Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

AideRSS is a great service for helping you filter your feeds. It checks the number of comments (if possible), number of times it shows up on Google’s Blog search, how many people bookmarked it on Delicious and any diggs that story got on Digg to calculate the PostRank.

You can then setup each feed with one of these choices of filtering

• all posts
• good posts
• great posts
• best posts
• top 20

Once you save several feeds you can get a single feed made of the feeds you picked and what filtering you chose for each feed. You can even get a top stories based on all those feeds with whatever filtering you picked.

The data to calculate the PostRank is not send with the feed either, but I think their algorithm is good enough you won’t need it. One downside is that the category nodes are lost in the feeds. Which means you can’t filter these new feeds anymore with Yahoo Pipes based on the original categories, but they do send the PostRank in the feed. I suppose you could create the category filtered feed from Yahoo Pipes first, then grab that RSS feed and put it through AideRSS to filter it yet again. I really wish Google Reader offered some filtering options, and perhaps I wouldn’t have to use all these other sites.

After using AideRSS some more I realized they should also make categories, that way all you can control if some top stories get mixed in with others or not. Then you could have top stories for each category, then also another top stories feed for all your feeds.

There are so many web development blogs, tips and tricks coming out every week it’s hard to get around to it all. I use Digg’s API, feeds from CSS Beauty, CSS Vault and many others going through Yahoo! Pipes and then into Google Reader. This helps me get a lot of stuff, but at the same time filter much of the stuff I don’t want out. But I still miss a few good tidbits of information out there.

Yahoo! Buzz is another story promotion site along the same vein as Digg. Yahoo promises a API soon, but their feeds already send the original story link, category and thumbnail in it. They need to add more categories, however I think the site is too general already. Its great for the person that just wants quick general news in a wide range of interests but more categories or a tagging system is needed to filter out much of the same news all around the web.

Dzone is a developer’s focused Digg site. It’s a decent site, despite it doesn’t have enough users or enough high quality data coming in. They have a huge amount of categories which can help you filter out what you want or don’t want. Personally I’d like it if they added the original story link’s to their feeds.

You might think would decrease the number of people that go to the site, but it would increase the number of people that use the site’s feeds. In return the site might become popular enough to get a higher ranking on Google; Thus, advertising revenue would increase, more people would submit stories to get better SEO, more people would login to vote stories up or down to prevent spam and better control the quality of frontpage and to make comments. But of course this is all speculation, but maybe they should just take that chance to see what happens.

Since using Digg’s API, I’ve found myself going to Digg only when there is a good story that I want to read the comments on, when I get really bored and want to see stories in the categories I’m not using the API for. Digg still gets plenty of traffic, despite the fact their API has been released for well over year. Dzone has potential to pick up where Digg left off but for now I’ll think I’ll pass it up.

Despite Yahoo offering @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com email addresses (which they are probably doing because there are no good names left especially with all the spammers registering bogus names).

When you want to check email, you don’t get on the first load. You have to click on it, because you are shown a newsblock first.

This is done for 2 reasons

1. It’s another pageview
2. There maybe some news headline that catches your attention and bring you to news.yahoo.com

However, Google knows you login to your mailbox to read email, not news.

Topix, is a site that displays lots of local information to people all around the US. However they also put a lot of US and World News. I personally think the site is becoming too cluttered, even more than a local newspaper site. There are tons of portals out there that do what they do already, so why not focus on becoming the lighter, faster local portal? They have already gone after many of the “verticals” that newspapers use (real estate, classifieds, jobs).

• Feature local data more. Don’t just show you have events and classifieds, tease some of that information.
• 1 day of weather teasing is worthless, give people more of reason to check the city page
• Make one of those 3 columns with a different color, everything looks the same, meaning people are less likely to pay attention to it.
• Add autos
• Get a designer and start uncluttering the website

Topix has the ability to become a unique nationwide local site with tons of local information, but they keep shying away from it trying to be just another portal with some local content. If they want to be serious about local information they need to display nothing but local information on the homepage. Otherwise I don’t see their site taking off in local markets around the US.

I recently saw a website do this on the weather page.

If you’re users are clicking on the weather page, give them the weather. Why does anyone have to choose between 2 TV stations? I guess this was a political decision, because Nexstar Broadcasting owns 2 different affiliates in the same city. But the user can care less about what station gives them the information, besides both stations already share the same website.