December 3, 2012
One question we get quite frequently is, “How do I embed a video on my blog?” It turns out to be pretty simple, so we’ve written instructions and recorded a quick video showing how to do so.
You can watch the video below or read our tutorial, How to embed a YouTube video into FotoJournal on our help site. Have fun!
November 29, 2012
We’re happy to announce that as of right now we’ve increased the storage capacity of the Hobbyist and Pro plans! The Hobbyist plan has increased from 2GB to 5GB and the Pro plan has tripled from 5GB to 15GB. If you follow our recommended exporting & resizing tips, that gives you room for roughly 10,000 and 30,000 photos respectively.
The changes are effective immediately and all accounts have already been upgraded. Enjoy the extra space!
November 9, 2011
Another one of the popular feature requests to come out of our customer survey was that you guys wanted more power over the menu that appeared on your blog.
Our system before, while it worked, wasn’t very flexible. We’ve decided to implement a feature that allows you to change the label of your core menu items (Home, Archive.. etc) as well as the position or even their visibility.
Here’s a shot of the new form:
As you can see there are three core links assigned to every blog: Home, Tags, and Archive. These menu items are special and cannot be removed, but you can decide to hide them on your blog by unchecking the ‘Show?’ checkbox on the left. This is simply another step in a long list of improvements that we plan to implement in order to make your guys’ lives easier when it comes to managing your blog.
One thing to note is that by the addition of these items as orderable menu items, you may need to check your settings and ensure the order of the menu items is to your personal preference.
November 8, 2011
A drop in Page Rank: it’s everyone’s worst SEO nightmare (well, aside from being banned from Google entirely). One minute your site is near the top of search results, and the next it seems to have fallen off the planet entirely. To make matters worse, the cause of a decrease in Page Rank can be tricky to identify.
The good news is that these problems are usually caused by one or two overlooked details (like a misconfigured domain) which can easily be fixed. The Google Webmaster Help channel on YouTube recently posted a great video where they describe how to troubleshoot a drop in page rank.
The video mentions a few handy tools, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, both of which are supported by FotoJournal. These tools give you a lot of insight into your website’s overall health and traffic sources, making it much easier to spot potential issues before they become a real problem.
One of the benefits of using FotoJournal is that we take care of the geeky SEO stuff for you. But as always, if you have any concerns about your blog’s SEO (or anything else!) don’t hestitate to email us or post a message on our help site!
October 17, 2011
Some of you have may already noticed but we implemented a new feature over the weekend: Social media buttons!
Better social media integration was a popular feature request coming out of our customer survey, so we decided to implement post sharing directly into the template through the use of social media. You will now see an updated post entry screen and new setting for enabling these buttons. As of now we have four available sharing tools: Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon.
Here’s a peek at the selection screen:
These selections can be made on a per-post basis, allowing you to fine tune your settings. The result is a selection of buttons on your blog, shown differently depending on your theme and customizable through our Custom CSS feature.
Here’s an example on the single column design:
Hope you guys enjoy, and look forward to more updates like this in the future!
- Jon & Kyle
September 11, 2011
We would like to start off by thanking all of those who participated in our very first customer survey! We were overwhelmed with the response and feel very positively about continuing to promote surveys as a way of allowing our customers to influence FotoJournal for the better.
All that being said, we’ve really embraced a lot of the ideas you guys have brought forth and plan to release regular updates and enhancements driven by the suggestions you have made. Things like better social media integration, more theme layouts, and improving our help center are all items we have on our radar.
Now on to the good stuff. Congratulations to our six winners, who each recieve a free tutorial from our friends at Photography Concentrate:
Thanks again to everyone who completed the survey! We learned lots with this first iteration and look forward to collaborating with you guys through more surveys in the future :)
- Jon & Kyle
August 29, 2011
It’s been nearly 18 months since FotoJournal launched, and since then nearly every enhancement we’ve made has been due to feedback from you, our wonderful customers. Today we’re going to kick things up a notch and directly ask what you love (or hate) about FotoJournal with a short & sweet survey!
We would be forever grateful if you could take 2 minutes to complete the survey. And the best part is, you can win some cool prizes!
The survey closes September 5th at midnight (1 week) so be sure to get your answers submitted soon!
Our friends at Photography Concentrate have generously donated six copies of their amazing video tutorial series. No matter what level of photographer you are, you’ll definitely learn something new from these guys:
Super Photo Editing Skills is a downloadable video tutorial that gives you both the theory behind great photo editing, and the skills to actually do it. Using the industry leading photo editing program Adobe Lightroom 3 you’ll confidently create exceptional images with speed and ease. Read more »
Awesome Album Design Skills is a downloadable video tutorial that will give you both the theory behind great album design, and the skills to actually do it. Using the industry leading page layout program, Adobe InDesign CS5, you’ll confidently create exceptional designs with drag-and-drop ease. Read more »
Another downloadable multimedia tutorial that will give you all the essential camera skills in a quick and easy-to-understand format. By combining illustrations, text, photos and video, it will help you get control in no time. You can download it immediately, and start learning right away at your own pace. Bonus: it’s fun!!! Read more »
By the way, if you haven’t already checked out Photography Concentrate, you should. It’s a great wealth of top-notch photography knowledge, and is a must-read for any serious photography!
We’ll be selecting winners and posting them right here on our blog shortly after the survey closes. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
March 12, 2011
We just released a small (but super-handy) new feature that lets you search your blog posts and comments from the blog management backend. Many users have built up an impressive number of posts & comments, and we hope this addition makes it easier to manage all that delicious content.
Posts are searchable by:
And comments are searachble by:
We hope you find this useful!
Click for a full-sized screenshot
February 27, 2011
In our constant effort to improve FotoJournal, this afternoon we added another small, but very impactful change.
In your Settings you can now choose a custom Homepage Title Tag.
Until now, all home pages of FotoJournal blogs would read “Latest Posts”. While this is fine for a homepage title, the ability to create a custom title allows for just that little extra bit of customization that helps you make your blog stand out, especially when being viewed in search engine results.
Now go try it out, and create a custom title for your blog!
February 16, 2011
This morning we recieved an email from a member of the community asking whether we supported RSS feeds for individual tags. At the time, that was not a feature of FotoJournal but the team of us had a chat and decided that is was a great idea.
A few hours later, voila! You can now utilize tag-specific blog feeds. Here’s how it works:
In addition to your normal blog feed at:
http://<subdomain>.myfotojournal.com/feeds/blog/
You can now subscribe to a feed for a tag at:
http://<subdomain>.myfotojournal.com/feeds/tag/<tag name>/
Note: If using a custom domain your feed URLs would look like the following:
http://example.com/feeds/blog/
http://example.com/feeds/tag/<tag name>/
These feeds act exactly the same as the normal blog feed, only difference is they filter results by the specified tag in the same way someone would view a tag on your blog.
Here’s an example that gives you a feed from our blog of posts tagged with “feature:” http://blog.myfotojournal.com/feeds/tag/feature/
Do you have any great ideas for new features, or ways to improve some of FotoJournal’s current features?