Power Users

Erin already covered this in the piece on the new Radiohead contest, but I thought I should also make an official announcement here:

One of our relatively unique features has been allowing users, albeit only verified users, to post snips of code in their comments on the site. This usually means photo links or video embeds from YouTube or similar.

We only allowed verified users to do so as a security measure to prevent anything that might goof up the site.

However, we've now made it so any user can post YouTube videos in comments. And you don't even need to do the whole embed code. All you have to post is the URL of the video and we take care of the rest.

So this:

...becomes this:

Easy as pie. Note that this only works with YouTube for now. If you want to geek out with any of the other myriad video providers, you'll have to become verified. (Otherwise, we'd have to do individual programming for every new provider.)

Right now the dev team is working on building out our new ad server (or possibly the piece of software that will communicate with a third-party server) so that laymen on our staff can make Daily You advertising happen without us having to program around every deal by hand.

We all know this is core to our business, but I also know that right now everyone really wants to work on a mobile/iPhone version. We have an anemic and clunky mobile version right now, but we want to roll out something that will use your location to be super-useful in terms of finding info on the fly. But we also know that the business needs the ad server first.

So, in the meantime, I'll share a stopgap that I'm using on my own phone. There is an online iPhone builder that turns any RSS feed into a web-based iPhone app.

For instance, here's the link for our PegPicks events. Send that link to your phone via email, and it should be pretty easy to navigate.

Here's latest stories.

And latest comments.

You can do this with any RSS feed you like, and we have thousands of them. If you're not conversant in such things, let us know a site category you'd like and we'll make you a link.

(And yes, I know that Power Users has been fallow lately. I don't really expect that to change for a couple weeks, but someday soon I'm going to block out a whole day to make some more screencasts.)

Only the geekiest of our regular users will probably care about this one, but I'm pretty psyched about it:

One of the things we want to do this year is improve our "bounce rate." That's people who hit our site because of a search somewhere on the Interwebs, read that page and then disappear into the ether.

The problem is that even though we know and you know that this isn't your average everyday news site, searchers often hit a page that might not communicate that very quickly so they get what they came for and move on.

My tipping point on this was the umpteenth call I went on with members of our sales team where the prospect said "I've never heard of you," only to recant when they saw a page of the site in front of them. It's a long, arduous battle to brand yourself in this day and age -- and we weren't happy to wait for nature to take its course.

So, we've added what the dev team has dubbed "search hooks" to virtually every type of page on the site. If you are logged in or coming from a bookmark, you should never see them.

BUT, if you're a noob you'll get a little gently-invasive notice, customized by the type of page you're looking at, letting you know about other things you might want to check out.

So if I I'm not logged in and hit David Gouldin's podcast on the DCTA on Google News, I get a page that looks like this. (Actually the page loads and then the tease drops down):

Or if I search for tonight's They Might Be Giants show on Google and click into the site, it looks like this:

Will be interesting to see how much impact this makes on registration and the overall activity in our community.

First, I know it has been a long time between posts on ye olde new Power Users blog. After more than a year of no one taking vacations around here, seems like everyone took one at about the same time. So, we've been running a bit shorthanded, and low on time to build screencasts.

I'm hoping to use the Presidents' Day holiday to do one, but in the meantime, one of our true Power Users, Scott Doyle, created a tutorial you might find handy.

The backstory is this: Some folks tend to use adblocker software to keep from being interrupted by unwanted advertisements. Scott and a few other users realized that while that's their general modus operandi, they might actually want to see the targeted ads here at Pegasus News.

So here's Scott's tutorial on how to alter your preferences. I'll be back on the other side to talk a bit about what your expectations should be if you do so...

Just FYI, for peeps who use Firefox and have the Adblock Plus add-on, here's instruction on how to make page exceptions (promised you I'd figure it out Miko, albeit a couple of weeks late). There's a handy tutorial behind the link "Show me how this is done".

Basically:

1. If you don't have Adblock in your toolbar (I didn't), you first need to choose "Show in toolbar" from Adblock's Options.



2. Be sure you're on PegNews.com.



3. From the toolbar, click the arrow on the right of the ABP icon and select one of the following:
   
   
   
   
   
   • Disable on www.pegasusnews.com (allows ads on all PegNews pages); or
   
   
   
   • Disable on this page only (ads would only be displayed on the homepage).
   
   
   
   
   
   

Example:

I personally chose to disable AdBlock on all pages b/c I'm interested in seeing just how much it'll affect my Pegnewsin'.

So, the reason the generally ad-averse might want to see our ads is that we're on a quest to use The Daily You to ensure that, eventually, every ad is a wanted ad. Are we there yet? Nope. Are we close? No-- but we're closer than most and closing in daily. At minimum, you'll find a lot more ads here are relevant than on most sites (even local sites) because they're largely local. Some, you'll notice are targeted because of where you live. A few others will be targeted based on your interests gleaned from your reading habits, whether they be crime news or bluegrass music. That targeting will increase over time, and hopefully get you to the point that you're generally glad when you see an ad.

Meantime, it's at least a better way to stay aware of our myriad contests. And it's a way to support what we're doing here, particularly if you think you get more out of your participation here than on other sites.

Big ups to Scott for creating this tutorial. More TK...

I know we've been slow about getting Episode 2 of our screencast series posted here. To tide you over, here's a fun view on what it can be like to teach new technology -- Not coming from a place of superiority here. I've been as bad or worse than the scribe depicted here. But should produce a chuckle for anyone who has ever tried to help their parents with a computer problem.

(Hat tip to Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0)

This is our first outing on the whole screencast thing, so be gentle. Today we focus on the features available to people who register address information in their user profiles.

Helpful links:

• Your neighborhood



• Event search



• Your profile

While analyzing our traffic and registration statistics, we've learned that the people who use PegasusNews.com the most are the ones who take advantage of the site's advanced features. They're the "power users," while our more infrequent visitors pop in to read a story or check an event and then move on, perhaps missing some of the cooler features. And occasionally, we even see a comment from one of our regulars exclaiming in wonder over some newfound feature that we've had for months.

Part of the problem is that there's so much going on here that it can be hard to keep up. So, we're going to start running a series of screencasts on this blog (which we'll also link to from the "Help" page) in order to show you how to use some of the advanced features. We're putting these in a blog so that we can have open comments for you to ask questions and suggest topics for future screencasts.

We hope that this will make all of the local goodness found here more available to everyone. And, without further ado...