DSW is happy to announce The News Record at the University of Cincinnati is now live. Special thanks to the folks from Swift Hall: Ariel C., Editor in Chief, and Sam G., Managing Editor, for their help with this project. Bearcats can be proud of this student-designed revamp of The News Record – and we’re proud to be involved with their 132-year tradition of independent student journalism.

Before we launch into the new school year, we wanted to take just a minute to tip our hat to those folks who were instrumental in helping DSW make it through what has turned out to be our busiest summer ever – as well as assisting us in shepherding the launches of some of the most impressive Gryphon sites we’ve seen to date.

Designer/developers Ryan McBride and Patrick Wellever deserve a big hand for their roles in summertime launches, as do their student counterparts at several newspapers; We’d like to pass along special thanks (and our general admiration) to the University of Michigan-Flint’s Kevin C, the University of Pennsylvania’s Kyle H. and Jared M., Andrew S. at the U of Arizona’s Daily Wildcat, as well as Adam A. at Colorado State.

On the admin side we’d like to thank Otterbein U’s Hillary W., Eric J. at the DP, Faith and Hagan at the Wildcat, Lacee and Dr. Lewis up in Flint, and Jenny and Larry at Colorado State’s Collegian. To the GMs and administrators at our existing Gryphon and Fotobroker sites, who chimed in with timely advice and a little necessary criticism… thank you so much.

Since the University of Arizona’s Daily Wildcat has been using our Fotobroker reprint service for several years already, it’s especially nice to be able to say that starting late this summer they’ll be Gryphon users too. Thanks to Mark W., Faith E. and webmaster Colin for their efforts in getting this project underway. We’ll have more info on this in August, but watch that dailywildcat.com space… I’ve seen the mockups, and you will notice when this switch happens.

As you settle in to the more relaxed pace of summer, we’d just like to remind both our Gryphon and Fotobroker users that now is a good time to update your account details with us.

Did your webmaster or photo editor change recently? In order to ensure that your mail is going to the right place (for both Gryphon and Fotobroker), we’ll need those updated addresses. Just drop a note to support with any changes (or if you don’t know who the current recipients are).

From support for the Gryphon Users

We are pleased to announce that sometime before the fall school season starts, we’ll be opening new Gryphon sites for both the University of Pennsylvania’s independent Daily Pennsylvanian [ thedp.com ] and Otterbein University’s otterbein360.com . We’ve known Eric at the DP for quite a while, as they’ve been a Fotobroker user for years, and we’re looking forward to expanding that association. Working with Otterbein U. will be a new thing for us – and Gryphon’s very first appearance in Ohio as well.

Thanks to Eric J. and Kyle H. at the DP (as well as their remarkably gifted design team) and Otterbein’s Hillary W. for their roles in bringing us together. We’re looking forward to working with you folks. Looks like summer is off to a good start, assuming it ever stops raining.

Well, it’s raining in Detroit today, but it beats shoveling snow. To celebrate the arrival of the new season (well, in theory) here are a couple of reminders & some details for specific questions we’ve seen more than once.

1) ‘locked items’ in Gryphon – the How & Why…

Items in Gryphon become ‘locked’ the second they’re opened by a user in the backend. If another users attempts to edit the same item it will show as locked to avoid the possibility of overwriting the original user’s work. When the original user clicks away from the item, normally the lock would be immediately cleared…

We’re pleased to announce that starting later this spring The Daily Illini, the independent student newspaper of the University of Illinois, will be powering their site with the Gryphon CMS. Despite roots going back more than a hundred years (1871!), these folks have always been further out on the edge technologically than many of their peers, and we are proud to be chosen as their new host.

Our collective tin hat is off to the Illini’s crew, who has impressed us in the last few weeks as a model of professionalism and efficiency. It’s been a pleasure, and we’re looking forward to the launch.

Also joining our client roster this month, but on the Fotobroker side, is Western Kentucky University’s College Heights Herald. Thanks to Daniel for his help in getting this rolling. The Herald has a long history of great photography, some of which you can see here: prints.wkuherald.com

Just a few things for Gryphon users this month, mostly in the way of reminders. As this semester begins to wind down and you start thinking about who’ll be doing what next term (we’ve been there ;) we thought it might be a good idea to round up some of the most frequent queries we get, in the hopes it may save you a step as you warm up your summertime crew.

In the meantime, we hope all your senior staffers are staying and that all your new hires are brilliant, yet humble and hardworking. Good luck.

1. When uploading, using ftp is a much better and far faster method (than using your web browser) for almost anything, but especially photos or video. Uploading video via your browser is just not recommended, and with really big files you’re almost certain to run into trouble. Uploading via ftp also allows you to batch import your media right into Gryphon all at once.

Gryphon 3.0 is officially here, bringing new features as well as improved performance and stability. We’re working as fast as we can to get all our existing clients transitioned to the new system. Thanks for your patience — we know you are anxious!

Our first major version upgrade since launching our hosted CMS service, Gryphon 3 offers an entirely redesigned admin user interface (thanks to the tireless efforts of Ryan M). Feature highlights include a new admin dashboard, Google Analytics integration, server-side video encoding, improved comment management… Head to our Gryphon overview page for screenshots of the new UI, and check out the extended feature list for the gory details.

Because we’d rather be building your new website than shoveling snow, we’ve reduced our custom install fee to $3000. The custom install option provides the greatest degree of flexibility, allowing clients to supply their own mockups, code, or specifications from which we can generate an entirely original design. Check out a few custom sites for examples of the wide variety of design possibilities:

www.lanthorn.com
www.dailylobo.com
www.dailytarheel.com

For clients looking for either a lower price point or a way to get a new site up and running more quickly, we offer the basic install as an alternative. With this option, clients can select one of our standard template options as their base design. For full pricing details, take a look at our pricing page.

First, a word about “HD” Video on the web…

The question of “HD” video seems to be coming up more often lately, and we’re sure that in part it’s because sites like Vimeo and YouTube are now including that as a display option. Since most of you are probably already aware, though, that HD over the web isn’t the same thing as HD television, we’ll leave the bandwidth & pixel density explanations for someone else. In short, “HD” on the web basically just means it’s either physically bigger, higher quality, or both.

Since with Gryphon you’re handling the transcoding yourselves before uploading the videos, you can create them at any quality and using the resolution settings you prefer. We can just alter the layout of your templates to enlarge the default player size.

Well, the leaves are getting colorful here in Michigan, and there’s been a noticeable jump in the number of football images we printed this week, so it must really be fall. The back-to-school season has always been a busy one for us, and this year was certainly no exception.

We haven’t had much to say on this blog or in the Google Group lately, but once the Gryphon 3.0 update comes out of testing (no official word on a date yet), we expect our communications to return to normal. Between back-to-school and betas, brother, it’s been busy. Things are starting to return to normal around here, though, and there is one thing we need to bring to your attention.

October first marked the first day of yet another set of rate changes from the credit card companies, and although we’ve held the line on credit card card fees (in Fotobroker) for years, despite increasing costs, that situation is likely to change. We are still assessing the new landscape, but we do expect to be raising our credit card processing rates on January 1st, 2011. We will follow up with a letter at the end of November about any changes coming with the new year.

With its launch last week, the UCLA Daily Bruin became the latest publication to adopt our Gryphon CMS platform. We’d like to extend a very warm welcome to our friends on the West Coast. Check out their new site at www.dailybruin.com.

The Daily Bruin is a leader in Web technologies, so we’re particularly pleased to see its managers give Gryphon their vote of confidence, and we look forward to a great partnership. Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen: Arvli, Mike, Chris, Farzad, and the entire Daily Bruin staff.

The Kansas State Collegian – the daily student newspaper of Kansas State University (and the ninth-largest daily paper in the state) – will be opening a Fotobroker reprint site this fall. It’s our first appearance in the Sunflower State, and we’d like to thank Steve W. for his efforts in getting this rolling. Watch for their site to be opening soon.

Fall is the best season for reprint revenues for most Fotobroker users, and back-to-school will soon kick off a long chain of newsworthy events. With that in mind, here’s a checklist to help you give your reprint site a tune-up in advance.

1. Are you getting the mail?
Someone on your staff should be getting, via email: import reports, sales receipts and customer feedback, often in the form of requests. If no one is getting the mail, please drop us a line with the new addresses and we’ll make corrections. If your point person for talking to us has moved on, please fill us in. You can designate as many email recipients as you need.

2. Regular uploads and good captions are the biggest factors in strong reprint sales.
A little emphasis to your photo crew about the importance of these factors can go a long way. If your last upload wasn’t today or yesterday, you may not be making as much money as you could. Similarly, photos without captions are harder for customers to find, as there’s less data to search through on their behalf. Better captions = more sales. Frequent uploads = more sales. Don’t forget to add the images from your online photo galleries!

We’ve been seeing an increasing number of images uploaded to Fotobroker with IPTC data coming in with curved quotes – or as some software refers to them – “smart quotes”.

These ‘special characters’ have always been a problem with files destined for the Web because there isn’t a completely standard way for encoding these characters for display on a screen. Windows uses one way, Macintosh uses another, and Unix yet another.

To solve this issue Fotobroker will automatically convert curved quotes (single, double and apostrophes) to straight quotes, which do have a standard way of being encoded and hence are easily displayed in a web browser. This conversion will be applied to all captions and headlines.

We’ll be sending more information about these merchandise updates out to all our Fotobroker users early next week, but just in case anyone misses the memo… here’s a summary of what’s been changed.

First and foremost, we’re adding an entirely new stainless steel water bottle for use with photo reprints. Enameled in white, these lightweight, eco-friendly bottles have easily the best reproduction qualities of any merchandise we’ve ever seen, so your photos will print crisp and true on a long-lasting product. They’re a little lighter-duty grade of water bottle than the backpackers use, but still well made. They come with a black mini-carabiner and black plastic top. Suggested retail, printed with the photo of choice, is $24.95.

Second, we’re happy to announce the return of the black 110z enamel mug, by popular demand. It adds a little variety, at very little extra cost, for your most-popular-product class. Suggested retail is $14.95. See the sample photos at left/above, shown here with a truly great summer feature photo by Rick Cinclair of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Gryphon’s user base is growing more and more rapidly of late, and we’ve been thinking it’s about time we created a forum to help staffers at our client publications connect and share ideas. In that spirit, we just opened a Google Group for users of the Gryphon CMS and other Detroit Softworks services. We hope it will prove a useful venue to discuss the software and online journalism in general, as well as to interact with Detroit Softworks’ staff outside of the formal “support” apparatus.

Intrigued? Head to groups.google.com/group/detroitsoftworks to join.

The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina has relaunched its website this week using the Gryphon CMS, and we couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. The DTH has been a Fotobroker user for years — and they’ve held the #1 spot in our records for one-day sales by a college newspaper for almost as long — so we already know they do things the smart way. We’re looking forward to watching them make the most of what Gryphon has to offer.

We’d like to offer a big round of Detroit applause (breaking glass, gunfire, sirens, loud guitars and thumping bass :) and our sincere thanks to Kevin and Erica and their gifted crew for their efforts in bringing this all together. Welcome, Heels.

It’s a good news/bad news kind of thing, but the photo-printed sweatshirts are no longer available through Fotobroker – and they’ve been removed from our product lists for every site. This only affects a small percentage of Fotobroker users, as not very many of you offered the sweatshirts.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the sweatshirts will be replaced with pullover ‘hoodie’ sweatshirts sometime before the cold weather sets in. We’ll be sending more info to all of our users once we have the specific product information all nailed down.