by Todd Jatras | July 22, 2020
Live Blog’s New Tagging Functionality for Digital Publishers
The recent release of Live Blog 3.8 introduced a new tagging feature that improves the discoverability of live blogging content for digital news publishers and their readers.
Previously, it was only possible to search on the content within a timeline by three criteria: newest, oldest, and editor’s choice. But editors can now create and apply as many tags as they want to each post as it’s published, making posts within a blog timeline searchable on a granular level.
Readers will now see an additional dropdown menu, labeled Filter Content, that displays all the available tags they can search on. If, to use one example, a reader of a blog on Premier League football was a fan of Liverpool F.C. and was interested only in items relevant to their team, they could pull down the menu, find their team’s name, select it, and the blog timeline would only display Liverpool-related posts.
To create tags to include in a post, go to Live Blog’s General Settings (see image below) and type them into the Global Tags dialogue box. If a term is not already there, you will be given the option to create that tag. These tags are global, and once they’ve been created they will be available to all the different timelines within a publisher’s blogging portfolio.
To apply these tags, there is a Tag(s) dialogue box in the editor field, on the bottom of each post. Type in the first few letters of the desired tag, and the predictive text will list available tags below it based on that criteria. In the example below “pr” brought up “press freedom” (highlighted in blue). Select the tag(s) you want, and click update. If the tag you’re looking for is not there, go to General Settings and add it.
When looking at the same post live, from the reader’s perspective (see below), the “press freedom” tag we just created appears under Filter Content.
When the reader selects that tag, only content containing that term will be displayed in the blog timeline.
This new level of search granularity is convenient for both readers, who may be interested in dipping far back into their favourite blog’s archive, and publishers looking to get a better handle on their overall blog content production.
Want to see what Live Blog can do for your publication? Sign up for your free trial here: https://liveblog.pro/en/try-liveblog-free/