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One of the feature requests we hear a lot is a way to include a custom message with each post before publishing it to Facebook or Twitter. Custom messages require a little extra effort to write, but they add a personal touch and improve engagement, and hence distribution, of your blog. So today I'm happy to announce our latest publishing tool, Quick Publisher.
You can access Quick Publisher from the top menu on networkedblogs.com. You select the post you want to publish and the Facebook and Twitter targets you want to publish to; and you can also add a custom message if you like. You hit "Publish" and you're done.
You can also open Quick Publisher by going to your blog profile and then click on the "syndication" link under each individual post. In that case, the post will be pre-selected for you and you can publish it right away. This will eventually replace the manual syndication option we have right now.
Also, in the dialog window, if your latest post has not been pulled to NetworkedBlogs yet, you can click the "refresh" button and it will do an immediate fetch of all the feeds of your blogs to check if there are new posts in any of them. It's equivalent to hitting the "pull now" button on all your blogs at once. Nice, right?
One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the Quick Publisher operates separately from the automatic syndication feature. In other words, if you have set up your blog to publish automatically, and then you publish a post manually using Quick Publisher, you'll end up with duplicate posts. Quick Publisher is good for blogs that are not set up to publish automatically, or in case automatic publishing fails.
And, one more feature: you can use Quick Publisher for status updates as well, not only to share your blog posts. So if you have several Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that you want to update at the same time, this is the perfect tool for it. I hope you enjoy using it, and we'd love to hear your thoughts on how to make it better.
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Today we're introducing a few updates related to Blog tabs on Facebook pages: first, we're making it much easier to add a Blog tab to your Facebook page. Rather than the multi-step process that was required before, now you can just go to your blog profile page on NetworkedBlogs and click the new "Add Tab to Facebook Page" menu, and you're set.
The second feature we're announcing today (this one is for for paying customers) is the ability to customize your tab by choosing a theme that fits your content and style. If your use a lot of pictures, then you can choose a style that displays your pictures prominently, and if you prefer a dark theme, we got that too. Also, once you sign up for a paid plan, you can switch back and forth between themes as often you like, and you'll also have access to new themes as we add them.
You can see a custom theme in action on our own NetworkedBlogs page.
Another customization we're offering today is the ability to hide the NetworkedBlogs branding from your tab so your brand gets all the attention. This option is available on the Plus plan. Check out our new features, and if interested,
sign up to one of the premium plans to get started.
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One of the most common questions we get on a regular basis is: why doesn't NetworkedBlogs pull my posts successfully? And after investigating, we find that most of the errors tend to be simple things like using the wrong feed URL, misconfiguring FeedBurner, missing to enable "full feeds" so that images are included, and so forth. These settings are usually easy to fix if you know where to look. So today we're announcing the new Feed Tester tool that should help with that.
On your blog profile page, you will now see a new menu item, Feed Tester. It runs a lot of tests against your feed and gives you a brief report of the results. Here are some of the errors that Feed Tester can uncover:
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Missing, invalid, or wrong feed URL.
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Blog taking too long to respond (more than 10 seconds).
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Feed with missing posts.
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Feeds that are formatted incorrectly.
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Feeds that don't contain the latest articles.
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Feeds that don't have the post images.
These cases represent almost 90% of all the feed related questions we get on our support site. So we hope this tool will help a lot in finding and solving problems faster for everyone. Give it a try and let us know how you like it.
News Page Available Inside Facebook
Another update we'd like to mention, which we pushed earlier today, is that the
News page is now available inside Facebook again. If you usually go to our Website directly, then you will not see anything different. However, if you visit NetworkedBlogs using the bookmark on the left side menu in Facebook, then you'll notice that you can view the News page now without leaving Facebook. We hope this makes it easier to get in, check the latest, and get out easily.
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If you've been keeping up, you probably know all about the updates we pushed in the last three weeks and the discussions around them in our forums (links below). But if you haven't visited NetworkedBlogs recently, here is a quick update for you. We also pushed a few small updates today that I summarize at the end.
Why Change?
The original code for NetworkedBlogs was written a long time ago when we had few users. As time passed and the application grew, a lot of changes were made. Also, the platforms we connect with (such as Facebook and Twitter) changed a lot too. The code was extended beyond it's original design to support all these changes, but that came with a price. Fixing errors took a long time, and adding new features was really hard. In order to continue to innovate and be able to fix problems faster, we had to make big changes. And, hence, the recent updates.
This initial release was not intended to add new features, but rather to replicate most of the features we had in the old system and remove features that were rarely used to free up space for new things. We did improve the user interface, though, and tried to make it easier to use and navigate. We also introduced a few bugs as well. Not on purpose, obviously, but as you'd expect with any big update, some errors are bound to slip beyond the best testing effort. In the last two weeks, we fixed most of the errors we found or reported to us, and we're continuing to listen and fix bugs every day. If you're aware of a problem that's unsolved yet, please let us know.
List of Changes:
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Blog profiles have a new design. For example, check out the NetworkedBlogs profile. This follows our previous updates to profile pages and the welcome page.
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If you use our 'Blog' tab on your fan page, you'll notice that it has been updated as well. The update makes it easier to edit and customize the tab without having to navigate to another page. We also removed the syndication settings from the tab because they were confusing. All syndication settings can be managed from the syndication page.
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The blog directory was simplified. Some of the listings such as "popular blogs by region" and "popular blogs by company" were removed because changes in Facebook made it much harder to create proper rankings. Since these lists were rarely used, we prefer to focus our efforts on other features.
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We removed the "friends" menu because the functionality it offered is now provided by the welcome page.
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The blog registration page was improved to make adding or editing blogs easier.
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The part of the app that was served inside Facebook is now on the Website for consistency.
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If you've upgraded your blog to Premium Listing, you'll notice that the highlighting of premium blogs in the directory is gone ...
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Continuing our effort to refresh NetworkedBlogs to be more fun and social, we launched a welcome page last night to help new users get started discovering blogs they might like. It's a simple way to see blogs and other news sources that cover topics you like, and also to see what your friends read and write. Check it out at:
http://w.networkedblogs.com/welcome
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Today we're releasing a new user profile page. It's nicer, faster, and more interesting. When checking someone's profile, you can see what they write, read, and a quick bio about them (if they provide one). Check out your profile page here:
http://w.networkedblogs.com/user
And, in addition to that, we added hover cards to the news page so you can hover your mouse pointer over a blog name or a user picture and quickly get more information about them without having to visit their page.
This update is part of a series of updates we're planning to launch in the next few weeks to refresh the site and make it more user friendly. We like to hear your feedback about it, so let us know what you think in the comments or on our support forums.
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As you might've noticed, over the weekend we launched a new update to our news page. The new page loads faster, looks nicer, and emphasizes the value of your votes on articles. It also paves the way for upcoming updates we're planning to release in the next few weeks.
As part of the update, we removed the small discussion board that we had on the old page because it was used mostly for promotional messages. We're planning a better alternative that we hope would be much nicer and more engaging.
Try the new page and tell us what you think:
http://networkedblogs.com/news
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Today we're launching an update to our app's home page to reduce the clutter and make it easier to read. If you're used to the old home page, you might feel that the new page is lighter, even a little empty, but we think you'll like it better once you get used to it. This is an experiment and is the first among many new updates to come. Please let us know what you think on this thread:
http://help.networkedblogs.com/entries/421633-hope-page-update-jan-30
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If you embed videos in your blog posts often, you'll like this new update. In addition to pulling images from your posts, we now detect videos embedded in your post and detect their thumbnail images and use them when publishing to Facebook.
We currently support YouTube and Viemo videos. And we'll add support for other video embeds as you, our users, ask for them. If you embed videos from other sources, please let us know and include your feed so we can use it in our testing to support your embeds. Please contact us on this thread:
http://support.networkedblogs.com/ninua/topics/fetching_video_thumbnail_images
Although we detect video embeds now, we give higher priority to images. So if your post contains an image and a video, we'll use the image, not the video.
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Happy holidays, everyone. Today, I'm glad to announce a new syndication page that is simpler and adds features that many of you have been asking for. Especially, the ability to see a preview of how posts look on Facebook before you publish them. We're hosting the new page on our Web site, rather than the Facebook app because it allows us to make it run faster and gives us more space to work with. Here is a quick summary of the main features:
- Select the blog you want to manage.
- List of the target pages to which new blog posts will be published. Click on each target to expand it and see more details.
- Add a Facebook target (profile, page, group or app) or a Twitter target.
- A preview of how the post will look like when published to Facebook.
- You can customize how your posts look such as hiding the NetworkedBlogs toolbar, hiding post images, ..etc.
- A high-level count of how many blogs you're syndicating to how many targets.
We're keeping the old syndication page for a few days, and then we'll replace it with the new one once we feel comfortable that everything is working as expected. Please try the new syndication page and let us know what you think.
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