Hey Everyone, 

    This blog will detail site-wide tech updates and happenings. We’ve always intended to make a blog like this but are just now getting around to it. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.  We’ll do our best to keep this current, but give us a buffer of a few days or so for a new post after an update.

To the point: 

As is obvious, AmhPub continues to evolve with lots of recent changes and some just on the horizon. Here is a brief tally of site additions in the last few weeks:

1) The new “Help Desk” feature (visible to you as a tab in your backend). Please use this to file any questions about the site so we can keep track of all outstanding issues in one place.

2) The ability to “subscribe” to a post’s comments. If you’re logged in and comment on someone’s post, you can now check a box called “Subscribe upon placing your comment,” located at the bottom of the comment box. Checking this will cause an email to be sent to you whenever anyone else later adds a comment to that post. You can later unsubscribe if you wish through a management backend.

3) New media embedding support. The “write” tab in your dashboard should now include buttons for inserting videos/media from other sites (youtube, flickr, etc) into your posts. Mouse over each button to see what it enables you to import.

4) A strange-looking “ShareThis!” button at the bottom of every post. Clicking this enables you to link/insert the page you’re looking at to over 20 popular social networking sites. It should be pretty intelligent in how it goes about things. If you want to add a post to your facebook profile, for example, click this button on that post and you’ll have the option to make it happen.

5) A snazzy (if slightly bizarre) tag cloud on every author’s blog. It’s written in flash, looks cool and allows for click-throughs to the underlying posts. Make sure to tag your posts so it can be of use! This being said, it’s set to default to only displaying the top 25 most-used tags, so if you are an incredible tag fiend realize that not all will be shown. 

6) The “recent comments” menu, google search, and added navigation links up on the homepage.  These are all rather self-explanatory.  In general we’ve found the google search to work well but be a little picky on queries; you’re best bet is to search for an email address (sans the @amherst.edu), not a person’s name, if you’re trying to find a post/comment by someone in particular. For the top links, please provide feedback on whether you’d like to axe or add any.

7) The ‘all blogs” link on the homepage sidebar and under the “Student Blogs” tab. Clicking this will display a list of all active blogs on the site, ordered chronologically by latest post. It takes a while to load as it’s a live query, but can be useful if you’re looking for an overview of people’s recent activity.  If someone’s post or comment has “fallen off” the recent posts/recent comments lists this is a good way to find it.

8) The little orange button at the top right of every page: rss. If you use rss you can now click this button to subscribe to individual blogs or the entire site’s activity with your feed reader.

That’s all for now…Keep on reading, posting and commenting.

Erik