The Official Fotojournal Blog

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.

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!

Related FJ Tutorials

• How to setup Google Analytics
• How to setup Google Webmaster Tools
• How to setup a custom domain

Google Resources

• Google FAQ: “My site isn’t doing well in searches”
• The official Google Webmaster Central is forum with loads of useful SEO information
• Google’s Webmaster Central Blog always has useful tidbits of SEO advice.
• Google Webmaster Help videos on YouTube.

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

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:

• Pixelpie photos
• Life artistry
• Silver Lamb studios
• Jam Photography
• Christen Barnes Photography
• Curtis Round Photography

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

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!

Shiny Prizes!

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 (x2)

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 (x2)

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 »

Extremely Essential Camera Skills (x2)

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!

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:

• Title
• Body
• Tags

And comments are searachble by:

• Name
• Email
• Website
• Body
• IP Address

We hope you find this useful!

Click for a full-sized screenshot

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!

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?

We are pleased to announce the spiffy new FotoJournal Help Center! As many of you know, we are a bit obsessive about providing speedy & effective customer service, and this new help center will allow us to do so even as the FotoJournal community grows!

The Help Center allows you to post Discussions, similar to how a forum works. You can optionally make a Discussion private so that it’s only visible to FotoJournal staff members. This replaces our old email ticketing system, so please post questions, problems or bug reports in the Discussions area.

One of the coolest parts of the new Help Center is the Knowledge Base. The new system makes it really easy for us to post new articles, and we’re looking forward to expanding our collection of tutorials and documentation. Keep an eye on it!

Our goal is to provide the best possible customer service experience, so we’d love to hear what you think about the new Help Center. Also, a big shout out to our good friends Rob & Lauren, as they handle most of FotoJournal’s support requests. We have them to thank for helping build our excellent customer service reputation!

If you’re looking for the existing tutorials, they will be available on the old wiki while we move everything to the new Help Center.

Just a quick note that we’ll be doing some scheduled maintenance on December 10 between approximately 11pm–1am MST.  We’re migrating FotoJournal to a more powerful server to help accomodate our awesome & growing community :)

This migration is a significant milestone for us, as it’s taken a lot of time & effort to coordinate.  We are very excited to return to active development once the migration is fully complete & tweaked to be lightning fast.  We’ve got some big plans for the New Year—stay tuned!