolutely not. We will in fact bring new and increasingly cool features to The Sacramento Press over the co

Each day there are hundreds of individuals and families living without basic human needs, such as food and shelter right in our own Sacramento County. Using Sacramento Community Family Resources website statics which received over 97,000 page views since January 1st 2011 there were over: • 1,728 Unique page views from words such as “homeless shelters in Sacramento”. • 2,945 Unique page views from words such as “food closet locations in Sacramento”. The list can go on and on, but the most important thing to know is that each of these numbers is an individual or family that is in immediate need of food or shelter. The question is “do we really need research and statistics to tell us that t

Now you can add captions and credits to images that you upload to the site. Because we have added captions and credits, the interface has changed for adding pictures to the slide show at the top of each story. The interface will allow you to give yourself a photo credit and assign multiple captions at the same time. Captions are optional, but image credits are required. You can also rearrange your pictures by simply dragging and dropping the rows into the appropriate order. You drag a picture by clicking the gridded dot icon located just to the left of your picture. In order to display this new information, we had to change the look and feel of the article’s slide show gallery. Captions