Springinfo ReStructure

[AF]

I'm restructuring SpringInfo based on experiments at http://springnews.darkstars.co.uk

The theme has been changed to Yoko and some fixes and plugins have been changed too. More details as they come

[knorke]

please please please please get right of these automatic tag clouds under each article and at the side:

Categories: News | Tags: Bastions, Brink, Censorship Bill, Chain Letters, China, Congress, Congressman, Free Speech, Full Committee, Gundam, Internet Censorship, Open Source Projects, Popular Song, RTS, Sister Project, Stuff, syndicated, video, Vote, youtube | Permalink

Makes it look like some unprofessional pronsite.

[AF]

I had a much fuller version of my first post but it got eaten.

I've added a second aggregator plugin of my own creation which allows tags and categories to be set, so the auto tagger is no longer necessary for those feeds. ( Apologies for the 19 emails from when the Conflict Terra Moddb Images feed was imported ).

I've made some changes to the Yoko theme to better adapt it for the image post format.

Aggregator features that weren't present prior:

• Youtube support
• Pulls featured images and thumbnails from media enclosures ( or the main post content )
• Downloads all images and hosts them locally attaching them accordingly
• Better duplicate post protection
• Support for custom post statuses, I've installed Edit flow so posts can be marked as 'irrelevant' or 'pointless' or 'not spring related'
• Feeds can now have post formats
• Feeds can now be exported and imported elsewhere
• Much faster feed imports
• Many other things

I've also installed Social 2 and set up Jetpack.

[Forboding Angel]

Knorke, don't worry Themes when first initialized tend to have x sidebar widgets enabled, so you have to do a little stuff to work it through.

Here is a though, this site supports rotating headers built right into the theme. Do you guys prefer no header image, or would you like it if each spring game had one (or several?) like here?

[AF]

That decision will be made when the time comes to it. I am not finished.

[AF]

Further changes:

• The menu structure has been changed
• There is now a development section with commits from github
• Posts link off to their sources
• Less vertical whitespace
• A video section has been added
• Knorkes youtube videos have been added to the list of feeds
• There's now an images section
• Smoths Gundam Moddb image feed has been added
• The conflict terra moddb image feed was added
• A tonne of behind the scenes stuff

[abma]

rss feeds don't work any more...

http://springinfo.info/?feed=rss

[AF]

I'm aware of that, it's being looked into

[Forboding Angel]

Wth? It was working fine a few days ago

Thanks for the heads up, I didn't notice. BTW af, we need to set it up for feedburner (actually SI already has a feedburner), so that people can easily email subscribe to it. I rather like feedburner emails from SI because I basically get news about the other projects as well without having to chick this site or SI.

[AF]

We already have a subscribe by email widget in the sidebar

[knorke]

I see the site is not finished yet but this is more a general problem:
What are your plans to avoid having a site that is a automatically thrown together collection of postings harvested from other sites?
All the content is mined from eg moddb and badly mangled in the process, or at least taken out of context.
This way all the recent advances are missed, all you get are basically changelogs from games and stuff like that. But what use is a changelog without a link to the game? Why should anybody comment on springinfo instead of using the games forum?
I think it is of little use to finetune the automatic article generation because it is only remixing existing content and the results will be bad, no matter what. That was also the problem of Forbs springinfo.

What is needed are original, manually written article for example about new games. But why would anybody want to write something only to have it lost in a swamp of rss feed spam?

[AF]

Both can be done, but keep in mind that the feeds being pulled in haven't all been added, nor are they beign gvien as much meta data as they could be.

Also feeds don't necessarily get auto-published, for example, your own youtube feed is pulled in with the status 'pending' so that they can be manually filtered for spring related videos and non-related videos to be flagged.

There are also other widgets that need sorting out for theme compatibility ( they need the theme adjusting they dont just wor anywhere ) to get the next part of what I plan.

Until then the posts are listed using the default category and archive listings, coupled with a hook to prevent the development category posts showing on the homepage ( mainpage full of engine commits?! omg lol cant be having that ).

Eitherway I would say there has been an improvement, traffic is up, aesthetics have been greatly improved, it's far less cluttered ( with the exception of the archives widget ), site overhead is down, server load is down, and the technical side of the site is far far more resilient/futureproof now.

[AF]

The feed issue is resolved

[Forboding Angel]

Thanks for fixing it AF, not to mention for everything you've been doing. It's nice not having to do everything myself for a change, and you've implemented ideas that I never thought of (like pulling in image feeds, etc).

Well done =D

[abma]

now it shows even git-commits...

http://www.springinfo.info/feed/

[Licho]

I liked the old non-spammy version more.. Now improtant things are hidden under piles of unimportant commits

[abma]

me too...

is there a feed that contains only human-written news?

[AF]

now it shows even git-commits...

http://www.springinfo.info/feed/

I had forgotten they would show up in the feed too, it will be amended.

Fundamentally, how the site works has not changed. The previous incarnation grabbed most of its content from RSS feeds, as does the new incarnation, the difference being that a superior code base with more features is now doing the heavy lifting.

As for human written posts, tbh their haven't been that many. As I've said I have something else in the works that should dramatically improve the way news pages are laid out. At the moment they're laid out in a simple 10 post feed like most blogs, whereas when I deploy the next phase they'll be arranged similar to sites like The Verge or BBC News.

Unfortunately that particular stage has been hit by setbacks, namely my discovery of Civilisation V, and the emergency resetup of my new site ( work on tomjn.com started several days ago and is going fast, if things continue at this pace the site will be deployed and live by the 7th ).

Those who have login access to the backend of springinfo will have seen a number of plugins and post types appear that are not on the live site.

A quick to do list:

• Filter the development category from the feeds
• Finish the section layouts
• Finish the listing widget layouts
• Implement a more streamlined developer section ( avatars should be smaller, no excerpts etc )
• there are ~6/7 moddb image feeds, and news feeds to add, and about 12 youtube channel feeds that still need adding from springnews.darkstars.co.uk

[AF]

The development category now no longer shows in the rss feeds

[AF]

Feed links have also been changed to point to the sites the posts got pulled from rather than springinfo