ABC | Online Journalism Blog

Example of using Instagram's new feature to tell Storm Doris story

Using Instagram’s new feature to tell Storm Doris story. Note the call to action to ‘swipe’: this can also be done in the caption to the first image or video.

This week Instagram announced a new feature that allows its users to share up to 10 pictures and videos within a single post. The feature resembles Stories in some ways, but with this key difference: posts are permanent. In a special guest post, Sam Gould explores how the feature can be used by journalists and news organisations.

You might be mistaken for thinking Instagram’s new “multiple photos and videos in one post” feature is just the same as Instagram’s Stories feature, which they introduced in August. But there is one difference which is key for journalists and publishers: these posts are permanent.

Although Instagram haven’t referred to the new updates as a slideshow or gallery, that is perhaps the simplest way to describe the new feature: users can swipe from left to right to move between pictures, and/or videos. Continue reading →

In March, I appealed to the Audit Bureau of Circulations to sort out its terrible ABCe website. It’s had a redesign. Here’s a list of its latest problems (originally published here).

If at any point the ABC wants to pay me a consultancy fee, for all this free advice, just leave me a comment to tell me how to receive my money …

All the URLs have changed but there are no redirects

New ABCe homepage in Google

They’ve had a redesign, but they haven’t redirected the old URLs to new ones. So, for instance, if you click the second link shown in Google for a search on ABCe, you get page not found.

Lesson When relaunching a website, always 301 redirect your old pages to new ones (even if they’re all just to your new home page). That way, external links still work and you keep the SEO benefit of any links.

They haven’t sorted www vs non www

The more observant will have noticed that the title of the first result in that screenshot says ‘To access IIS Help’. The ABC hasn’t realised that abce.org.uk is not the same URL as http://www.abce.org.uk. And if you go to the ABC URLs without www, you get page not found or server errors.

Compare these pages:

and these ones:

Lesson When you set up your website, redirect yourdomain.co.uk/whatever to http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/whatever. And log in to your google webmaster account to set your preferred domain (www or non-www).