Latest Contributions by RupertEssinger

Hi Helen, that Cergy Soit Shortlist is a nice one. It uses the earlier version of the Story Map Shortlist, version 1,  that was provided just as a source code download that authors could self-host. They did a nice customization of the header of the app too. The Shortlist beta that is hosted in ArcGIS Online uses updated code from that one. Rupert ... View more

Hi Helen, Thanks so much for notifying us about this issue which we can repro too. We have a bug logged here for it now. It looks like on iOS if you swipe to scroll down to the bottom of a long place description, and your finger swipes the image, that is incorrectly interpreted by the app as a tap/click on the image, which is our generic Shortlist shortcut for advancing to the next place in the browse sequence. Not an issue on Android like you say. We are going to look into this for our next scheduled update (tentatively late June). Rupert ... View more

Hi Justin Thanks for the note. The behavior of the Twitter and Facebook links in the Shortlist banner/header can't be changed via the Builder. So if someone tweets your Shortlist via that Twitter button, we generate a default Tweet and after tweeting the 'who to follow' suggestion they'll see will be the EsriStoryMaps account. (The most flexible Story Map app in this regard is Story Map Crowdsource, which lets you specify the tweet text and the Who To Follow accounts as a setting in the Builder). You can however tailor those properties in Shortlist and other Story Map apps by downloading and self-hosting the open-source app code, and customizing that part of the code.  If you're interested in exploring this option we recently published an article about how to host your own story map. There is also an article about improving the appearance of self-hosted apps on social media by tweaking the meta tags. For example, for many of the story maps that the Esri Story Maps team publishes,like The Lands We Share: America's Protected Areas  we hosted the app code on our own web server so that we can make any tweaks we like, and improving the appearance of the default Twitter card is one of those tweaks we usually do. For example paste that story's URL into the Twitter Card Validator to see the large image we use: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator  This is an area we would like to enhance in the Story Map apps in some new development we are planning because people are asking for it, and social media is obviously a key platform on which story maps are shared, promoted and discovered. Rupert ... View more

Hi Brittany Thanks for raising this issue with us Brittany. We are looking into this and have been able to reproduce the issue in a collaboration workflow with the Shortlist Beta. We'll post more details here. Rupert ... View more

Hi Ryan Thanks for this question. When you create a Story Map Shortlist using the point data in an existing web map there's not an option to automatically show the field names next to the field values that you use to populate the description panel. So you can't see the field names in the description panel, like you would see by default in the attribute list view for popups for the features in a web map. However you can get the effect you want in a Shortlist... You could of course manually add those field names and format them by editing the description for each place in the Shortlist Builder, but you won't want to do that if you have tons of places. A better alternative, if you are going to be using points already defined in a web map to create your Shortlist, is to add additional fields into your point data that contain the exact text strings you want, and include that field when you create your Shortlist from the web map containing that data. For example in a spreadsheet containing places I will be using in a Shortlist I may have a field called Photographer that contains the name of the photographer who took the picture for the place defined by that row in the spreadsheet. I can add an additional column into that spreadsheet to contain the text:   "Photo by:" followed by the value of the Photographer field which is how I want that value to appear in my Shortlist description panel. You could generate this new field's values automatically using an Excel Concatenate function so you don't need to manually populate the values, and the values will automatically reflect updates you make to the Photographer field. If defining your data in a feature service or shapefile instead of a spreadsheet you could use a field expression to generate the extra field. You can then use that new field in your Shortlist. In this way you can get the same effect that you asked about but it is more flexible because you aren't limited to just use the name of the field in your layer, which is good especially as GIS field names can be fairly cryptic and abbreviated such that they wouldn't look good in your description panel. This method also lets you control the formatting too because you could also add HTML tags into the text values of the new field to apply formatting like bold and italic. Hope that helps Rupert PS. I hope you have you checked out the 'As is' workflow we added to Shortlist in our March 1st 2017 update for when you create a Shortlist from a web map . This lets you live link your Shortlist to your web map so that updates you make to the data in your web map are automatically reflected in your Shortlist. It is a good option if you are making a data-driven Shortlist and you are happier updating your place data in your GIS than manually in the Shortlist Builder.  This way you can update the point data in your map (either by editing it or completely replacing it with a new layer) and see those changes immediately in your published Shortlist. So it is great for GIS folks who like to do things in batch using their source data.To take advantage of 'As is' you have to choose that option when you first create your Shortlist, you can't apply it retroactively to an existing Shortlist. ... View more

Hi Craig Yes. the main thing is that when you open a web map and save it, the extent of the map at the time you save it becomes the map's initial/home extent the next time you or someone else views it. So if your web map is being displayed in an app like a Story Map app, that extent change will in most cases be reflected in the story map, unless you, depending on the particular app you are using, have used the option to configure a custom extent for that web map. For example in Story Map Series, Journal and Cascade, when you add a web map into the story, you can override the default extent inside the Builder and specify the extent you want to show on the map. In that case, the web map will be displayed at that extent irrespective of the saved extent in the web map. Rupert ... View more

Hi Jay Thanks for raising this issue/question in the forum. Shortlist doesn't offer a clustering option for the symbols, like the clustering you'll find in Story Map Crowdsource. Sorry about this limitation. Several authors have asked us to add that option to better handle having multiple places of interest at the same location. Like you describe, you can see all the places in the tab next to the map, but just by looking at the map it isn't obvious that there are multiple places there, and clicking on that location only opens up the top-most place. There's not a great workaround for this: in addition to places for each individual business you could add a place into the Shortlist to represent the building itself, and list all the individual businesses that it contains in its description, and then order the places so that that one is top of the stack in the order. Or you could have one tab in the Shortlist for each building and another tab for all the businesses, so end users can choose what they see,   We would like to offer a clustering option but this will most likely be down the road as we are first focussing on a new look and functionality for map tours. Rupert ... View more