Live Blog 2.0 stable is here!
After weeks of intense testing and bug fixing, we are proud to release Live Blog 2.0 stable today. This version of our real time storytelling app makes it easy for publishers to have their live blogs indexed by search engines, which means that more readers will see and follow your stories.
To achieve better visibility in search results, Live Blog generates and continually updates an HTML copy of each blog. For the 2.0 stable release, we’ve polished and extended this feature: You can now generate multiple HTML versions of a blog and style each of them differently, allowing you to integrate the same blog on several websites.
As always, this release comes with a number of bug fixes and performance improvements. We’ve learned a lot from working closely with our clients. Thanks to their feedback, this version of Live Blog is the most stable yet.
Some great live blogs by our clients
Speaking of clients: We’ve seen our clients make great use of Live Blog’s potential in recent months. NZZ, for example, ran a permanent blog for the whole duration of the World Cup to present background information and trivia about the teams and matches.
Zeit Online, one of Germany’s leading news sites, used Live Blog to publish live coverage during the games of the German team.
Rheinische Post, also a leading news site in Germany, is using Live Blog several times a week to cover any news event that unfolds quickly, for example to assess the damages on the day after a heavy storm or to cover the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in Ukraine.
Readers love live blogs
Live Blog enables these newsrooms to present a constant stream of updates, which drives readers to their websites and invites them to stay longer than usual. A study of live blogs at Guardian.co.uk, conducted for the Department of Journalism at City University London, found that live blogs often outperform other article types on the same subject. The median number of unique visitors was 233 percent higher than for conventional articles, the study showed.
Sourcefabric’s Live Blog is the platform to tell unfolding stories in the most engaging way, using text, images, videos, and social media sources. And since it’s open source, you always have complete control over your content and the source code of the application.
We invite you to try Live Blog for free. Write to us for a test instance that you can use to cover any event. We’ll help you make the most of the tool and can support you with managed hosting, theme design and custom feature development.