Greetings! We’re very excited to announce that we’ve recently rolled out a brand new release of hy.pr! The new release comes with all new features that will allow you to customize your sharing pages with related content links. Behind the cut, you’ll find a step by step guide to the new features and how to begin adding related content to your hy.pr links.

Adding Related Content to Your Sharing Page

The latest release of hy.pr gives you the power to customize your sharing pages like never before. You can now feature additional and related content for each hy.pr link you create, allowing your readers direct and instant access to any content you like, whether it’s related articles, videos, images, music – anything that lives on the internet!

When added to your sharing pages, your related content will appear to the right of the content preview. So, when a reader enters one of your hy.pr links into her browser, not only will she be able to share your content with her social networks, she’ll also be able to connect directly to your related content.

Managing Your Related & Publisher Content Categories
There are two new types of content that you can add to your hy.pr sharing pages. These are Publisher Content and Related Content. The screencap below shows how these new content links will appear when added to your sharing pages.

Before you can add these types of content to your sharing pages, you must access your account to activate the content categories you’ll make available to your readers. To do this, login to your hy.pr account at http://hy.pr.

Once you’ve logged in, click on the Profile button at the top, right-hand corner of the page. From the Profile Page, click Related Content.

* Publisher Content
On the Related Content Page, you’ll see two sections. The first section, at the top of the screen, is for Publisher Content. The Publisher Content section is used to create the links that will appear automatically at the top of every hy.pr sharing page. These could be links to your Twitter, your Facebook Fanpage, your RSS Feed, a static Subscription page – any sort of link that is related to your publication and would be appropriate no matter the content of the sharing link.

Under Name, type the word or phrase that you would like to appear to identify your link. Under URL, type the URL to which you’d like to link. When you are finished, scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save, or continue to the hy.pr associated content section to activate your related content categories.

* hy.pr Related Content
Under hy.pr Related Content, you’ll find a list of potential content categories for your related content: Video, Picture, RSS, Music, etc.. To be clear, this is just where you’ll select the general categories that you’ll make available to your readers and not the specific links that will appear on your sharing page. To activate one or more of these categories for use with your hy.pr links, simply check the box next to the categories of your choosing. Next to each category, you can also add a subhead that will appear in cases when there is no sharing link associated with the related content.

Additionally, you can add a URL Stem to your category. The URL Stem is the portion of the URL that goes unchanged from page to page. For example, if your domain is www.domain.com, you may have many URLs that are simply variations upon this root, like: http:// domain.com/earth, http:// domain.com/wind, http:// domain.com/fire. In this example, the URL Stem is “http://domain.com.” If you were to add “domain.com” as the URL Stem for your category, all you’d need to do when creating a related content link for a hy.pr link is fill in that last portion, e.g., “earth” or “wind” or “fire.” If this is still a bit confusing, don’t worry, we’ll come back to this part a little later in the section on Adding Related Content Links!

Once you have selected and edited the categories of your choosing, scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save.

* Adding A Content Category

hy.pr provides a list of several default content categories for you to choose from, but creating your own content categories is a cinch! Want to add related recipes, coupons or anything else you can think of to your related content categories? Just click the Add A Content Category button and fill out the blank fields with the name of the new category, a subhead and a URL Stem, if applicable.

FINALLY: Adding Related Content to Your hy.pr Links!

Now that you’ve activated your Publisher Content and Related Content Categories, you can add them to your hy.pr links! Navigate back to your list of hy.pr links by clicking the My hy.pr Links button at the top of the page.

You can add Related Content links to any hy.pr links you’ve created, new or old. Let’s begin by creating a brand new hy.pr link. To create a new hy.pr link, click the Create One hy.pr Link button at the top of the page. The hy.pr link editor will open at the bottom of the page, where you can create your hy.pr link just as you normally would, by adding a keyword and entering in the original URL.

However, now you’ll notice that there are additional buttons available to you in the editor. These are the Content Categories you added on the Related Content page.

To add related content, click the check boxes next to the Content Categories you’d like to add. With each click, additional fields will open up in the editor.

In the first field next to the content category you’ve chosen, you can add a subhead that will appear in the case that there is no sharing link associated with the content. In the URL field, enter the exact URL to which you’d like to link.

When you’ve finished, click the Save button.

Adding Related Content Links to Existing hy.pr Links
Don’t forget, you can add Related Content links to existing hy.pr links. To do so, just click on the check box next to the hy.pr link you’d like to edit. The link will open up in the editor at the bottom of the page, where you can add links following the same directions as above.

URL Stems Revisited
Remember URL Stems from the Related Content page? If you set one up for a content category on your Related Content page, now you only have to enter the last part of the URL for your link to work! Let’s revisit the process step by step:

On the Related Content page, I’ll create a Content Category for my Flickr account.

I enter in the URL Stem for my Flickr account. This stem is part of every single image in my Flickr stream and never changes. Once I’m satisfied that the information is correct, I click the Save button.

Now I would like to add related Flickr content to one of my existing hy.pr links. So, I navigate back to my hy.pr links by clicking the My hy.pr Links button, and select the hy.pr link I want to edit by clicking the box next to it. Scrolling down to the hy.pr link editor, I see that my new custom Content Category is available. I click the box next to it to edit it…

…and, TA-DA! The URL Stem is automatically filled in for me! Now all I have to do is enter in the final portion and click the Save button.

Checking Your Work
After you’ve created your categories and added your Related Content links, how do you know that everything is working properly? Whenever you save a newly created hy.pr link, you’ll see a progression bar to the right of the description field. This indicates that our system is fetching information from your URL, including a snapshot of the web page. Once the snapshot loads, you can click it to go directly to the web page associated with your hy.pr link.

And, of course, you could always give your hy.pr link a try to make sure everything checks out!