Product Update: Snapshots, Event Activity Feeds, Radmin Categories & More

Within the next few days, we will be unveiling 'Snapshots' (working title) on the desktop versions of our sites. You may have already noticed Snapshots on event pages in the app, directly below Recommendations.

 

Snapshots are composed of Twitter and Instagram posts by culture-forward show-goers from all the cities in our network - and their goals are both to tell the story of a band on tour and also to successfully document the atmosphere of the live show (in order to help our users find awesome things to do as easily as possible).

For now, we've been adding Snapshots from our HQ here at DoStuff Media (where we all will soon be eating tacos and playing bocce) - but we'll be opening these up for metro contributions soon. Stay tuned.

Event Activity Feeds

With the introduction of Snapshots comes the changing of desktop event activity feeds to more closely mirror the app and to better surface the content that users interact with the most.

The area below the poster image field (or below the event description field if no poster is present) will now look like this:

The long lists of users who added the event to their calendars will be going away - which means not only a sleeker event page display but also no more incidents with angry users who were frustrated that their names appeared on these pages.

'Download The App' Banners

The recently-created 'download our app' banners did not perform as well as we would have liked. 

In fact, they've only amounted to around 100 downloads across the network thus far.

Therefore, we've pulled them down from desktop - as well as mobile for users that already have the app installed - so that we can spend some time revisiting and improving them. 

Our goals with the upcoming revisions are to insert metro-specific language to each banner, to make the call to action more clear and to improve the designs of the banners. We'll likely start testing new banners as soon as next week - and we'll let you know the moment we do. 

By popular demand, the ability to create, edit and delete categories will be added to Radmin before the end of the week.

Prior to this update, metros could only create and edit event categories from within the 'Add Event' or 'Edit Event' forms. They couldn't delete event categories - nor could they create or edit venue categories at all without Support's help.

That all changes this week. Keep your eyes peeled for proper, intuitive and fully operational category management links underneath your "Events" and "Venues" categories.

Note: we won't immediately remove the ability to add and edit categories from within the Radmin event forms - so that you have some time to get used to (and test out) the new system - but please be advised that will ultimately be going away.

We are making some changes to /p page images to speed up load time. After we deploy, all images uploaded into the inline editor that are larger than 1200px will be automatically re-sized to a maximum width of 1200px (which is the largest size with which images can display on our pages). Smaller images will not be affected. You should still upload optimized images if possible.

This will be a huge win in speeding up page load times - especially on the app - since excessively large images have historically caused /p pages to load incredibly slowly (especially on mobile).

Please note that this fix will not be retroactive and will therefore only affect images uploaded after this week. Do I smell a future tip of the week related to re-uploading your larger images?

We're adding pagination to 'All Tastemakers' pages in order to better expose these pages to Google and improve SEO.

We also fixed a bug that was affecting users ability to switch between pages of Latest posts.

Pop quiz for Content Managers! 

Q: Which fields actually get 'updated' when replacing an existing event with a new event in the dupes queue?

A: All the fields you can see when working in the dupes queue - and nothing else. 

We realized that we'd never explicitly said that (or at least not in a long time).