WC Publishers Call for Speakers. This year’s theme: taking back the open web. Want to apply but don’t know your session title and description? We’re happy help you with a round of feedback.
Email newsletters and incentives
Email newsletters are some of the best content being produced by media companies right now. It's amazing what's possible when incentives are aligned (growing subscribership vs. driving pageviews).
How Facebook Is Killing Comedy
Facebook is essentially running a payola scam where you have to pay them if you want your own fans to see your content. If you run a large publishing company and you make a big piece of content that you feel proud of, you put it up on Facebook. From there, their algorithm takes over, with no transparency. So, not only is the website not getting ad revenue they used to get, they have to pay Facebook to push it out to their own subscribers.
Matt Klinman — How Facebook Is Killing Comedy
Bylines acquired by PublishPress
Happy to report that Bylines has found a new home with PublishPress.
Bylines is a modern rewrite of Co-Authors Plus that I started last April. It hasn't been anywhere near my primary focus for quite a while, so I finally called a spade a spade and started looking for a new owner. Fortunately, it's a perfect fit for the developers behind PublishPress — I'm glad my customers ended up in good hands.
You can read more about the announcement on the Bylines website.
My 15 minutes of fame
Reusing DFP slots within infinite scroll
Infinite scroll on the index view and article view seems to be all the rage these days. TIME reports their bounce rate went down by 15 percentage points with their redesign. At some point in the discussion, AdOps will raise their hand and say “how can we get ads in the scroll experience?”
Short answer: with code! Because AdOps only wants to create a limited set of ad slots, and Google DFP slots can be used once per page, you’ll need to display the slot first, and reload it for each subsequent use.
The slots are added dynamically as the user scrolls. If a given slot has already been loaded once, then the next time we try to use it we actually pull the first instance over to our new slot, reload it, and add a placeholder for its old position so the page height doesn’t jump. We can use the same trick scrolling back up, simply replacing the placeholder with the refreshed ad.
Google’s documentation has a similar example that’s a good reference point for methods, etc. Pay attention to googletag.refresh( unit ); and googletag.pubads().refresh([unitInstance]); — unitInstance is what’s returned by googletag.defineSlot(), so you’ll need to store that somewhere for later reference.
I look forward to hearing about the straightforward approach I missed…
Inside the Guardian’s CMS: meet Scribe, an extensible rich text editor
Inside the Guardian’s CMS: meet Scribe, an extensible rich text editor. TinyMCE wasn’t extensible enough.
Building a WordPress-powered web app
Building a WordPress-powered web app. Fun read from Quartz’s Josh Kadis.
Where Tumblr Came From
Where Tumblr Came From. Wonderful “making of” piece.
Status
John McAfee, yes the household name in tech, is on the run from the law in Belize. His situation sounds larger than life — who knows how much of it is true.
But, as a testament to the world we now live in, the man has a blog and it’s powered by WordPress. I look forward to hearing his story.