New Release: Bug Squashing

Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

We pushed out a new release today on Kapost. We’ve updated the moderation queue so you can now promote content directly from there.   Also, we fixed some connectivity problems that caused some users to think they were connected to the WordPress (or other) sites when they actually weren’t. Some other fixes:

  • You can now add an image from a URL with a https label
  • If you’ve customized your background color, your article pages will look ok now
  • You can now set your Primary site’s name in the “Connect” area on Settings so the link in your upper left area shows a name instead of a URL
  • A big bug that occurred if you uploaded a user image from Settings has been removed

As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions or bugs in our forum.  Thanks!

Javascript Widget is Now Available

Posted on 21. Jul, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

We did a big release today that saw 2 big improvements:

  1. Connection Options. We added a javascript widget so anyone, on any platform can add the ability for someone to contribute.  If you’re on WordPress, Moveable Type or some other platforms, you can still push these submissions back to our site.  We also added documentation of our API in case you have a custom platform
  2. Improvements on installing the service.  There was some confusion as to how the Newsroom works and what you need to do to get going.  As a result, we’ve brought back the Setup Manager which provides step by step instructions on how to get going

As always we have lots of bug fixes under the hood too, such as corrected registration problems.  Please use our forum to add in any more comments or suggestions you might have

New Name: Kapost (plus a release)

Posted on 10. Jul, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Company Updates, Releases

Welcome to Kapost!

Many of you know us as Grogger but as of today we’re officially rebranding ourselves as Kapost. You can now find us on Twitter at kapostful and on Facebook here.

In addition to changing our name, we did a big release of our plugin and add-on service today. You can now:

  • Categories. If you have WordPress categories, you can choose to use those in your contributor’s posts.
  • Custom URL. If you want to use your own URL with Kapost, you can do that by simply changing your A-Name record
  • Auto-Promote. You can set the Kapost service to auto-send content to your blog if it receives a certain number of votes. This empowers your community to tell you what content is the best. Also, if you set this value to 0, content will flow immediately into your blog

As part of our new name change, you’ll need to install the new Kapost plugin. You can find that inside WordPress by simply searching for “Kapost”

As always, let us know if you have any problem or suggestions by either contacting us or placing that info into our forum

WordPress Plugin Available

Posted on 28. Jun, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

It’s been an interesting month as we’ve been busy developing a version of Grogger that can work with any WordPress blog.  In the past, we heard from lots of you that you love Grogger, but don’t want to move off your own platform.  We heard you loud and clear and as a result we now have an alpha version of a plugin that will place a widget on your blog that will allow anyone to submit a piece of content.

Specifically, the plugin:

  • Places a widget on the right side module
  • Creates a new “Community” section associated with your site where all the submissions live
  • Allows anyone to easily register when posting.  They can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others
  • Allows the owner of the site to view any submission, and if they like it, they can push it back to their WordPress blog

Go ahead, give it a try.  It’s still in Alpha so we’d love any feedback you can (contact us)

Here’s a video demonstrating the plugin functionality

Release: New Video Management

Posted on 11. May, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Blog Posts, Releases

We did another release today and although we added some nice stuff, most of the release was filled with bug fixes.

What you’ll notice is that we’ve made it easier to embed videos into posts. Now, there is an Insert Video button on top of the article area. Clicking this will ask you to insert a YouTube URL. Doing so will insert that YouTube video into your article. As with images, once the video is in the article, you can move it around, align it or delete it.

Some other items we fixed:

  • The message displayed to new users looks better now if your Grog name is especially long
  • Occasionally the editors of a topic would not appear
  • Facebook “Share” buttons are now changed to “Like” buttons
  • There is a description area that will now show up by default on your Grog.  You can click the “Edit” link below it to change the contents or there is a checkbox in Settings to remove it
  • If you had problems editing your text, whether it was aligning photos or doing blockquotes, they are fixed
  • If you are now a Trusted User or an Editor, you won’t see a Captcha appear ever

As always feel free to leave a comment in our forum and let us know what features you’d like to see.

Release: GetGrogger.com Update

Posted on 05. May, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

Another release was pushed out today.

The biggest part of this release is an update to GetGrogger.com. We’ve added videos, pricing details, and much more information about our service.  If you’re  interested in learning more about Grogger, schedule a demo from our homepage and we’ll tailor a pitch just for you.

Some other changes we’ve made: we’ve changed the service a bit with this release so new Grogs go straight into a Grog – bypassing the Install pages.  We’ve now have the Urban Monocle theme loading when you start and a piece of default content will appear in each new Grog.  It’s there just to get you going. Feel free to delete it

We’ve added some small fixes to the theme.  For instance, the Popup Publisher will no longer close if you click outside of it.  We heard from some users that this caused some painful moments when we closed the window and deleted the work-in-progresss.  This will never happen again.

Some smaller fixes:

  • We updated the feeds so Editors can now delete posts that are in their Topics.
  • Our change last week caused some images to disappear – this is now fixed
  • If you uploaded an image, there was a bug where it couldn’t be made a Primary (feed) image.  Fixed.

As always, give us feedback in our forum. Thanks

Release: Image Management, Trusted Users, and Editor Tools

Posted on 28. Apr, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

We did another release today of goodies. Almost all of these features came from user suggestions so if you don’t see what you want on your Grog, submit something to our forum and we’ll put it in our development queue.

Today’s release has three main features: new image management, Trusted User support, and Editor tools in the feed.

We had heard some feedback that the way images were added to articles wasn’t intuitive nor that flexible. Adding images to a Grog is a bit different from adding to a blog as Grogs have feeds and a user can determine what images are displayed in those feeds. Our new system allows for users to place images directly into an article – which is the typical manner that most blogs work. Once that image is in the post, users can edit it, remove it, or select it to be the Primary image. Primary images are the ones that are displayed in the feed for that post.  Some other little changes:

  • We now support attribution/captions on images. Adding a caption will insert in a line under a photo
  • The caption field is now hidden
  • There is no longer an “Add Image” tab in the popup publisher

The second big feature we released today is support for Trusted Users. When an Admin has turned on Moderation for a Grog, all posts go into a moderation queue for approval before they are posted. Now, in this mode Admins can mark certain users as “trusted.” These users will see their posts bypass the moderation queue and appear immediately. This is a great feature for Grogs that want to have a limited number of people submitting or Grog that have a problem with lots of troublesome or spammy users.

The third feature we added was to enable Editors to remove tags and posts from the feed. If you’re an Editor of a Topic, you can now delete a tag from a feed so that article doesn’t appear on your topic. If you are the Editor of all the article’s tags, then you have the ability to delete an article too. This should help Editor’s more easily police their topics.

Other items we’ve added or fixed are:

  • When importing, feeds that have a redirect to feedburner now work
  • There is now spam protection on registration and on posts. Captchas appear if the post is deemed spammy
  • The registration process has been adjusted to go straight to a Grog without choosing any Topics or menus

As I said in the beginning of this post, please visit our forum and submit any requests or bugs you find. So far your input has been outstanding.

Release: new registration, My Tags

Posted on 16. Apr, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

We pushed out a big release out last night that changes how we do authentication. You can still register with an email, but now you also easily register using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, OpenID and others. In addition, if you register with one service, you can add the other services into your profile. It’s lightweight and easy and we’re very happy to enable this for our users.

We already released a MyTags featured.  When creating a post, there will be a button in the tag area called “My Tags” which will list the top 5 tags you’ve used.  This should help you if you are frequently tagging items with the same tag and don’t want to go searching for that tag

Other bugs that are fixed are: article now support quotes, IE now handles new users correctly, and importing an RSS feed handles images correctly

We have another release right around the corner so stay tuned for some new moderation features.  Also, don’t forget you can request features and report bugs in our forum.

Release: New Theme and Editors’ Picks (3/31)

Posted on 31. Mar, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

We just did another release today which has some nice nuggets in it. First off, you’ll see that we have a new theme available. We’re calling it “Urban Monocle” but it’s a lighter, more blog-like theme. Some users wanted a theme that emphasized the featured area less and the feed more. This theme does that. With it, we have a new feed appearing which is “Editors’ Pick.” To populate this feed, a editor simply needs to Like a post and it’ll appear in this feed.

Some other items:

  • We’ve removed age and gender from the user profile. There’s a bio section that supports full HTML. If you want to put in your age and gender, feel free to put it in there
  • In the middle of the page there used to be an area to submit a Message. Now this area is a button to submit
  • You can now share to Facebook and Twitter from the post page
  • Some bugs such as chaging the Editor of a topic, importing tweets, and uploading images have all be fixed

As always let us know what you think and continuing submitting ideas in our forum

Release: New User Messaging, Adding Photos from Web

Posted on 23. Mar, 2010 by Mike Lewis in Releases

We pushed out another release last night filled with lots of good stuff.

First we’ve added a popup message for new users. We’ve heard feedback that when a new user comes to a Grog, they don’t know that they can publish. We now tell them loudly that they can and we explain how to do it. If the user closes this popup, it won’t show up on their next visit.

We added the ability to easily add images into your posts by searching the web. This will find Flickr images that have been approved by their authors to be used. This makes it much easier to add a post with an image – which is vital to making your posts look good throughout the Grog.

Some other improvements and squashed some bugs are:

  • Twitter import now works even if your Grog has an apostrophe or space in the title
  • We added captchas to the comments area to reduce spam
  • There was a bug when doing an import – it was auto-creating a random topic

We off building new features. Let us know in our forum what you’d like to see and look out for some new themes soon.

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