It seems silly to have all assets be displayed on the search results list, especially if some are just images (and especially if some of those images have funny/incomplete titles). Also, we create some assets specifically for our e-mail newsletter, and those are not to be displayed anywhere else on our website, except in the newsletter, and those are showing up in the search results as well.

There must be some way to designate an asset to not be "searchable". Please advise. Thank you!

We are considering building a new "simple" elections platform for the 2020 election cycle and beyond. This would be more streamlined and easy to use than the old Election Stats, and would include AP election data for state and national elections, leaving you to focus on local. You'd still need to update your local race results as often as you want to make them available for your visitors, but the state and national would be automatic.

I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on what you would like to see. Is this something your site could use?

What functionality would you want in such a product?

How are you currently handling election results?

In the new AP API delivery, in the preview of the image, you see (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) in the caption. When you open the image to publish on your site, the credit has been removed from the caption, but in the byline field you usually see Seth Wenig - staff, AP or Leila Coker - stringer, AP. Sometimes you see just the name and no organization. 

The reader doesn't care what the title is of the photographer, so we would need to remove this prior to publishing. 

We are used to seeing the credit in the caption, and styled like how it appears in the preview (AP Photo/Seth Wenig). 

My request is the photo byline be styled as you see it in the caption. If that is not possible, the next easiest thing might be to remove the title from the byline. 

If a couple of photos are added to a story, the photos are displayed under the headline; hooray! If a YouTube video is added to a story, the video is displayed under the headline; hooray!

But if there are both photo and video child assets, the visual under the headline defaults to photos, and pushes the video to the bottom of the story on mobile or a sidebar on desktop (unless the video is dragged into the body of the story). That's much less exciting.

If an article has both photos and videos, we'd like to have the flexibility to choose which is dominant. The easiest way: The asset listed first should win. (If it's not the easiest way, it's still what we'd like to happen.) Is that possible?

Does anyone have examples of staff directory pages they've created outside of static HTML pages on their sites? How about newsletter list landing pages that are more than the out of the box "list" of newsletters available. 

I think a nice feature would be a custom option within a block to schedule it for certain times.

We currently have a few blocks that I only have show up on a single day of the week so I manually disable it when we don't need it.  Having something with the block options itself where I could schedule it to enable and disable itself would be great.

For those who use the TownNews e-edition:

We think it's important for our organization to control the assets in the River of News. Right now, according to TownNews, there is no way to control that. Basically, it just shows up in whatever order it does. They think it's feasible, but asked me to put in a feature request.

How important do you think this is? Would you use it to place importance on the the content in your River of News?

Thanks,

Thomas 

Does anyone have an example of a custom calendar export template that they would be willing to share with us? We are looking at improving our calendars and are getting some resistance from people who want to keep using the text files they've always used for building our print calendars.

As we get more and more readers moved from print subscriptions to digital-only subscriptions, we've had several older readers ask how they can easily print the crosswords, jumbles and Sudoku puzzles from the e-edition.

My request is for a simply clipping tool to make it easier to print a portion of the e-edition, similar to the print/save tool used by Newspapers.com. It works quite effortlessly and is user-friendly, even for readers who lack tech skills.

Webinar recording now available.

At our November customer webinar, Susan Bell, product manager, and Christine Masters, director of product management, will show off what’s new in the BLOX Now app and in BLOX CMS.

Topics will include:

• Exciting updates to the BLOX Now app, including: lucrative new ad positions, powerful full-site searching, updated weather features, and enhanced subscription support.
• An introduction to BLOX Media Library, a new way to keep track of images and other binary files in BLOX CMS.
• Fighting ad inventory fraud within your apps with new “app-ads.txt” support.
• . . . and much more!

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

Facebook is offering an instant article paywall that lets publishers keep 100 percent of subscription revenue.
Details here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tdcq6ocqd1x3hoo/2019-07-25%2013.36%20Subscriptions%20within%20Facebook%20Instant%20Articles.mp4?dl=0

The page that talks about instant article paywall(https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/subscriptions/) shows that the integration requires custom FB Pixels events being triggered, on login, and during purchase.
This level of integration doesn’t appear to be something that can be done in GTM, nor in BLOX templates, and seems to  require BLOX software support.The page that discusses account linking (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/subscriptions/account-linking) mentions the need for “signed pixel events.”
That page shows sample code in PHP to generate the signed data, which requires access to the FB App secret, which would be unique to each BLOX website, just as the FB App is unique to that website.
This whole process requires running code server side to keep secrets. The “account linking” event requires an account_id to link the FB user to the BLOX user (for subscriber access details.) The only really reliable/secure account_id is the user’s UUID, which isn’t exposed in a cookie, so the front-end doesn’t have access to it .

Webinar recording now available

Join Tim Turner, iQ Engage program manager at TownNews, and Tim McDonough, manager of client strategy at Lotame, as they show you how TownNews and Lotame can help you improve ad targeting, and make more money with your in-house (first-party) data.

Topics included:

• Using your own proprietary audience data to maximize advertising revenue
• Augmenting your in-house data with third-party audience data to unlock new ad targeting opportunities
• Expanding your advertisers’ reach with look-alike modeling
• . . . and more!

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

Following up on Rob Weir's question, but with a Facebook focus. A Wordpress plug in was just announced making it easy for all publishers to access instant articles. Does TownNews have a plan to quickly match this?

What I would like, if possible, is to have a column in Editorial/Assets next to Title, Status, Sections and Start Time for Notification Date and Time.

1) What problem(s) does this idea solve? Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.
As of now, to remember or view what assets are set for you have to open each individual asset. This takes many steps and extra time. Also, as you know, opening an asset after a notification has been set increases the odds the post is prone to errors.

2) How often would you use this feature?
Daily. It would be used just like the Title, Status, Sections and Start Time columns.

3) How many people in your organization would use this feature?

Everyone who posts assets.

It would be nice to have a detection and pop up for when people are viewing our site in incognito mode.    It should allow for a message and perhaps a promo code to purchase a subscription at a special offer.    

* It should work like the ad blocker detector*