Second Draft of New TPM Community Tools
As promised by Josh early this morning, below the fold is a second preview of the new community tools we'll be launching in about 4 weeks (after we finish our server upgrade and move to the newest version of our blogging software).
The first picture is of the new interface you'll get to use for putting up your posts. The second is of the new layout for each reader blog. The third is of the community dashboard you'll have to keep track of people you think are interesting and people who are responding to you in comment threads.
Here are screen shots of the tools our Associate Publisher Al Shaw is building out of the sketches we showed you earlier.
(CLICK THE HERE FOR THE FULL IMAGE)
What you see here is a simplified version of the blogging interface we use here at TPM. When you click to update your blog, you'll be taken to this interface. It allows you to do four things:
- Write, tag, preview and post new blog posts. You can write them in rich text (hidden HTML code with buttons), or write your own HTML in raw.
- Manage your old posts (edit them, retag them, update them, delete them).
- Upload a header image for the top of your blog.
- Update the profile picture and information that show up in the sidebar of your blog.
This new blogging interface will fix so many of the issues we've been experiencing, from bad code to repeat posts to being unable to fix spelling mistakes or spacing problems. You'll also be able to embed videos or pictures.
(CLICK THE HERE FOR THE FULL IMAGE)
This is what your blog will look like. To simplify things, we've merged the profile and blog and put tabs to see your latest comments and recommendations behind your blog. You'll be able to edit your profile and upload a header image (to replace "MYTPM Blog") using the blogging interface. If you're looking at the blog of someone you like, you'll be able to hit the "follow" button below their profile picture to get notified when they post, comment, or recommend.
(CLICK THE HERE FOR THE FULL IMAGE)
The Community Dashboard is where you keep track of the activities of the people you follow and get notified when people respond to one of your comments or start to follow you. As you can see, these action are listed in reverse chronological order (probably the most recent 50 will show), and you can click on the "posts," "comments" or "recommendations" tabs to pull up just those. In the top right, you also have a nice little tiled list of the people you are following.
So what do you think? We're actively building with the hope of launching in early to mid-October so people can enjoy this before we get to Election Day. What are we missing? What would make this better? What's not intuitive?
Thanks, as always, for your patience as we build and your participation in our little community.
It's going to translate everything into Latin? Sweet!
September 11, 2008 2:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
After the latest upgrade, will the log in and posting difficulties be corrected? I mean things such as the need to log in multiple times to get a post accepted, even though you appear logged in when you surf to the TPM site.
I love the idea of being able to edit my posts even after submitting them.
September 11, 2008 2:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, those are server problems that will be fixed by the end of next week.
September 11, 2008 3:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Will we get our blogs back? the promised ones from before Feb?
September 11, 2008 3:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes. Your old blogs are still archived, and we'll be bringing those into to the new system shortly after we switch over.
September 11, 2008 3:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hot Dog!!!
October 10, 2008 2:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Looks good and I hope it goes smoothly because the new interface launch is so close to election day and that's when our comment will be more "important", not on the actual day.
In the meantime, since the new servers won't be online until next Friday is there any way you could add a banner to "submit" page(s) about the 500 error or better yet, substitute a quick custom error page for the 500? The multi-posts are making it seem like most of us are just talking to ourselves and whomever happens to be online for that hour, plus it's leading to lots of posts on identical subjects because somebody's previous post is gone.
September 11, 2008 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent suggestion about just changing how the 500 errors are handled. That should be an easy 5-minute change that won't affect anything else.
September 11, 2008 4:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lovely! Thanks for all you do to keep this site going, Andrew.
September 11, 2008 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I preferred the hand drawn look. You should go back to that.
September 11, 2008 5:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I want to offer my condolences to you Andrew and the rest of your TPM colleagues for the torrent of kvetching that is no doubt headed your way as all of this develops. 4 weeks you say? Could the timing be worse? If you have half the problems with this new stuff that you had with the current setup you may need to go into some blogoshphere equivalent of witness protection! Trying this just weeks before the election will just add that much more hysteria, etc... to the complaints.
May "The Force" be with you!
September 11, 2008 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Goes with the territory Oleeb. At the end of the day, better to have people pushing us to make it better cause they want to be here and participate then having no one care what works and what doesn't.
September 11, 2008 6:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Will there also be a preview function for comments?
If not, will the text checked by the blog preview function be compatible with the code used in the comment boxes? If so, then the blog preview could be a jury rigged comment preview.
September 11, 2008 8:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know this is a tiny point, and someone has probably already mentioned it, but the reader posts page (the currently active one and in your sample above) still has a link to TPM Horse's Mouth. I loved reading Greg on his own page and do miss it, but I understood his April 20, 2008 post to mean that the Horse's Mouth was not coming back as a standalone page.
September 11, 2008 11:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just fixed this. Thanks.
September 12, 2008 3:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
The new system looks very promising to me. I just wish we had it for the past two months, when there has been so much to say about the election. I mean, what could possible top Ms Palin, sorry, I mean Ste Palin as a generator of blog comments and posts?
Thank you to the staff for working so hard on this.
September 12, 2008 12:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
"follow" is so much more friendly-sounding than "stalk"
September 12, 2008 4:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Looks really excellent! Everyone has obviously put a lot of work into this.
Thanks!
September 12, 2008 5:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Can't wait to be in the computer age.
September 14, 2008 8:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
You cannot get this working soon enough. I truly miss the old site. Several blog posts have been lost in the ether. Not that I care that much (the catharsis is in writing them more than posting them) but it is annoying for the few that I put some real time and effort into via links, quotation, etc.
October 3, 2008 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
The only way I could go back and check if there were any replys to comments I had made, was to have recommended, a posting.
Will there be a way for us to cleanup our Profile Page?
Some of my Blogs were inadverantly triplicated and I'd appreciate a way to clean up my mess.
October 10, 2008 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Looks more tool oriented to me. More the tools, the better. It gives you more control.
October 10, 2008 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
I Really Like the Follower Idea
and see who is following you.
The control panel that tells you when your comment is commented on - Cool-Beans!
October 10, 2008 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Is it in any way possible to support Textile or Markdown for the text?
October 10, 2008 6:15 PM | Reply | Permalink