PS: What's up?

Anonymous Comments

Christina Wodtke, Jim Meyer — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:48:55 GMT

Due to popular request, we’ve added the ability for you to allow your visitors to comment without having to register. Just remember, without the enticement of building reputation (or the deterrent of losing it) you may see a drop in quality of comments as well as an increase of quantity. Please let us know your experience with anonymous comments!

How to turn them on:

If you’re using one of our pre-packaged themes:

Dashboard → Configuration → Click the “Allow anonymous comments” checkbox

If you’re using a custom theme, you’ve got a little more to do:

Add conditional display of the anonymous poster info fields: Find this in your _comment_form.liquid:


{{ form.body }}

...and paste something like this above it:

{% if comment.show_anonymous_poster_fields? %}
  <span id="PosterName" class="AnonymousCommentLabel">Name 
<small>(required)</small></span>
<br/>
  {{ form.poster_name }}<br/>
  <span id="PosterEmail" class="AnonymousCommentLabel">Email 
<small>(required and never shared)</small></span><br/>
  {{ form.poster_email }}<br/>
  <span id="PosterURL" class="AnonymousCommentLabel">Website 
<small>(optional)</small></span>
<br/>
  {{ form.poster_url }}<br/><br/>
{% endif %}

{{ form.body }}

Only show voting controls on signed comments:
Because anonymous users can not (and should not) gain reputation, you
don’t want to show the voting controls. You’ll find something like this either
in your _feedback.liquid or _comment.liquid:


<div class="CommentVotingArea">
[...]
</div>
<span id="{{ id.flagging }}" class="CommentFlag">
or <a href="#" onclick="{{ action.flag }}" 
title="Alert the staff that this entry is inappropriate">
Flag as Offensive/Spam</a>
</span>
[...]
{% if on.poster %}
  &middot;         
  <a href="#" title="Delete this entry and ban this person from posting again" 
class="AdminToolbarLink" onclick="{{ action.ban }}">Ban</a>
{% endif %}

... and make it look like this:

{% unless on.anonymous_poster? %}

<div class="CommentVotingArea">
[...]
</div>

{% endunless %}

<span id="{{ id.flagging }}" class="CommentFlag">

{% unless on.anonymous_poster? %}

or

{% endunless %}

<a href="#" onclick="{{ action.flag }}" 
title="Alert the staff that this entry is inappropriate">Flag as Offensive/Spam</a>
</span>
[...]

{% unless on.anonymous_poster? %}

  &middot;         
  <a href="#" title="Delete this entry and ban this person
from posting again" class="AdminToolbarLink" onclick="{{ action.ban }}">
Ban</a>

{% endunless %}

Show your comment form when it’s okay to comment:
Find this in your story.liquid:


<p><a class="actionmessage" href="{{ current_site.log_in_and_return_url }}
{{ '#post_comment' | urlencode }}">Register or log in to comment</a></p>

...and replace it with:

{% if story.show_comment_form? %}
  {% include 'comment_form' %}
{% else %}

  <p><a class="actionmessage" 
href="{{ current_site.log_in_and_return_url }}{{ '#post_comment' | urlencode }}">
Register or log in to comment</a></p>

{% endif %}

Stylize the new bits: Add these styles to your screen.css:


.AnonymousCommentLabel {
  font-style: italic;
}

.comment_poster_name {
  width: 255px;    
}

.comment_poster_email {
  width: 255px;    
}

.comment_poster_url {
  width: 255px;    
}

.comment_body {
  width: 510px;    
}

.comments {
    font-weight: bold;
    padding-bottom: 2em !important;
}

.CommentInputErrorMsg {
  font-size: 1.1em;
  color: #c00;
  font-weight: bold;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
}

Keyboard Shortcuts for WYSIWYG

Christina Wodtke — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:02:22 GMT

<img src="/files/blog/keyboard-shortcuts/PS-WYSIWYG-2.png" width="245" height="215" alt="WYSIWYG new functionality" title="WYSIWYG new functionality" align="right" />You may have noticed WYSIWYG has gone on a diet and started working out… and she’s looking (and acting!) better than ever before. What you don’t know is Jim, which exploring the depths of the FCKEditor documentation, found some awesome keyboard shortcuts for you! If you’ve never used them before, go ahead a play a bit. The secret is to hold these keys down together… or in order. So, for example, hold down the CTRL key (on window’s machines, on Mac’s it’s usually the apple) and while holding it down, push the letter A.

Keyboard Shortcuts

enter gets you a

shift-enter gets you a

Accelerator keys:

CTRL + A, select all

CTRL + C, copy

CTRL + F, Launches find

CTRL + S, Saves (currently to disk, we’re planning to return to it and get it to save to PS)

CTRL + X, Cut

CTRL + V, ‘Paste’

SHIFT + INS, ‘Paste’

CTRL + X, ‘Cut’

SHIFT + DEL, ‘Cut’

CTRL + Z, ‘Undo’

CTRL + Y ‘Redo’

CTRL + SHIFT + Z, ‘Redo’

CTRL + L, ‘Link’

CTRL + B, ‘Bold’

CTRL + I, ‘Italic’

CTRL + U, ‘Underline’

CTRL + SHIFT + S, ‘Save’

CTRL + ALT + ENTER, ‘FitWindow’

CTRL + TAB, ‘Source’

BTW, FitWindow is a feature we’re very excited to discover. We know you’ve been begging for more room to edit! The only problem is we haven’t figured out how to get out of full-screen mode. I’ll keep you updated for when we do…

Three Tiny Tricks for Cooler Interfaces

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:44:21 GMT

Firstly, we all now how important it is to keep our readers engaged. Here is a bit of liquid to show related categories. A great way to get more clicks!

 {% if story.categories != empty %}
<h4>Related Categories</h4>
        <ul>
          {% for category in story.categories %}
            <li>{{ category.link }}</li>
          {% endfor %}
        </ul>
  {% endif %}

Did you now PublicSquare generates a tiny url for every story? You can find it for your newsletters in the lower right sidebar. But sometimes you want to offer your users an easy way to share your stories too. Try sticking this bit of code in your sidebar.


<p>Use this when sending links by email.</p>
        <p><a href="{{ story.tiny_url }}">{{ story.tiny_url }}</a></p>

Finally, a goodie for your geekier users: rss on comments on each and every story (authors love it too!).


<h4>Comments Feed</h4>
        <p>Follow the comments on this story via RSS:</p>
        <a href="{{ story.comments_rss_url }}">
            <img alt="Feed-icon-16x16" height="16" src="{{ 'feed-icon-16x16.gif' | asset_url }}"  width="16" />
            </a>
        <a href="{{ story.comments_rss_url }}">Comments RSS feed</a>

Big Release: Something for everyone

Christina Wodtke, Jim Meyer, Fleur Dragan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 04:18:19 GMT

Hello true believers in independent publishing everywhere! We’ve got goodies for you this week!

_We’ve added image manipulation._ Wherever there are image links there are edit links now. Take a test drive, and resize, reformat and play!

We do want to recommend though, that you create a copy *first* before you crop or resize. Those buttons apply immediately, so if you are a bit unsure about what you are doing, better to play with a copy (Christina found out the hard way!)

Also, when a file is uploaded, a caption can now be specified along with the keywords. To see the caption used with a dropcap, the liquid template for a story will have to be modified. In liquid, the story image tag is

{{story.image.url}}

and there is now a

{{story.image.caption}}

tag available as well.

Finally, we’ve also changed the alt tag to show the caption rather than the keywords. However, if no caption is present, we’ll still show the keywords so your old stories will continue to work the same.

We now let you autopublish!

You notice now we’ve got two fields, one for internal deadlines (behaves the same way as the old deadline field but now also a “publish date” which will actually publish your story with or wihtout you! But don’t panic.. once you set that deadline, the story is marked publishable, just to warn you it’s on it’s way.

Never be seen without your makeup again!

And another much-requested feature: template staging. Planning a makeover? Don’t want to get caught wearing your curlers? Well now you can specify a theme to be “staged” that will show up as the theme on your own personal staging site. There is a link to the staging site available from the themes editing page (the “design” tab) on the theme designated as the staging site theme.

BTW, we’ve turned on the “forums” feature (another new and nifty feature, activated by clicking on “forums” under configuration) so you can tell us about bugs, issues, improvements and blow us kisses when we finally get it right….

We’ve got a few other little surprises planned… Watch this space!

Welcome Washington Independant

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:00:00 GMT

The Washington Independant is the first of a series of newsblogger sites from the Center for Independant Media to be run on PublicSquare. They orginally used Soapblox, but found the layout restrictions too confining, and chose PublicSquare for it’s unique combination of lightweight editorial workflow with blogging-style publishing.

They say about themselves

The Washington Independent is a nonpartisan news and commentary site dedicated to covering topics of national importance. Launched in January 2008, the site aims to combine the best of the old and new media by combining the reporting, accuracy and fairness of traditional journalism with the speed, voice and community of the Web. The staff adheres to the Society of Professional Journalist’s code of ethics which calls on reporters to be honest, tireless, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information for the public. The site belongs to a network of state-based online news sites founded by the Center for Independent Media.

Cocktail: Category and Story Iteration

Jim Meyer — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:00:00 GMT

(cocktail == recipe for liquid … get it? ;)

{% for category in current_site.story_categories %}
  {% if category.label == category_label && category.published_stories != empty %}
    <div class='item {{ category_class }}'>
      <h3>{{ category | link }}</h3>
      <h6 class="tagline">{{ tagline }}</h6>
      <ul class='list list-small'>
        {% for story in category.published_stories %}
        <li>{{ story | link }}</li>
        {% endfor %}
      </ul>
    </div>
  {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Five Thoughts on Publishing

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:32:00 GMT

Publishing does not belong to publishers. It’s a fundamental activity that belongs to human life; it’s communication. One-to-many has irreplaceable value. Blogs are published diaries, newspapers are there to tell you what’s happening in the world, magazines to distract, entertain, educate. But in between those extremes we have a rich, fertile land full of publishing.
- Businesses publish. They have to buy coffee, and they have to publish. Newsletters, company reports, status updates, brochures. You have to communicate to your customers and unless you plan to call each one up by phone, you are going to publish.
- Professional organizations publish. You gather with other nurses, or IAs, or engineers, or accountants to get better at your job, and the way you do that is to share what you’ve learned. From peer-reviewed papers to emailing lists, the professional organization exists most to exchange knowledge.
- Hobbyists publish. There is no delight on this earth that is as good as when its shared. Do you love fishing, knitting, lawn bowling, origami… doesn’t matter, your love is always better when you share it. Like the professional organization, everyone strives to get better but now you are broadcasting out of personal pride.
- Enthusiasts Publish. From spec miatas to organic produce, everyone has some funny little thing that lights them up inside. And those people can’t stop looking to read more about it, and eventually when they run out, they start sharing what they know. Because its that great. And everyone should know its that great.
- Schools- all school publish, from ‘zines to newspapers. It’s good for the kids.
- Localities- The Mountain View Voice is a newspaper, but still rooted in its ‘hood more than the world, the Barron Neighborhood Association is a jumped up newsletter and every coop seems to have their own “what’s happening” publication.
Blogging is less satisfying *and* less effective than being with a group. I had coffee with

It would be silly of me to even bother mapping a mommyblogger to maya’s mom or babycenter. Groups do better. Every member is also a writer, a fan, a marketeer, a copyeditor, a bugtracker—there is power in the people, and more people more power.

Digg? Take a look at yesterday’s headlines: money making scams and insults. Is this the shining future of citizen journalism?

There is a rising backlash against the lack of trustworthiness found in current citizen journalism; i.e. bloggers. Previous posts capture some of the frustration against un-fact-checked, biased, half-truthed corporate shills and the rest of the rubble that makes ordinary peoples’ lives actually worse. I’ve also blogged about the mess anonymous comments and posts can create from spam to trolls to actual cyberstalking. It’s time for responsibility and reputation.

What if there is a middle group? What if we can combine editorial insight with the collective wisdom of the crowds? Do these two really have to be opposed? I think the future will take the best of old media and new, and create a far more participatory and engaging BUT trustworthy generation of publication, and in the best scenario that will also include Karl’s Printshop down the street allowing his customers to give each other advice on how to make chapbooks and posters.
Finally, and this is the most difficult for me to articulate, I believe the economy must evolve to support these folks. Maybe Karl the printer is good for awhile longer yet, and small businesses like him can consider their publishing a cost of doing business or even a loyalty play. But the bloggers are begging for a way to make a buck doing the thing they love, the thing that eats up their every waking hour. The enthusiasts, the hobbyists, the schools, and all the rest may not have much hope for making a living doing this anymore than folks who held a garage sale once a year thought they’d go pro before eBay showed up. They deserve to make a living doing the thing they love best. I think we all deserve that.

That’s why we built PublicSquare, and the other products that will come on its heels such as the job board and the events calendar. Publishing is changing, and we’d like to help.

Dashboard and Workflow Changes

Jim Meyer — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 19:47:00 GMT

It’s hot here in Wilson, NC, where we’re spending the dog days of summer working on some improvements that will make a big difference in working with your publication.

First, a couple of small changes: * We’ve changed the story list on the dashboard to include all stories in the pipeline; this brings pending stories back in sight, back in mind. * Also, we’ve changed the Stories tab to default to all stories rather than just pending stories. We know this drives some of you crazy; now with one click you can see everything, then narrow it down with the filter links.

But the big news is the new ability to preview stories prior to publication. We’ve added a new “staged” state for stories which allows your publications’ staff to see what the publication will look like once the stories are published. There’s now a “Stage” button in the admin story view (just above the “Publish” button) and a new staging link at the top of the dashboard to take you to your soon-to-be front page.

Hope you like the improvements. Keep those cards and letters coming and stay cool!

Welcome Red Canary

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:46:26 GMT

Redcanary is the latest site to move to PublicSquare. It’s gorgeous, and truly a showcase of what you can do if you roll up your sleeves and get in the templates… plus it’s chock-full of wonderful information for tech professionals! Check it out!

Statistics

Jim Meyer — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:20:20 GMT

A nice thing about PublicSquare is the ability to show off your community’s statistics. Here’s a bit of liquid to pull up some commonly used statistics.

Most commented upon

Most commented shows people what’s hot, what’s contraversial. A great way to get more discussion flowing!
This code lists the stories that have the most comments. You don’t have to use tables.

 {% if current_site.most_commented != empty %}
   <h4>Most-commented Stories (past 60 days)</h4>
        <table class="SBTable">
          <tr>
            <th class="SBTableHead">Title</th>
            <th class="SBTableHead headRight">Comments</th>
          </tr>
          {% for content in current_site.most_commented %}
            <tr>
              <td class="SBTableCell">
             <a href="{{ content.url }}">{{ content.title | truncate: 25 }}</a>
             </td>
              <td class="cellRight">{{ content.recent_comments_count }}</td>
            </tr>      
          {% endfor %}
        </table>
  {% endif %}

Highest Rated

Everyone wants to know what’s the best—let them find those stories easily!

  {% if current_site.highest_rated_stories != empty %}
<h4>Highest-rated Stories</h4>
      <div class="SBCopy">
        <table class="SBTable">
          <tr>
            <th class="SBTableHead">Story</th>
            <th class="SBTableHead">Rating</th>
          </tr>
          {% for story in current_site.highest_rated_stories %}
            <tr>
              <td class="SBTableCell"><a href="{{ story.url }}">{{ story.title | truncate: 30 }}</a>
             </td>
              <td class="cellCenter" title="Based on {{ story.ratings_count | pluralize: "vote" }}">
             {% for step in story.rating_steps %}{% if step.on %}
              <img src="{{ 'dot-orange.gif' | asset_url}}" class="RatingSolid" alt="*" />
              {% else %}
              <img src="{{ 'dot-white.gif' | asset_url }}" class="RatingEmpty" alt=" " />
              {% endif %}
              {% endfor %}
              </td>
            </tr>
          {% endfor %}
        </table>
  {% endif %}

Most Active Authors

This can be useful if you have a group of regular authors, to spur a little competition, keep people writing…

  
    <div class="SBHead"><h4>Most Active Authors</h4>
    <div class="SBCopy">
      <table class="SBTable">
        <tr>
          <th class="SBTableHead">Author</th>
          <th class="SBTableHead headRight">Stories</th>
        </tr>
        {% for user in current_site.most_active_authors %}
          <tr>
            <td class="SBTableCell">{{ user.link }}</td>
            <td class="cellRight">{{ user.stories_count }}</td>
          </tr>
        {% endfor %}
      </table>

Most Active Contributors

You can call them commenters, or community members, but you want to reward the folks who make your community work with a little shout-out!


    <div class="SBHead"><h4>Most Active Commenters</h4>
    <div class="SBCopy">
      <table class="SBTable">
        <tr>
          <th class="SBTableHead">Name</th>
          <th class="SBTableHead headRight">Comments</th>
        </tr>
        {% for user in current_site.most_active_commenters %}
          <tr>
            <td class="SBTableCell">{{ user.link }}</td>
            <td class="cellRight">{{ user.comments_count }}</td>
          </tr>
        {% endfor %}
      </table>

More tips soon!

2.0 for everyone

Christina Wodtke — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 17:00:08 GMT

Great article The WCM Renaissance(pdf), and particularly gratifying is this quote:

Web 2.0 is also exposing cracks in WCM space. Much the same way that WCM specialists accuse ECM vendors of “not getting it,” many WCM tools that only recently added blog and wiki functionality suffer from complicated interfaces, unfriendly URLs, and other un-Web 2.0 shortcomings.

In particular, the prevalence of sexy Ajax interfaces on the public web makes traditional WCM contributor interfaces seem very outdated. Vendors point out that re-engineering their product UIs is not a trivial matter.

Growing interest in user-generated content (UGC) has also created architectural challenges for integrated WCM packages the same way that the rise of the web caught many document management vendors flat-footed. In enterprise settings, most web-content management services and repositories live in a protected zone behind the firewall, and don’t naturally lend themselves to authors coming in from the public web.

To be sure, most enterprise customers don’t know yet what it means to “manage” user-generated content, and important questions are stalling some initiatives. Should we put UGC through an approval workflow? Do we need to archive it? Do we expose our internal classification scheme so we can cross-reference internal and user content? And so on.

I couldn’t have paid someone to better explain the PublicSquare approach. USG is a gruesome acronym, mind you, but the idea is crucial: publish with your audience, not at them.

EM and EN

Christina Wodtke — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 07:00:00 GMT

The Trouble With EM ‘n EN (and Other Shady Characters) by Peter K Sheerin is the best article I’ve found on the En dash and the Em dash, and how to render them easily.

The em dash (&#8212;) is used to indicate a sudden break in thought (“I was thinking about writing a—what time did you say the movie started?”), a parenthetical statement that deserves more attention than parentheses indicate, or instead of a colon or semicolon to link clauses. It is also used to indicate an open range, such as from a given date with no end yet (as in “Peter Sheerin [1969—] authored this document.”), or vague dates (as a stand-in for the last two digits of a four-digit year).

The en dash (&#8211;) is used to indicate a range of just about anything with numbers, including dates, numbers, game scores, and pages in any sort of document.

These characters are used so often by publishers — why don’t WYSIWYG pay them more attention?

New! Add RSS feeds to your Publication

Christina Wodtke — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 03:28:22 GMT

Erstwhile Matt Pelletier of EastMedia has just added the ability to add rss feeds as a way of populating content to the pages of your publication. It’s a easy way to tie in blogs, or any outside ap with an RSS feed. For example, let’s say you wanted to show the latest blog posts form friends using typepad, or say you wanted to pull in job listings from a job board… Just this!


   <ul>
   {% feedreader url: 'http://digg.com/', max: 15 as link %}
     <li><a href="{{ link.href }}">{{ link.description }}</a> 
     {{ link.extended }}</li>
   {% endfeedreader %}
   </ul>

5 reasons not to use email for login

Lars Pind — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 19:05:20 GMT

Using email for login seems a compelling choice, because an email address is guaranteed to be globally unique—no two people will have the same email. Unfortunately, there are some problems.

h2. 1. People have more than one email

People often have several different emails, and they can’t remember which one they used. Some of us have our own domain and use the firstname@lastname.com format always, but a lot of people have an email address from they employer, one from Hotmail, and a Gmail one, and they forget which one they used for your site. The next time they come back, they try to log in with the wrong one, think that they must not have an account, and register for another one.

h2. 2. People use fake emails

People are afraid of spam, and so they’ll tend to use fake emails, or mailinator.com emails, or something else that they’ll forget the next time they come back. Even people with their own domain may use nospam@lastname.com or yourservice@lastname.com or some other variation to avoid the risk of getting spam to their primary address. Again, they’ll end up registering a new account.

h2. 3. People change emails

Some people use an email address that belong to their employer and then change jobs. Or they have a hotmail account and it expires because they don’t use it often. For whatever reason, they may loose access to the mailbox. Now their account is associated with an email they no longer use, and they’re likely to forget that.

h2. 4. A username imposes fewer constraints

When you ask for email, there’s the constraint that it should be a working email, and it needs to follow a certain format. With usernames, people can choose freely, so long as other people haven’t used the same username. People will frequently have a username that they typically use, which can be their own name (lowercased and with dot instead of space, perhaps), or it can be a nickname that they often use.

h2. 5. A username lets people express themselves

With an inventive nickname, people get to express a bit of their personality in their username, if they so choose. It’s not necessarily something others get to see, but it can still give that warm fuzzy feeling. (and perhaps a bit more commitment in the long term?)

You’d think, that by asking for both username and email you’ll be asking for two things instead of one, but in practice, you’re better off going with username, and use email for backup.

Make it your own

Lars Pind — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 10:18:15 GMT

In case you haven’t noticed, a little over a week ago we put in a new theme editor, which lets you fully customize your design using the neat templating language “Liquid”:http://home.leetsoft.com/liquid.

Using this editor, you can completely alter the look of every reader-facing piece of the site. You start by cloning an existing theme, and from there you can do anything from merely tweaking the CSS to creating new partial templates that can be reused across the site. Very powerful stuff.

You will have a number of variables available. Some are always there, like ‘site’, which gives you access to things that relate to your entire publication. Others depend on which page you’re on.

We’re still working on some of the innards of these variables, and for this reason, we ask you to still be patient with us and not kill us if we break your pages occassionally. We will be sure to let you know when the interface is finally locked down and stable.

Once that happens, we will also provide some documentation for all of that, so you don’t have to fumble about blindly. We’re as anxious as you are.

If you make a great theme and would like to share it, please get in touch. We want to make a nice gallery of top-notch themes available for everyone.

Find all the good stuff on the Design tab from your Dashboard.