I’m thinking about implementing some chances network wide to xmeltrut.com. It’s never actually been done before, the systematic updating of every xmeltrut.com website so it will be interesting to see how it goes and more importantly, I want to get all of the changes I want to make done at once.
The reason behind it is that I got thinking about adding TrackBacks to the news stories, as it’s a lot easier and cooler than comments ;). I also thought of a neat way to add related stories which I have pondered (not quite considered but pondered at least) for a while now. It’s just things getting cluttered which I am worried about. The news story pages are pretty empty though and I can add them to the xmeltrut.com news posting pages by hiding the functions then having a “more” button next to the post news button which dynamically reveals more options.
The only problem I would have would be that I would need to put like “Related (2) TrackBacks (0)” below every news story which would take up a lot of space, especially on the news archives page as many of the stories are only a paragraph long which is why so many are on each page.
The other problem is protection against spam which is very hard but in order to try and counter it I would have to build some kind of time delay, ie, you can only TrackBack from the same IP once every minute or five minutes or something and also have a system to email me of every TrackBack which is manageable considering there will be every few, probably none at first other than maybe be pinging from site to site which would be useful when I have stories relating between celebs.
While I am there though I also want to bring everything else into line – update the functions library and database class and also the most recent RSS feed file that includes showing the entire first paragraph of the story rather than the first 100 characters. I initially didn’t do this as that is often all the story which eliminates people’s need to come to the site which I don’t want as there is no ads in the RSS (yet anyway) but I feel it is worth it as there may be more to the story and as I build up RSS readers I can start introducing adverts there too.
I’m also toying with the idea of putting a second RSS feed in there for the video news updates (at least the sites that have them) that include the Media RSS specification so that I can get it syndicated in Yahoo Video search. All the changes should be drag and drop for the new sites though, it’s only the first half a dozen old sites that I should have problems with as the code is really old in there. The last dozen sites or so work off almost identical code bases and the RSS files now take all the site information from the database so they are actually identical files that only differ because of the Site ID variable supplied in another file. Rapid deployment is what it is all about these days :).
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.