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Re-making headlines

For the last 2 months, we've been working on a cleaner, simpler admin interface for news.

You can expect to see these changes in the coming weeks—but for now, here's a preview:

Before_after

Previously, there were 17 or 18 different things—or even more, depending on how you count them—that you had to fill out in order to put some news up on your website. We've managed to get that down to just 3 things, with 1 optional extra.

As you can see, writing news won't feel so much like a lengthy interrogation any more, and you'll be able to concentrate on the most important part—the news itself.

For news, all the different categories and labels are replaced by a new concept: topics. Over the coming months, topics will become the most important organisational tool for all resources—resources being news, frequently-asked questions, links, articles. And 2 new types of resources—which we're not quite ready to reveal, but I think you'll find them really useful. 

I'm very excited about the re-made news interface, and looking forward to applying the same principles of simplification to the other resources too. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Please feel free to leave a comment here on the blog, or email our support crew.

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Nov 22, 2011
James said...
Hi Luke

It looks great!

Can we still put url links into a news item? I cannot quite tell from the screen shot, we quite often put links to websites, events etc. in a news item and I would not want that feature to be removed.

I like the topics idea and to have the same topics across the different resources, it should greatly simplify things.

James

Nov 23, 2011
Luke Sampson said...
Hi James, yes you can still add links—you just highlight some words, and click the link button to enter a URL and turn them into a link.

The benefit of doing it this way is that your links are in-context to what you're writing, rather than the sort of out-of-context footnotes that the old form encouraged, where you write “see below” and the reader has to go looking for the link.

Most of the time, in-context links will be the way to go, but you can still add links as footnotes if you need to—just add a numbered list at the bottom of your news, and add links as above.

Nov 23, 2011
Paul Lockman (University of Melbourne) said...
Hi Luke
Can you please explain how the targeting will work?
For example, on the Newsletter (or e-bulletin as we call it) all items are targeted to student's preferences. If I lodge a news item that is relevant to Engineering students only, how can I be sure that it will not appear on an Arts student's newsletter?
Thanks - Paul
Nov 24, 2011
Luke Sampson said...
Hi Paul, good question. So for newsletter targeting—previously, newsletters would include items based on students' campus, discipline and service category selections.

It works ok for things like jobs and events, but for what we're going to start calling “resources” (news, links, articles, FAQs), a lot of the time these things are targeted at everyone (e.g. All Disciplines), i.e. not really targeted at all. So students would just end up seeing mainly generic resources. Which is fine, but the targeting isn't really working.

So going forward, newsletters will contain 2 different types of item:
1) targeted jobs and events (no changes here)
2) general resources that have been specifically marked for inclusion in newsletters, by adding a “general” topic.

So if you have some engineering news that you don't want arts students to see, you wouldn't put it in the “general” topic.

Another benefit of this approach (besides simplicity) is that it changes newsletters from fully-automated email (*cough* spam) to something that is more carefully constructed by people, instead of a computer. This is the direction we're thinking of taking newsletters in the long term—to something where you can have a separate newsletter for, say Engineering students, and carefully choose highly relevant info to be on that newsletter, and everyone in Engineering would see the same thing.

Hope that answers the question. We'll be posting more about topics soon too. And if you send out any newsletters in the next couple of weeks, we won't include any news on newsletters, just to be safe (only applies to sites we've updated since Nov 21).

Nov 25, 2011
Paul Lockman (University of Melbourne) said...
Hi Luke
Thanks for the explanation of the targeting. I will lodge a few news items soon and play around with it. But I will wait for more information on topics to be provided.

I have another question about expiry dates......
I don't see anywhere on our list of current news items nor on the news item itself what the expiry date is. It's nowhere to be found either when you write a new news item.

Has this been overlooked?

Regards,
Paul

Nov 29, 2011
Luke Sampson said...
Hi Paul, removing expiry dates from news was a very conscious decision.

Expiry dates are good for things like vacancy listings where the listing becomes irrelevant after a certain time, or employers are paying for a limited period of advertising. For news though, the content naturally becomes less relevant over time, but it should never really expire.

News is tied to a point in time—when it was published—and we care most about news that was published recently. News from 3 years ago is far less relevant and will naturally become harder to find because it could be 5 pages back. But we don't want to hide it completely—it's a historical record of what happened, and that's valuable.

Expiry dates on news feel artificial and encourage a type of curation that is really unnecessary and counter-productive. We all have a feel for how news works in the non-CareerHub world, and by making CareerHub reflect these real-world conventions it makes CareerHub that much easier to understand.

Nov 29, 2011
jamesmears said...
Hi all

We just got the news update - bit of a surprise as I was hoping to get it on the .dev server first to try it out before going live.

Comments so far:

I think the topics would be better as a select list (or work the same as adding labels) rather than the predictive text filter type box. As it stands an admin user has to remember what all of the topics are to type them, I can see that some topics will not get used because they will forget about them. A list is better because you can actually see what the topics are to select from.

Our Admins here still want to be able to expire some news automatically after a certain date (to expire an item would not be a required field or a default option). We have some things like competitions with a closing date that we promote via news items, we would want that news item to expire after the closing date of the comp so that students do not keep seeing the details. We will now have to remember to find the news item and manually delete it - this is a loss of a feature that we use.

Our RSS feed of news has broken meaning anybody subscribed to our published feed will not get an update.

When generating a news RSS feed you have removed the general options box to limit the number of items in the feed and the sort order etc. - could this be added back in please.

Cheers

James

Nov 30, 2011
Luke Sampson said...
Hi James, thanks for your comments.

As of now you have 81 topics, so a drop-down list would probably fill your screen and more. We'll be posting some more info on topics soon, but try not to think of them as categories—topics are much less rigid. They'll naturally expand in number, and there will be some that get used less than others—that's ok. They're a tool to help you organise resources in a way that's easily discoverable by students. Try to think of topics that students will be interested in and will think to look for.

When you're writing news, if you're not sure what the existing topics are the topic box will search for you—you just need to guess a letter or two. And if you can't remember what the topics are, maybe it's not a great topic after all—will students think to look for it if you can't remember it? I think this is one of those things that might take a little bit of adjusting to get used to, but after using it for a while you'll start to see the benefits.

Similar thing with expiring news items: I think you'll find it's actually works quite well if you see news as a historical account of what's happened. We have plans for how to make this work really well for students, but even now if you're browsing news on the student site, the news is tied to a specific date and people understand that news from the past might not be so relevant any more—it's still good to keep a record of it. If you absolutely need to redact some info, you can always edit the news item to say, e.g. “we removed this information because it's no longer relevant”. I personally wouldn't recommend removing information, but you can do it if you need to. If you forget to remove news that's old, other people have probably forgotten about it too ;)

Sorry about the RSS glitches—they should be fixed now. We have plans to remove a lot of the complicated options around generating RSS feeds, but we'll try to keep everything working for the feeds that everyone's already published.

Dec 02, 2011
jamesmears said...
Hi Luke

Thanks, the RSS feed is fixed.

Hopefully not a stupid question but I cannot see how to edit Topics, 81 is far too many (how did you select what to use as a topic on our site), I want a clearly set list of standard topics otherwise it will get out of control. Also it seems that any Admin can add new topics, this will not work because the list will constantly grow making it hard for students to find anything and no doubt we will get duplicates with different spellings or versions of the same thing.

I love the idea of topics but they need to be a managed list for Admins to select from and not a free for all - we have too many staff for that. Could the Topis list not look like the interface for adding a label with the scrollable list and the search feature, we have over 100 labels and this works really well.

I am afraid we disagree with you on expiring news items on a certain date. There are some things we will want to remove (this is what our department staff are telling me), I guess we will have to live with deleting things but it would be nice to have the automatic expiry as an optional feature rather than removing it completely. Even out Uni wide CMS can expire things automatically as an option.

Thanks

James

Dec 03, 2011
Luke Sampson said...
Hi James,

Yes, you edit topics from Admin > Configuration > Topics (last item in the first box). If you do get 2 duplicates, you can combine them by renaming one to match the other. And just delete/backspace all the way to remove a topic completely.

The topics you see have come from combining all the previous category selections (news, discipline, service, and campus) and labels if there were any. So, some of these auto-generated topics will look a bit strange, and you'll probably need to delete a few that don't make sense—we thought this was better than potentially losing information.

I hear what you're saying about organising topics, but it'd be good if you could give topics a chance before deciding that it needs to be more like what we had before. Unlike categories and labels, you could have 500 topics and it will still work—students will see the most popular topics if they're browsing. And if they're searching, more topics will lead to more relevant matches—the topics are more likely to match what they're interested in. Admins won't have to worry about conforming to the ordained list of topics, they can feel creative freedom to come up with the topics that best describe the resource they're adding. Another admin might come through later and decide to add their new pet topic, and retrospectively add existing resources to that topic—and hopefully you can see this is adding value to your collection of resources, rather than messing up the organisation.

I get the impression you're getting some kickback—if so, I apologise for putting you through that. I don't want to cause unnecessary disruption, and we wouldn't be making these changes if we didn't think they were really good and important.

Luke

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