Diyshare is coming.
So what is that? Its a pretty original new concept in user generated content and news distribution. Basically its a new twist on user submitted and user managed content, all put together under one “roof” to share information, news, events, promotion and general interest pieces (all relevant to the DIY ethic).
We’ve just started hashing out this idea and development is under way, but we think this will be pretty unique and frankly its pretty exciting. The idea behind this is really two fold. One to provide a mechanism for DIY projects to post news, and another mechanism to enable users to rate, promote and drive how that content is delivered, along with our new editor (who will oversee everything).
In addition to this, we’ll have a blog for our editor, so she can keep us all up to date with what is going on. So yeah, things are a foot around here!
Another mass link deletion is getting ready to happen. I’m looking to cut another 20% of the links from the database. Basically, and as been pointed out by a few folks, there are still an enormous number of dead links.
So, any link that was posted before January 1st 2001 will be deleted. After just running a quick report that is exactly 9,693 links. That’s a pretty big number.
Because of this, I’m going to have to step up my recruiting a bit more, to get more links into the system. Yeah, I would rather have fewer links that work than a ton of them that don’t. So, if you are reading this, and know someone who does a project, ask them (politely) to stop by sometime and add their project web site. I will be posting a “call for links” today as well as start posting in as many places I can find. Got any ideas?
Well, perhaps not *that* kind of social engineering.
When I first designed the new system I put in a few little extra columns in the database for each link, one such field is called “clickthru” and another is called “impressions.” These two fields actually say quite a lot. “Clickthru” basically stipulates how many times the given link was clicked on. “Impressions” refers to the number of times the given link was “shown” to a user.
If you divide clickthrus by impressions, you get a clickthru percentage. Ad companies use this very basic formula to determin pricing (and other things, like cost per click etc.). Yes, this is a vast over-simplification, but just hang in there for a moment.
What I am wanting to do is, “promote” popular links, and at the same time, create a “neighborhood” of common links.
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A new feature is going to be launched this weekend. I’ve talked about it before. In an attempt to better clean up and keep clean, the search index, I’ve implemented a “report dead link” feature. What you will see is, on category and search result pages, a little link next to each result (after the description of each link): [report dead link]
Now, its important to note that this cannot be abused in anyway. If a user clicks that, all that happens is, I’m notified that a given link was reported as dead, and that link has a new flag (in the database) called “isReported.” This WILL NOT REMOVE the link from the database. In fact, a user can click on “report dead link” all day and nothing will actually happen.
What I will see, in my administration screen, is a list of links that have been reported as “dead,” which I can then review myself. If the link truly is dead, then I can de-activate the link (not delete it). This will mean that the link will not show up in search results or on category pages, but gives the link owner an opportunity to fix things.
Along with this new feature, the FAQ section of the main site will be updated and has been reorganized. Also, I’ll be doing a slight design tweak to the t-shirts (hmm, always a designer, have to tweak tweak tweak!).
Its been very quiet around here. Probably a good thing. The new site (diysearch.com) is running very smoothly, not a single problem since the launch (on May 20). Its been seeing about 1,500+ visitors a week, which is significantly down from the peak back in 2002/3 where we were seeing that in a day.
I only have myself to blame for that.
Anyway, I’m working on another side-project, one that isn’t quite as involved as Diysearch, in fact I’m not doing hardly any development for it (thanks for that goes to Joomla, a nice fork of the Mambo server product). The idea is to build a “veterans” straight edge community, which I am calling Still True.
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