We have been really busy the last two weeks performing maintenance, replacing our old server, and adding new features to PR Leap. So in keeping with the mission of this blog we wanted to share with you what we have been up to.

Improvements

Faster Statistics Report - The statistics page for each press release now displays your news release stats in about a second where it used to take up to one minute. This is due to our new server being much more powerful.

Search Engine Friendlier URL’s – As you know our goal is to bring search visibility to your news, thus we identified an opportunity to make every URL at PR Leap even more user friendly and search engine friendly.

New Features

New MSA Pages – If you submit your news release to a particular MSA (metropolitan statistical area) as opposed to all MSA it will now appear on the relevant MSA page. You can browse through all of the MSA pages here http://www.prleap.com/msa/.

Currently, there are many MSA pages that have no news in them. We encourage you to target an MSA when you distribute your news. Doing so will make your news appear on one more page and XML feed than if you distribute to ALL MSA’s - the default option when submitting your news.

New RSS / XML feeds – Every MSA page now has a corresponding XML feed.

Bloglines, My Yahoo!, and XML subscription icons and links – We have made it easier for people and search engines to subscribe to our XML feeds that contain all of the news distributed through PR Leap. Every page that offers an XML feed now has an orange XML button that takes you to the XML feed. There is also a Bloglines and a My Yahoo! icon. Clicking on these icons allows anyone to monitor the news found on that page through Bloglines and My Yahoo!.

New Server Bug Fixes

The new server had a shiny new operating system that was not configured exactly like the old server. This caused a few problems for members who submitted press releases that contained quotation marks within them, and for anyone who attempted to contact PR Leap through the help desk. The problem was resolved as soon as we found out.