New look. Geolocated posts. More white label design options.

If you’ve logged in to ScribbleLive today, you probably noticed a few changes. Here’s a summary of what they are.

New look

We’ve redesigned the back end of our website. The features are all the same, but they are now grouped by function so you can find them more easily.

You’ll notice that things have been consolidated in the Dashboard, but it still has all the same functionality as our previous interface. For instance, if you hover over “Events” in the left sidebar, you’ll see that three items – “Create a New Event,” “My Events,” and “Event Archive” – are now under the one heading.

The main event page has also seen some menu consolidation. For instance, the “Social Search” tool has become part of the default writer environment, with the commenting function on the right. The only major name change is under the “Reporting” menu in the left sidebar: you’ll now find out how many people are reading and watching your blog through Statistics.”

Here’s a video that takes you through changes.

Writer geolocation

Got a news team in different places covering different aspects of a story?

Think about the American election – you have reporters and photographers across the country posting updates into one liveblog. Arab Spring – there are photographers in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, and you’re pulling their shots into one event. Or even a local court case in a small town – one reporter’s in the courtroom, another’s interviewing people in the community while a photographer is grabbing shots of the mayor in her office, and all the content is going into a liveblog.

Using our white label, you can now map out where your writers are posting from. By clicking a spot on a map, your users can sort the posts by location, viewing new information coming out of one specific place.

To set this up, go to the “Basic Setup” page of your event. Under the heading “Localization,” you’ll see an option to Enable Map Display. Choose Yes in the drop-down menu. Make sure you connect your event to your White Label; the map function doesn’t work in the embed. Locations can be tracked for all posts made in the writer interface.

Now, from the front end, your users can pick the “Map” option in the top bar to see from where your writers are posting. If there are multiple posts in one location, it creates a slideshow of posts in the map.

White label options

Using our white labels, there is now more freedom than ever to style your posts.

In your Dashboard, under Admin > Manage Templates, by either Creating or Editing a White Label Template you can change the way that posts look depending on where they come from.

We have added the “Customize Meta Tag” section, where you can change the look of the dates and names of writers and readers. You can change what the words say. You can change the position and size of avatars.

The data we collect is the same. We’re just making more options to display that data.

Check out our video for more information about meta tags and step-by-step instructions on how to play around with them.