[jsword-devel] RSS feeds and news page

[DM Smith]

Peter,

Just a couple of quick impressions. Since this is an early cut, I'm sure that you won't take offense;)...

Good start.

I can't read light purple on dark purple headings.... ;)

There is way too much information on the page. I need help determining what is important. Some thoughts on what might help:
* Allow me to drag sections to re-arrange them. I've heard that there is a way to store prefs on the user's machine w/o cookies. IIRC, Greg Hellings has played around w/ it.
* Allow me to show/hide sections.
* On the section's banner, indicate whether there is recent news and if so how many are recent. Recent might be based on a multiplicity of factors, e.g. anything within the last week or anything I haven't seen since the last time I looked. That is if either is true then flag it.
* Perhaps summarize today's top news? (It would include recent stuff, not just today's news) Perhaps a toggle to such a view? Perhaps it's own section?
* Allow each section to show more or less news.
* Perhaps an accordion to manage the collection of sections? Or the news within a section?

The title "The SWORD Project" is not quite right. Maybe "News at CrossWire"? It is showing CrossWire's classic news, of which only Alkitab Bible Study is showing.


What are your thoughts w/ (read more)? Does clicking on "more" do an in place expansion?

Thanks,
DM

On Nov 11, 2010, at 2:10 AM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:

> Hi Guys,
> 
> I am busy creating some protoype for an automatically updating
> CrossWire news page. This is so far my private work, but if it finds
> reasonable consensus it might go into the update of the site.
> 
> You can see what is happening here
> 
> http://www.crosswire.org/~refdoc/test_site/index.jsp?section=News
> 
> (This will change as I keep working on it)
> 
> I think the general agreement is that our "news"
> section is commonly old news, and a lot of stuff which happens is
> nowhere to see for the general public.
> 
> My thought was :
> 
> If all frontends would have an RSS feed for their releases and other
> important news then the News page's work could be simply to aggregate
> this.
> 
> CrossWire itself is already riddled with RSS feeds which often do
> update quite well. Several frontends do have very useful feeds, but
> some don't.
> 
> I think it should be simple to have a small perl script or similar
> hanging out on your servers and produce this. This would take out the
> pain of updating news in a variety of places.
> 
> Those of you who use the CrossWire news facility - ignore me, unless
> you like the idea of an RSS feed for your own reasons. But if you do
> establish RSS feeds, please tell me.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Peter
> 
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