When you explore the outdoors, capture the experience in a story and create memories you’ll never forget. Tell stories of the breathtaking views, the wildlife you’ve encountered, the sounds of nature, and the trails you’ve explored with photos, audio, and interactive maps.
StoryMaps is updated regularly with new features and capabilities. With this latest update, the new My Feed page was introduced giving you a view into the most popular and relevant content created with StoryMaps. This and other improvements will help you create beautiful stories and collections more easily, and get inspiration from others:
My Feed page
It’s now easier than ever to find inspiration for your next story or to find content that you’ll want to read. You can now see what other storytellers are creating on the new My feed page!
The Trending feed shows popular stories and collections from StoryMaps authors around the world. The For You feed is personalized to show you content based on what you’ve already viewed and liked.
You can also filter content by your favorite topics and find inspiration for your next story by clicking one of the topic tags on the side.
Premium themes
Themes are a great way to make a statement with your stories and collections. StoryMaps offers several useful basic theme options, and of course you can design your own themes to match your story’s tone and style.
Since themes are such an important part of storytelling, we’ve added more ready-to-use options with premium themes!
The StoryMaps design panel now contains a gallery of professionally designed themes that you can use for your own stories. They are perfect when you want a little more punch than one of the basic options. If you see one you like be sure to favorite it.
We’ll periodically add new premium themes to the gallery based on upcoming holidays, seasons, or events.
Text editor enhancements
We know writing the narrative is one of the most important parts of storytelling, and you can spend a lot of type typing and formatting text. There are now several new capabilities of the text editor that provide you with more options for how to arrange and format text.
There is now a third heading style available. This provides the opportunity to have one more level of hierarchy or organization for the content in your story. You can copy and use links to these headings just like the other heading levels.
You can now also manually adjust the alignment of headings throughout your story. This includes headings that appear in sidecar narrative panels and even the credits heading.
Lastly, if information in your story needs to be updated, but you want to preserve the original text, you can now use the new strikethrough formatting option. Strikethrough formatting has been implemented in an accessible way so assistive devices will communicate the stricken text to anyone using a screen reader.
Collection improvements
One small, but often-requested, feature that is now available is the ability to remove some of the elements from a collection overview page. This includes the “Collection” heading and the “Get started” button.
These elements can be helpful in some cases, but they are not always useful and authors have asked for a way to remove them. You can now easily do this in the collection settings.
What’s more, if you are using the Journal layout for your collection, you can now make changes to the summary of each item card. You can also choose to leave the summary blank if you’d like.
We can’t wait to see what adventures you share! For a complete list of changes and fixes, see the Release notes on StoryMaps.com.