Skimfeed news aggregator UPDATE 12252012

Time for another skimfeed update. Yay? Hit the music (new window).

• Hide button was removed because I thought no one was using it (it has no usage tracking metrics). Feedback complaint today. Hide button is back. The hide button is yellow for now to get attention, will remove the yellow later once it’s established, a little too “buzzfeed” going on on the front page, with the blue and the yellow. Looks low-brow.
• Full frontend rewrite for all non-frontpage pages. Now they all look the same and rely on the same frontend code base. Still need backend rewrite so The Verge can finally be added and a final front end rewrite to clean up the code.
• Showing feed counts on the top menu. Feed counts are now shown on the top menu. Hopefully this will let users explore the site more and see different areas they may be interested in.
• Celebrity feed and UK News feeds removed or absorbed completely. Future tech combined with Design feed. Business page renamed to Money.
• Google says the site takes 2 seconds + to load. AddThis is the issue. Need something faster. Without addthis we’re looking at milliseconds. AddThis is asynch, so users don’t feel it, just Google

Future

Recommendation engine for skimfeed is a definite possibility now we have some good usage. The popular clicks get a very good number of clicks to feed in. I built a movie recommendation system for myself last year, so the hard tech is there. But, a recommendation engine is server intense and this is still a 512 hobby server for self projects. Can it take it? Slow roll out, but the Next Big Thing I’ll try. Won’t be on the front page, most likely a side link and will require a cookie drop on users for a unique id. Look out for it!

Link voting like Reddit. Possible, but I prefer click tracking. It has a lower barrier to entry and the good still rises. The quick link death of skimfeed (12 hours or less on the front page) means things move too fast for votes to matter.

Comments. The popular block contains only links from the last 12 hours. This makes comments difficult. I also don’t want to babysit (mod) comments and home run the spam. Maybe a permanent page for popular links that recieved comments, but then what about categories? No to comments for meow.

User accounts. I tried them on skimred. Didn’t work. Nobody uses them. I just want the news in the categories I need and to have a daily bookmark to return to. I want to consume. I want an overview. With the recommendation engine, user accounts may be a good idea. User accounts could also have a “save link” area. The database can handle this, but would add bulk to each link (a save icon).

Tag cloud. Next. No idea how it’ll work, but I’ve built one before and it’s easy, looks nice and could be useful to see what’s hot. The goal of the site is to give an overview of the [insert category here] landscape. A tag cloud would help that, even if the tags are not clickable.

Overall, I like where the site is going. Yeah, the links are too blue, but they contrast well. I will explore different link colors today. Then it’s working on that juicy fun recommendation engine project with a tag cloud as backup when I get bored. And a cookie for the hide/show when I have time.

Le bye.