New Home Page/News Feed for USUFans.com
Posted: June 20th, 2014, 8:13 pm
After a lot of work, the News/Home page of USUFans has undergone a major redesign. The layout has been changed to look more modern while also including some new member feedback functionality. Here is a quick runthrough of some of the new stuff we have.
Refined News Feed
I've implemented some changes to the way we pull news articles that will hopefully eliminate a lot of the articles that aren't related to USU.
Article Promotion/Demotion
When logged in, you will see an up and down arrow attached to each article. You can upvote articles that you find especially interesting and downvote articles that are not relevant or are very poorly written (very similar to sites like Reddit and Digg). Once an article reaches a certain negative threshold it will be removed from the feed. Articles that have at least 3 positive votes become eligible for the Top Stories section. If Moderator/Administrator downvotes a story it will be immediately removed (Mods/Admins please only use downvote for irrelevant articles.
Top Stories
Now that we have voting on articles, we can figure out which news stories are currently at the top. Articles that receive the most votes will float to the top where they will stay until newer popular articles appear to replace them. I will probably watch the algorithm over time and make tweaks to it in hopes to improve upon it. At this time only news articles (no Podcasts) are eligible for Top Stories (Sorry Front Row Show). I will continue to study this to find a good way to implement a top Podcast as well in the future.
Articles Open in New Tab/Window
With the old news feed articles were opened in the current tab but also included a Top Bar allowing easy return to USUFans. Unfortunately, many sites have since broken the top bar and a few sites have been unusable from within the framed window. Because of this, the Blue Bar is no more and all news articles open in a New Tab (older browsers will open in a new window).
View By Source
If you click on a Source Logo in an Article it will filter and only show you news articles from that specific source.
Please comment with any problems that you encounter with this new functionality.
Refined News Feed
I've implemented some changes to the way we pull news articles that will hopefully eliminate a lot of the articles that aren't related to USU.
Article Promotion/Demotion
When logged in, you will see an up and down arrow attached to each article. You can upvote articles that you find especially interesting and downvote articles that are not relevant or are very poorly written (very similar to sites like Reddit and Digg). Once an article reaches a certain negative threshold it will be removed from the feed. Articles that have at least 3 positive votes become eligible for the Top Stories section. If Moderator/Administrator downvotes a story it will be immediately removed (Mods/Admins please only use downvote for irrelevant articles.
Top Stories
Now that we have voting on articles, we can figure out which news stories are currently at the top. Articles that receive the most votes will float to the top where they will stay until newer popular articles appear to replace them. I will probably watch the algorithm over time and make tweaks to it in hopes to improve upon it. At this time only news articles (no Podcasts) are eligible for Top Stories (Sorry Front Row Show). I will continue to study this to find a good way to implement a top Podcast as well in the future.
Articles Open in New Tab/Window
With the old news feed articles were opened in the current tab but also included a Top Bar allowing easy return to USUFans. Unfortunately, many sites have since broken the top bar and a few sites have been unusable from within the framed window. Because of this, the Blue Bar is no more and all news articles open in a New Tab (older browsers will open in a new window).
View By Source
If you click on a Source Logo in an Article it will filter and only show you news articles from that specific source.
Please comment with any problems that you encounter with this new functionality.