Nozzl Cash

I've got the basis for Nozzl Cash in. Users earn NC by voting for stories, adding comments, and voting on comments. Users can also give other users cash ("Tip" them). And by using Tips.

Users can use cash to vote up a story. It's a sliding scale - the more a user "Tips" a story, the less actual votes they will get out of it. Which is perfect, as users CAN slant a story they want, but the more they want to do so, the more pain it will cost, in the form of decreased cash.

Also something else big here - the ONLY way to do a negative vote on a story is by using a Tip. So if something is really bad, there's now a way to decrease a stories votes.

Next to each story, the user can click the Tip graphic
A pop-up will let them do the tip (got some cleanup here still)


The main screen shows the users with the top cash


And the users profile will show how much they have

I'll probably also put a top tipper/top tipped for the day/week/month/year on. Also need to be able to allow users to tip other users (and tip on commenting and comment voting - which is 2nd priority right now).

Published vs Popular

So until tonight, the date shown for stories was the "Loaded" (aka Published) date. This is when the second pass of the loader inserted the story into the DB.

This wasn't working well, as older stories would drop off after 12 hours (on the front page), even though they may have been made popular only a few hours ago.

So I went ahead and fixed that - if the only Loaded is available, that's the date displayed - otherwise it's when it was made popular (and I'm now setting that at the correct threshold). As I am now also selecting and order on that on everything but "All" (as those may not be popular yet), I had to go in and update the DB to correct old stories.

Looks to be working nice :)

Last 10...

I've finally got the right column up. It shows (up to) the last 10 votes and last 10 comments,
Because I'm staying away from the emphasis on friends, I need to make users visible able to each other - this is one way to do that.

It's 100% cache-based, as I don't want to hit the DB. Looks pretty good, I think - and now that I have the right column set, I'll be doing other things (like showing top tippers by time...)

Like-Minded, Part 2

Whew, ended up doing some more on this. Now when it returns any like-minded, it will also show a list of WHO was like minded.

I'm trying to make sure the social part of this (as in, users connecting to users) is still around. This is one of the things to help with that.

Also cleaned up some of the screens - I've ended up going to a centered column, so made sure everything is doing that (login, register, user, etc. was left still).

Like Minded

So I think I've taken like minded to its conclusion.

Instead of a straight # threshold, it does it as a % of like-voted stories. And the user can now configure that, either on their user page or when they do like minded on the main page.

When doing like minded on the main page, they'll get this:


The low the %, the more open it is. The higher, the more alike (voting-wise) the stories will be.

Not sure how much more I'm going to do right now - still would like to flush user profile out (default sites and cats for the most part), but I'm getting a bit fried :)

I also put in a RSS link, so the RSS buttons in IE and Firefox now show up.

Ajax

Enough Digg smacking :)

So a few new things have gone in. On the preview screen, you can now comment.


And I've added Ajax to all commenting - when you make the comment, it will in-place make it, then show that it made it. Which helps navigation on the story page a LOT - as back will now take you to the previous screen, always.

I MIGHT do the 60 seconds timer for edits on comments - have to see. Not a huge deal, but might be a 2.0 thing.

Big thing left is user profile. Going to keep that very simple for now, but I at least need to get some basics in (pop window on click, % for like minded, etc)

Critical of Digg = Be censored by Digg?

So an interested thing happened last night. I had posted a blog entry about how annoyed I was with the quality and type of ads that Digg has been showing over the last couple of weeks. And sent it off to Digg

I didn't really mean for it to go anywhere, I was just venting. But I guess others had gotten tired of the annoying video ads, so it ended up getting voted up. It entered the front page, and was on the "top in 24 hours" in 2 hours.

By 5 PM EST it was in the #1 spot on the Top 10 in All Topics, and by 11 PM it was in the #2 spot for "top in 24 hours", and rising fast.

Around 11:45 PM it was removed.

So, my question is, why? I would guess it had either been buried by users, or Digg itself removed it.

It very well COULD have been buried - a lot of the comments seemed to be thinking the point of the post was about having to look at ads (and from there, pointing on there are ad blockers that could be used). That wasn't the point.

I've been using various forms of Ad blockers for a long time, so am aware of them. I happen to be on a new install and had not gotten around to installing Adblocker (something I did a hour after the first post, as I was really really tired of watching that $@!#$ girl every time I brought up Digg).

The point was the low quality of ads on Digg, almost NSWF, and very distracting. A lot of people want to support the site through ads so don’t install blockers; some don't have a clue about ad blockers (or are using IE). And some can't control what they can install on their machine ('cause they are at work, or are using a public machine or someone else’s machine).

Considering how many people DID support what I was saying, and after seeing the continuing Diggs (I was watching it on Stack), I do have to wondered how a post like that could all of a sudden been buried? It would have probably hit the number 1 spot for 24 hours.

So was it buried or censored by Digg? Did someone at Digg not like the amount of slams they were getting on their partners poor choice of Ads? I realize this is a touchy subject, as the site is getting 100% of their revenue via ads, and they don't want to piss those people off (and as I said before, I SUPPORT Digg using ads – I just would like less intrusive, SFW ads, you know?)

Anyway. I don't really care that much, just thought it was interesting. I haven't had anything I've submitted go up like that before; it was cool, and then disappointing to just have it removed. I really HOPE it wasn't Digg that censored my opinion - if so, then the site has a lot more to worry about then the lousy selection of ads they are running!

DIGG: Please stop with the $!&@ front page video ads!

Yeah, I know, you need to make money, fine. But it seems like every time I bring Digg up I'm seeing this girl w/ live video. Yeah, she's pretty good looking... but I'm trying to READ, damit, and having some animated bit of fluff in the lower right of my window is very distracting. So how about using some of that $300-million-value-pull and drop the !@#!@ video adds? OK? I promise I'll click on some of the less-annoying static ads if you do. THANKS!

Site Buttons

So I've been using the force vote to submit to digg, which is working GREAT (68 stories in 2 days - usually VERY hard to get a new one in).

So I was thinking. I'm not really in competition with the other sites. I'm actually feeding off of them, NEED them to have lots of new stories. So why not let my users submit to those sites (if the original story wasn't from. So I've done that.

I've also given credit to the sites that we're feeding off of in the footer (under "Sites we use") with a link.

I still need to figure out what to do with user profile. Should I get it full of stuff, or keep it very simple as it is today?

RSS

RSS is up and running. Asking some testers what they want, beyond what I've done.

I've also set up a twitter account that gets stories when they first go on the front page (http://twitter.com/NewzNozzl) and am using Force Vote to Digg (there's a button that will digg a story, nice). The userid for that is http://digg.com/users/newznozzl

I hope that both of these will drive traffic - the twitter info directly, and the digg one indirectly (a couple of front page stories would help a lot, as that will get the user ID visible to a lot of people)

Search

Not a lot of time to work on Nozzl this week... but I got Search in. Works pretty nice.

Also moved away from the mutli-select on the categories- you can now only select one, and there's a "All". While I think the old way was better once you knew what was going on, it was uniformly confusing the hell out of people. Fun :)