Monthly Archive for August, 2009

Feedback for TWiC

Published
by
Joey
on August 30, 2009
in High Priority
. 1 Comment

I jotted down a few quick notes for TWiC after doing the show today that I thought I’d share. Sorry for coming off heavy-handed, I put my editor hat on for this one.

We need a brief written up well ahead of time. This can be a FreindFeed room, or a gDoc, but it should have topics, listed in order of priority. Sample questions wouldn’t be bad. Relevant links are a must!

DEADTIME DEADTIME DEADTIME. Brief Joey anecdote here. I used to work at a summer camp where we put on weekly campfires. (done laughing at the quaintness yet? Click that link. You’ll ROFL) Watch the first minute of this video.

Here’s the point: we were professional campfire-skit-doers. We were rockstars who are were just enfused with the zany power and …

…k, I’ll come clean: we practiced, a lot. Practice was tough because every moment that the stage is empty, where the audience doesn’t have something to look at, the guys in charge would shout “DEADTIME, DEADTIME, DEADTIME.”

Here’s how this gets back to TWiC: campfires have visuals and audio to work with, TWiC has just one. Deadtime is even more noticeable on a podcast. It just sounds bad to have anything more than a second of dead air. Talking in the text chat is not a good solution. You’re doing something but the audience here’s nothing.

Someone needs to be in charge. If conversation dies, that person must move on to the next topic, keep it lively, keep it engaged.

There’s lots of CoPress folk. Don’t get me wrong. I like doing TWiC, but 3 CoPress peeps to one or two guests doesn’t help our tendency to turn the podcast into an interview session. Perhaps we should cut back on the number of folks and try to encourage discussion.

Tech issues on our end is in-excusable. We need to have voice, from everyone, 10 min before a call. This also should mean having guests on the line 10 min before. Communication with the guest should be done well in advance, with a quick follow up the day of. They’re our guests, but they need to be on time.

Offer to post on copress as a reward. If we liked what the guest had to say, we should offer them the opportunity to write a post for CoPress. It’s actually PR for them – we’re doing them a favor.

August 30, 2009: We can haz Skype fail?

Published
by
Joey
on August 30, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 4 Comments

Skype is real convenient, but wow can it suck. We had a few crashes and dropped sessions during our call today. Which was attended by Daniel, Adam, Joey, Miles, Andrew, Lauren, Vanessa and excitingly, Bryan.

We’ve been using our new system of breaking down topics to be covered into 3 priority levels and endeavoring to keep the calls to 30 minutes. The system isn’t perfect, but it’s working well. We’re always sure to cover the important stuff, and get off the phone much faster than our old hour and 30 minute standard.

Site Design (fixing the 2am half-assing)

Today’s call started off with a full acknowledgment that our hosting page, while updated, is not nearly what we need it to be. Feedback provided:

  • It’s not entirely clear that by signing up for hosting, the client should also be signing up for Priority Support. I don’t think we should manage hosting accounts if they don’t have priority support
  • Signup form needs to be updated a bit so that we make sure we capture required information.
  • In the school size calculator, Staff Size, can be mistaken for University staff, as in faculty, staff, etc. not newspaper staff.
  • We should review why we limit database restores to 3? If the DB crashes or breaks after that we won’t do anything? It might become unlimited, as its a service that people are likely to never use, hopefully will never have to use, but should always be there for safety’s sake.
  • Include a badge with “Prices starting at $50/month” that leads into the pricing page
  • We should consider raising the basic setup cost to $200. $150 seems low
  • Maybe make the graphic only over the left column, and move the links to the top of the right column.

Adam is going to take the lead on mapping out what we need to do, and Daniel will help with execution if needed. Any other feedback? Let us know in the comments.

Continue reading ‘August 30, 2009: We can haz Skype fail?’

 
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August 23, 2009: Inching Closer

Published
by
Adam
on August 24, 2009
in Low Priority
. 0 Comments

As we continue the transition to a priority-based system for organizing team conference calls, this week’s meeting inched closer to our goal of half an hour — but overshot it somewhat at a final tally of 43 minutes per the agenda. Attending were Daniel Bachhuber, Joey Baker, Greg Linch (whom we did not forget this time around), Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino, Kevin Koehler, new addition Vanessa Bezic and myself. Continue reading ‘August 23, 2009: Inching Closer’

 
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August 23, 2009: We’re now a for-profit enterprise

Published
by
Suzanne Yada
on August 23, 2009
in High Priority
. 6 Comments

This afternoon, the CoPress board unanimously voted to switch from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization. It’s a big deal and a new direction for CoPress.

So why did we do it? It opens up a lot of expansion opportunities we wouldn’t have had with a nonprofit status. The move allows us to share equity with the people who have worked so hard to build CoPress up, and it opens the doors for investment opportunities. Though we lose the tax benefits and the warm fuzziness of being a nonprofit, we think CoPress has the potential of being a self-sustaining business in its own right.

Members in attendance:

  • Daniel Bachhuber
  • Joey Baker
  • Ryan Sholin
  • Suzanne Yada
  • Jackie Hai
  • Andrew Dunn
  • Bryan Murley
 
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Client education workshops

Published
by
Daniel
on August 23, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

One of the ideas we have for the fall, because clients are afforded an hour or two of education every month, is to offer workshops so that they can improve their WordPress, PHP, etc. skills. What I’d like to do at this point is start brainstorming what those topics might be so that we can start planning ahead. Here’s what I have so far:

  • Basic HTML/CSS, basic WordPress, etc.
  • Advanced HTML/CSS in regards to how it applies to theming WordPress
  • Introduction to PHP and WordPress
  • How to measure engagement with your website (using Google Analytics, # of comments, and other metrics)
  • Creating and installing plugins
  • Site performance (how to test how quickly your site loads, and methods for improving that)

What else should we add to the list?

Related: A past idea on how to tie client education into the Connection Engine.

Logistics of moving to for-profit

Published
by
Daniel
on August 20, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

On Thursday, I had a meeting with Carolyn Duncann of the Portland Ten in regards to some of the logistical questions we’re facing as we try to switch from non-profit to for-profit. Joey and I had a short conference call this morning to debrief on that, and then plan our next steps.

For the text record, on Sunday our board will meet to vote on whether we have permission to move the project from non-profit to for-profit. We need a board vote on the record to make sure that everything is legal. Depending on whether that passes or not, Joey and I will then work on refiling on Monday with the State of Florida. We’ll continue with Florida over Oregon or another state because Susan Linch is kind enough to be an excellent resource. Once we get the filing done, we’ll wait as close as possible to September 15th to file for an extension on our tax return. The next month will also hold the project for us of figuring out how we split up equity amongst the people who going to be doing the work this fall. Neither Joey or I are qualified to comment on how this will be done (yet) and plan on talking to knowledgeable people within the next week to figure out the most equitable way to do this.

Thursday’s meeting with Carolynn was mostly focused on investment, when you seek it, what investors are looking for, etc. Most of the information isn’t applicable to us currently, and might not ever be applicable to us. The upside to external investment is that you get an infusion of cash with which to scale your business. The downsides are that you lose ownership/control of the company, the investors generally want at least a 20x return, and they might be looking to take your company public or sell it off to get that return. If we can scale such that the team starts getting paid based on their work without having to take external investment, I think we’d be better off.

My notes from the meeting (page 1, page 2, page 3) are moderately informative.

 
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Mid-August Edit Flow update: Email notifications and editorial comments

Published
by
Daniel
on August 18, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 4 Comments

The whole goal of the Edit Flow Project was to build a bunch of different pieces in to WordPress that made the editorial workflow side of things a lot more seamless. Mo said he’s back in the game so we’re going to start working on some of the most requested features: email notifications and post-specific editorial comments.

In an email, Andrew Spittle said that, for the Whitman Pioneer:

The most important thing that I see from our end would be the ability to designate editors for specific sections/categories and have them sent email updates (single or digest) of the activity in their section. I think that of everything that would turn it into something that creates an online workflow for us instead of just an online place to do work (I hope that distinction kind of makes sense). Another thing that’d be great (perhaps you’ve already implemented this…I haven’t been keeping track of updates) would be the notes feature that we talked about at the beginning of the project. If this is done in a smooth and user-friendly way than I think that editors and reporters alike would be more inclined to use it. Also, if the notes are custom fields in the post then it would be kind of cool to be able to pull these out and display them.

Daniel Randolph wants to see “something like edit flow has where we have custom statuses that say ‘needs edited’ and things of that nature.” In addition, specific notifications to pre-defined people when a post hits a particular status is important.

Continue reading ‘Mid-August Edit Flow update: Email notifications and editorial comments’

Version three website relaunch: Things left to do

Published
by
Daniel
on August 17, 2009
in High Priority
. 4 Comments

First off, credit must go where credit is due. Mad props to Miles, Joey, Lauren, and Andrew for working their hearts out on getting the redesign out last night (especially Lauren, who had a final this morning, and Joey, who had been running on zero sleep from the night before). The short story of it is that, although we did a significant amount of work in the past weeks, there was still a lot left to do before we could even think of moving the theme from the sandbox to the the main website. We started that process around midnight Pacific and took the site off maintenance mode around 2:30 am Pacific, after I laid down in bed, almost passed out, and then remembered that I had to remove the maintenance splash.

CoPress homepage - August 17, 2009

All in all, the homepage is looking really good. Lauren came through with a nice graphic for the top right lead slot, we put together images and copy for the featured projects, and the footer came together. The homepage might still need:

  • Final copy edit for all of the text on the page. We might want to have Miles write something for the Managed Hosting slot in preparation for the announcement tomorrow, and then update the Network Spotlight and Edit Flow Project.
  • The most recent blog posts. This was a suggestion Max made, and I was trying to think where they’d fit the best. I might try taking out one of the featured projects in favor of a list of most recent posts.
  • Working links to projects and contact. Right now those links 404 but we do intend to launch pages for them soon.

Other than that, it’s looking really, really good. A remarkable improvement from what we have before.

Continue reading ‘Version three website relaunch: Things left to do’

August 17, 2009: Back to the weeklies

Published
by
Greg
on August 17, 2009
in Medium Priority
. 0 Comments

It’s good to back in the swing of things with our weekly group calls! This one was chock of full goodness.

Before I get into the details, I’d like to welcome Vanessa Bezic, who is joining me as a co-host on This Week in CoPress, season two. Vanessa is a recent graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, where she studied broadcast journalism. She learned about CoPress this spring from David Cohn, who is now on our board of directors.

Now, on to the call:

We first discussed the Web site redesign, which will launch on Monday. In addition to a post about the redesign on the main blog, look out for another announcement about hosting.

The next item involved an informative video Lauren Rabaino created about innovation. She’ll soon be working on another one as part of our new educational video series.

Continue reading ‘August 17, 2009: Back to the weeklies’

 
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Y Combinator is looking for “Future of Journalism” startups

Published
by
Daniel
on August 17, 2009
in Low Priority
. 0 Comments

The proposal is more specifically for content producers, but we might fit the bill in an obtuse way.