It’s that time of year… you know, when the end of the term becomes more than just a distant light in the tunnel, and since it’s a time of transition in many newsrooms, it’s also a time of many questions. We’ve got some improvements coming this summer to the both the quantity and quality of Gryphon’s onboard help, but there’s one thing in that update that we think might be useful now.

So, we’re going to jump the gun a little in regards to one of the items we hear a lot about this time of year: Setting up a Google Calendar account to work with Gryphon. To be clear, these instructions are for sites that already have an ‘Events’ page display. (most do)

If you are already using the Calendars – and just need to know how to let Gryphon know to sync a new calendar, you can jump right to the bottom of this page, starting with “Once you’ve successfully granted access…”. If you’re using Calendars, but have either lost the account info or need to change the account used for it, read on…

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.

We’re very pleased to welcome the University of Michigan-Flint’s The Michigan Times to our list of in-state Gryphon users. Their site will be opening later this month. A big round of thanks to Lacee H & Aaron B & Mike L for their roles in getting this project moving (and for being willing to overlook our MSU Spartan heritage :) Welcome!

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 many of you probably know, Gryphon got its start several years ago when a young student programmer named Mike Joseph was hired by Michigan State University’s ‘Independent Voice’, The State News , as their webmaster. Almost immediately after he was hired, work began on an early version of what you now know as the Gryphon CMS.

Several years and many revisions later, Detroit Softworks was formed in 2009 (by Context Craft, LLC, our parent company) specifically to work with The State News to bring you their CMS as a hosted and supported commercial CMS service. And now, starting this summer, we’ll be working with them on more than just the continuing development of Gryphon, as they’ll be getting involved with our support structure as well.

This is something we think is good for everyone, as not only does it reduce the distance from support to programming, it allows your development ideas to be heard more easily, as well as provide a few additional learning (and income) opportunities for State News students.

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.

The annual Western Association of University Publication Managers (WAUPM) convention is usually held in a great spot, but this year’s event – right in the middle of San Diego’s bustling Gaslamp District – will be tough to beat next year. There aren’t many events where we get a chance to pitch Gryphon on the deck of a WWII aircraft carrier, so naturally we had to attend.

As usual, the conversation & food were outstanding, and a tip of our tinfoil hat is due to hosts (and WAUPM presidential figures) Arvli Ward from UCLA and Melissa Lalum from Cal State Northridge for their organizational efforts. WAUPM offers a chance for us to talk with a sizable portion of the Gryphon user base all at the same time, and the result, as in years past, would be worth the trip – even if our users weren’t fun to hang out with ;)

Thanks to WAUPM, and especially the Gryphon users within. We appreciate your collective & continuing support.

Your Fotobroker ‘import reports’ are the best way to keep tabs on how the uploads to your reprint site are going. These reports tell you which photos were successfully imported and which photo were rejected by the online reprint system – and why.

However, depending on how many photos you upload each day, the reports can be a bit long and tough to assess quickly…

But all that is about to change. We are currently rolling out an improved & streamlined report that will be easier to review. We removed a lot of the information that really didn’t affect the main goal of reviewing the important information: the key IPTC fields: source/credit, byline, caption – and success or failure of each image. We also added a success/failure summary at the top so you can know at a glance how things went.

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.

The 2010 holiday season turned out to be a busy one after all, and our plans for making last year’s fotobroker Admin Dashboard upgrade the default (and removing the older Administration structure) had to be pushed back until things slowed down a little, but I’m happy to say that’s now completed – and logged-in fotobroker Admins should now see only the newer “Dashboard” links.

Since both the new and old Admin setups have been running side by side for months, I suspect there aren’t many users who are unfamiliar with the Dashboard, but if you have any questions, please let us know. For those who haven’t used it before, it may be helpful to take a quick look at our fotobroker Dashboard tutorial screencast.

Note: For sites that use custom access levels for limited-admin users, that functionality was left unchanged, so users with access below “level 4” (full admins) will see no differences.

Well, now that most of the holidays are behind us and Gryphon 3.0 is finally ready to go (!), it’s gotten quiet all of a sudden. Quiet enough to realize it’s been a month since we posted here, among other things. It’s also quiet enough to be able to reflect for a few minutes on the good fortune we had in 2010.

For starters, we opened a whole bunch of new sites, including Gryphon for UNC’s Daily Tar Heel, UCLA’s Daily Bruin, Colorado State’s Collegian, and here in the Rust Belt, for Grand Valley State’s Lanthorn and Wayne State’s South End. Fotobroker sites opened for LSU’s Daily Reveille, Kansas State’s Collegian and Texas Tech’s Toreador, to name but a few. Don’t take my word for it, though – see the ever-expanding Detroit Softworks client list.

And as I mentioned above, Gryphon 3.0 is ready (and is already out there running on two initial sites). Feedback has been pretty strongly positive for reasons of pure functionality, but we’re hearing good things about how it looks too. We’ll be contacting existing users after the first of the year about upgrading older sites. More on that soon.

First, two frequently-asked questions…

*Q: *Missing mail? Is something not getting delivered to the right people anymore?

*A: *In every automatically-generated email message that Gryphon sends out, a link is included to allow the recipient to block messages sent from the system. It would look something like this:

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.