Hai! Assalamualaikum semua! Ok, so today, I’m going to try to write in english. That’s because currently, YourAgregator has been indexed in Google, and at the same time, this blog seems the most referenced blog about YourAgregator. Because YourAgregator does not have an About page (yet), and anything about YourAgregator will be referenced to this blog, I’ll be talking in english from now on, on anything that involve YourAgregator, because YourAgregator is (currently) written in english.
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| It must be because of the domain. I should’ve also buy domain for numerologyprobability. |
Ok, so the purpose of this post is to help me to visualize the future of YourAgregator and also to help me stay on track on YourAgregator. So, you can say that this is the second TODO list for YourAgregator. Ok, so let’s get started, so first let’s see what we currently have in YourAgregator, and at the same time, review what is YourAgregator actually is.
Intro!
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| The logo….. I’m not good at designing so don’t say a word. |
For the first timer in this blog and for those of you who does not understand Malay, YourAgregator is a platform for making something like meta blog, blog agregator, news page or you can describe it as a news based community site. The name YourAgregator came from the word agregator, simply because what the site does is that it agregate rss from various user submitted source and show it in a web page.
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| Agregator test is an agregator that is used for testing YourAgregator. |
So, basically, a user can create an agregator hosted in YourAgregator much like a person can create a blog hosted at Blogger. An Agregator also has members much like a blog has followers. Even so, an Agregator is not meant to be a personal site like a blog. It is meant to be used by a community of certain interest, in which the person who create the agregator act like a moderator.
The concept is, when a community, like, for example, the student of IIUM (Intenational Islamic University Malaysia) need a place where they could find recent news about IIUM or maybe about their member, they could create an Agregator called “iium-news”. Using this agregator, IIUM student can join in this agregator, and submit their blog to be indexed in YourAgregator. When the IIUM student update their blog, the blog update will be shown in “iium-news”. Beside blogs, member can also submit RSS link, let say, for example the RSS of IIUM official website. That way, when the IIUM post news on their website, member of “iium-news” will get notified.
The moderator (and some other member if granted permission by the moderator), carry the role of making sure the rss submitted and member request is relevent to the Agregator’s interest. By default, the moderator need to approve a person before the person become an official member and able to submit rss. And by default, an RSS submission need to be approved by the moderator before it is indexed by YourAgregator. This make sure that no totally irrelevent post get indexed by YourAgregator.
Besides that, YourAgregator has a special ranking system which I call ‘niceness’. The goal is that, member who contribute more to the agregator has more ‘niceness’ and therefore has more power to rank post. Basically in this ranking system, when a member click ‘nice’ on a post, the post ranking increase according to the member’s ‘niceness’ and at the same time the member’s ‘niceness’ increase. This means that member who often rank post will have higher ‘niceness’ and therefore has more credibility to rank a post. For convenience, a post initial niceness is equal to the niceness of the member who submitted it. And of course, you cannot ‘nice’ your own post.
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| The nice button |
The rate of increase of a member’s niceness will become lower, the more the person rate. Infinitely, a member’s niceness will never exceed 100. This prevent a member from becoming over-powered.
That’s It
That pretty much explain the concept of YourAgregator. Up to now, YourAgregator also has some other service such as a chatbox. In terms of configurability, YourAgregator’s moderator can edit the css of their Agregator. But some of the css will be overridden to prevent abusive use. The moderator can also edit the header, the sidebar, the footer and create custom ‘page’, if they need it.
For now, what’s lacking in YourAgregator is mostly good design. In fact, YourAgregator has no theming system, allthough it does have a Styler that help a little in modifying the css. The theeming system can easily be done, albeit most probably buggy. Talk about bugs, YourAgregator probably has lots of bug. But due to the lack of tester, we may never know most of them. Anyway, YourAgregator do have a feedback button. Another thing that is missing in YourAgregator is a forum. It’s a community site without a forum, lol!. But by putting too much feature in it, I’m afraid YourAgregator may be exceed what it suppose to be, an Agregator.
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| Anyone into designing? |
Inspite all that, the biggest problem is that YourAgregator is hosted on Google App Engine, with all it’s mighty restriction. To make it worst, paypal cannot convert MYR to USD, and to make a foreign currency in the local bank, the minimum deposit is RM1000. I’m a poor kid! Local hosting provider in another hand, do provide RM 35 to RM100 a year for a shared hosting. But that’s with a maximum processor speed of 50Mhz to 100Mhz. That’s 26X slower than my computer! I can’t imagine it ran django with mongo db. That will need at least 256MB ram to run. So, the plan was to use Amazon Ec2 free trial. Unfortunately, I do not have a credit card to verify, so currently I’m stuck with Google App Engine.
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| The red bar is the result of 7 blog submission. |
GAE or not, YourAgregator is still online, and I intend to keep it that way. And the plan is to make it mature enough, make some money with it and pay hosting with that money! And to do that, we need to make sure It is user friendly, from the frontpage!
Obviously, this will need a lot of work. A little notice ‘Hi! It’s seems that you are not logged in. (More message will be written)’ shows a lot. This frontpage should show “Welcome to YourAgregator!, a site for news based community. Login or Signup to create or join agregators!” or semething like that with ton’s of graphics. Ok, so the user logged-in….
The login page is probably the most beautiful page in YourAgregator. Probably because of the login providers logo. Other than that, there is the confusing, request password reset and register a new account.