Since our last release notes, we released a new Add-On OCR Tagger that allows you to tag your document(s) based on the OCR engine used and we added better logging for when scheduled Add-Ons like Klaxon or Scraper get disabled. This helps more easily diagnose and correct outages that impact Add-Ons.

The tech team has been busy working on improvements to both our FOIA filing platform as well as DocumentCloud, our document analysis and hosting tool. For MuckRock, we gave a nice graphical bump to our article images — doubling the resolution — and fixed a bug that prevented sharing cloned request links with logged-out users. With DocumentCloud, the incorrectly labeled “rotate” button now does what it says on the tin. Plus: More localized versions coming soon!

It’s been a while since we’ve published release notes, but we have a lot to share, including improvements to our crowdsourcing Assignments tool and a number of new DocumentCloud features.

This week, we upgraded older document embeds on MuckRock and released a small timesaver for DocumentCloud users.

One of DocumentCloud’s marquee features has always been the ability to embed documents within articles and other webpages. Now you can embed whole collections of documents for readers to browse.

MuckRock’s software is written in Python on top of the Django platform, and we’re doing a major upgrade from Python 2 and Django 1.11 to Python 3 and Django 2.2. It’s one of our most major MuckRock changes in years — and one we hope will have a minimal impact on day-to-day usage.

Improving the speed and helpfulness of our customer support operations has been a major priority over the past year. We’ve cut down the average time-to-response by about 75 percent, but we know we can still do better. To help with that, we’re moving our support software to Zendesk, so you might see some minor changes in the coming weeks.

Over the course of the next week, a few brave newsrooms are getting upgraded to the new DocumentCloud platform, which offers a variety of improvements from speed and search to mobile-friendly annotations. Here’s how to cut to the front of the line or ask for a delay.

We’re still hard at work putting more polish and finishing touches on the revamped DocumentCloud, but we wanted to share some major improvements now. Better yet, you can go ahead and try them out even without access to the beta.

The last few weeks we’ve been heads down on DocumentCloud work, so no new user-facing features this past week. Want to work on transparency tools of your own? Join us Tuesday nights in Cambridge as we work on our Code for Boston project, GovLens.