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Building The Site

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Building a news site with automation

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Jimi Wikman

By 💫 Jimi Wikman in News Database

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One of the key features I want to build is a news site. This has always been a big focus for me, as I love to consume news. This site already have a News setup, but I never got the functionality working properly. Hopefully I can re-imagine this a bit once the Invision Community V5 is released.

In short, I have been trying to adjust the SuperVote page template by OpenType, one of the best Pages developer there is. While partially successful, I never got it working 100% and that is probably because I broke everything while trying to adjust it to my liking. Instead of trying to hack the ratings update from the page listing, I will see if I can work with what already works.

There are a few things that already work very well. For example, the actions taken are very nicely displayed based on the actual rating given. A little indicator show which news items you have rated, and the news itself is dimmed out if it has been given a low rating.

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These things are very nice, and I can work with this to show things nicely when I redesign this. If I can figure out how to update the ratings in the listing view, then that would be awesome, but I will not put too much effort into this to get started. Getting the news added in a news section will be the main focus.

Automate News

Automation of news will be important. Getting it done without ripping full articles is a bit trickier. While Invision Community comes with RSS import, it is crude and basically just show the RSS content. This will not work because that way I will basically be stealing articles from the Atlassian Community for example and that is not what I want. I can kind of mitigate this by truncating the content, but that is crude and not really a proper solution either.

I can go with Zapier, of course, and I probably will do that in a limited way as it is quite expensive. The advantage with Zapier is that I have a lot more control, and I can for example truncate the content before it even comes to the site. Setting this up can be done using multiple Zapier accounts, where I set up one Zapier account for each RSS feed. Considering the number of RSS feeds, this is quite a lot of accounts to set up.

Designing a new News setup

I will spend some time to design a new News setup and try to figure out where to take this today and what the vision would be for the future. I am looking into the old Digg setup from the early 2000 as inspiration for what I would like to build eventually.

For now, I am just brainstorming to try to figure out what functionality would make sense. I see some of these functions also being useful for other databases, so I will gather some functions together as a base for future database ideas as well.

I will update with some designs once I have something to show.

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    Hakuna Matata Just Arrived

    ° Hakuna Matata

    ° Newcomer

    comment_2

    How to you make actual rating given? Do you use the native rating system of IPS? It has a bug right now preventing precise rating. I use it on the large live project, but the rating itself does not make sense with the bug.

    E.g. you can have 8 of 10 items that have exact the same rating in the IPS database even if they are really not. 😄 

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    • Jimi Wikman Oracle

    💫 Jimi Wikman

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    • Owner
    comment_3

    I use the native function and I was not aware of the rating bug. I am just playing around at this time and the rating bug will be fixed eventually and probable before I will build this anyway 🙂

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    • Hakuna Matata Just Arrived

    ° Hakuna Matata

    ° Newcomer

    (edited)

    comment_6

    I can build around it. I can create a custom field for rating, that is filled on the fly via JS. Every time the user votes, the field is updated. Then sort by this default field.

    But that would be a crutch. And it's a shame to invest time in a crutch just because the standard function is buggy. 😉 

    Edited by Hakuna Matata

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    • Jimi Wikman Oracle

    💫 Jimi Wikman

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    comment_7

    I would love to learn how to do that 🙂

    That would make building a Digg-like site a lot easier than having to rely on ratings 🙂

    But you are right, that is not the correct path forward. The standard function should work properly.

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