General Archives -
A recent update for the GravityForms plugin that comes included with Our-Hometown’s WordPress Publishing Platform has introduced a more secure way of connecting and communicating with the online payment gateway, Stripe. As a result, customers who utilize the Stripe payment gateway for things like Classified orders, Donation forms, and any other paid submission form will see a message on the dashboard reading: “You are currently logged in to Stripe using a […]
At Our-Hometown, we’ve continually emphasized the importance of creating a digital product that can continue to grow and thrive, even should the traditional print newspaper ever go out of fashion. The COVID-19 pandemic put the spotlight on this issue earlier this year as many publishers faced issues with printing and distributing during quarantine, but the shift to mobile web browsing has been a steady trend for over a decade now. […]
Last Thursday between 10:00 and 10:25 PM EST, Our-Hometown engineers performed an update to our Matomo stats server. This update required temporarily disabling the tracking of website statistics to avoid any conflicts during the update process. You may see gaps in your Matomo reports where data was not recorded during this brief period. We do apologize for any inconvenience. The database update was successful and all stat tracking is back […]
Our-Hometown’s latest Virtual Conference on Increasing Digital Subscriptions took place this past Friday. President & CEO Matt Larson hosted once again, giving an informative presentation where he introduced attendees to a number of strategies used on our platform to help drive digital subscriptions. These techniques include ways to advertise your website in the print edition and how to keep readers on-site once they’ve arrived. Matt also discussed the benefits of using auto-renewing […]
Attention, Our-Hometown customers! Thanksgiving is a week from Thursday, and although everyone could use a break after the long and difficult year we’ve had, we know that the news cycle doesn’t stop for holidays! However, we need your help to make sure that we have the resources available to handle any holiday-related requests such as early publishes, late publishes, or extra special sections that need to be posted online next […]
Our-Hometown President & CEO Matt Larson hosted another episode of Office Hours on Monday, this time introducing viewers to the Audio Articles feature available exclusively on our platform! Audio Articles converts all text articles into an audio file that readers can choose to listen to instead of reading. This is especially useful on mobile devices, since it allows users to free up their hands and listen to the news while […]
Our-Hometown’s WordPress Publishing Platform comes pre-equipped with the popular All in One SEO plugin to help customers optimize their website for search engines and improve their web rankings. There are a number of basic techniques you can use to help your website perform better on search engines, and the All in One SEO plugin gives you complete control over these various settings all in one place, making setup quick and painless. You […]
Back in September, Nature.com published an article titled, “Auditing local news presence on Google News” (Free PDF) by Sean Fischer, Kokil Jaidka and Yphtach Lelkes. The article highlights the research performed by the trio, which ultimately supports their hypothesis that Google News favors content from large national outlets over smaller local outlets, and prioritizes those sources within its search results. This is problematic for local and regional newspapers who are being […]
Our-Hometown’s latest Virtual Conference on Getting Started with Audio Podcasts took place this past Thursday, where President & CEO Matt Larson was joined by Tom Lappas of the Henrico Citizen to discuss the ins & outs of podcasting and what it takes to get your production off the ground. Tom and his staff have the process down to a science after launching three new podcasts in the past year, and he’s been […]
Our-Hometown is excited to announce that for a limited-time, customers who add Audio Articles to their plan can try the feature for FREE for one month before deciding whether to keep the feature or disable it! Audio Articles is an innovative feature that converts each article published on your website into an audio file that visitors can play on their PC or mobile device, allowing them to listen to the news and free […]