January 8, 2014 archive

Just a quick update… in our constant effort to to make this site work as smoothly as possible for visitors and also to help as many people as possible  find our content, I spent some time “under the hood” today making some upgrades and doing a number of other tweaks.

You shouldn’t see anything really different about the site, but if you do see anything that acts strange, please let us know.  I’ve gone through a sample of our pages and posts, but there’s a chance I may have missed something.

The major change you will see is the “Share This:” bar of buttons at the bottom of this post.  I switched from the plugin we were using before to Automattic’s “Jetpack” plugin for WordPress and like the behavior much better. I also added LinkedIn as a sharing choice to make it easier for people to share out content out to LinkedIn.  Any feedback on the sharing experience would be welcome, either as comments here or via email/form.

Another reason for the update today was that the Jetpack plugin lets us also automatically publish our new posts out to the Deploy360 Google+ Page, in addition to our Twitter account and Facebook page. We’ve found a good amount of interest in our information within Google+ and continue to gave great conversations there. Our previous process automatically posted to Twitter and Facebook but was a manual process for Google+ that was a bit cumbersome. We like that this change puts Google+ on the same level as the others as a content distribution channel.

We also updated the awesome EditFlow editorial calendar we use for planning the content we’re sharing on the site and made a number of other minor tweaks and changes.

All in all a shiny new back-end of the Deploy360 site for 2014!  We’re looking forward to using these capabilities to deliver even more information to you in 2014… please do let us know how we can help you!

Image credit: wsdot on Flickr (I figured a photo of a snow plow was appropriate given the current weather conditions where I live in New Hampshire, USA).