V1 Done

So I consider V1 to be wrapped.

Linking is fixed - all using a href's now, intead of (those damn) LinkButtons. I'm making some minor look and feel changes (mostly font sizes). But the site is otherwise cranking along.

Added 28 or so new users in the last two days, and some are using the site - need to get LOTS more though!

I also changed RSS to use a link (and changed to time, so it's like the rest of the site).

AND one big thing - Recent now just orders by the time a story was made Popular - instead of score and then popular. This is more digg-like. I originally didn't want to do it this way, but it's the default page - and I think having newly popular stories show up like this will help move them up.

Next Evolutionary Step in Social News?

Social news aggregators strive to collect the best of the best. NewsNozzl takes that a step further and adds "the social" to the mix. This isnt your mom's news reader.

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Nozzl got up on Mashable last night; this Digg story posts to it. Hoping to get on TechCrunch still...

So the FUN thing here is I'd love to have this up on the main Nozzl site - but I can't, as it needs to make its way up on some other site, like digg, before it'll show up :)

read more | digg story

Links

Spent some time this weekend working on the whole LinkButton thing.

asp:LinkButton is pretty cool. It looks like a hyperlink, but when you get the click, you get a POST - so you get all the form data. Nifty, easy to use, lets you do some cool things - so I used it. :(

The problem is it IS a POST back. So you get various results on BACK - and often a "page has expired" when trying to go back to the last page. And if you've clicked through a bit, you may get several.

100% not usable, at least not for what I'm doing.

So the whole thing was a bit of a trap - oh well.

It actually took a fair amount of time to rip all of that out. I've got EVERYHING on standard a href's now, except the pager, which I will finish up later (maybe this weekend? - Got Jury duty all week, so prob won't have a lot of time).

I'm not going to deploy until the pager is done, as I will need to re-test a lot to make sure everything is a-ok. The site actually LOOKS the same to users, but all the main links are now handled different.

Done?

While I'm not DONE, I may be "done" for the version.

Users can tip other users now, and the auto-cash system is in place. It runs every few hours and figures out who's done what since the last process time, and awards cash.

I've still got some things to do (the POST issue, allow users to configure defaults, and a few other things) but the site is very usable.

I'm going to put together a FAQ with some screen shots - try to show what's different between Nozzl and other news sites.

I think that list is:

• Users don't submit news; we feed off the top stories from top social news sites.
• On-page preview of stories
• Direct link to story mirror (either Google Cache or Dugg mirror)
  
• Nozzl Cash/Tipping system
• Wiki
• Submit Nozzl stories to other sites (not exactly new, but you can't submit a Digg story to Reddit, from Digg).

And, of course, even with the limited number of users we have now, I think the site can be BETTER than others. Less crap on the front page. Wider range of stories (because of how we feed off of other sites).

Once I get some screen shots and info together, I'll submit it around a bit and see what happens. Probably do TechCrunch first (great site, but wouldn't be the mass influx of some of the bigger news sites). My big fear here is not getting a nice swell of users - going to be hard to attract attention. Or getting too many :)

While I'll continue to work on the site, until I get a user base, I'll probably work on other things (and the things I DO work on will be more trying to get the user base then coding). I am planning working on some other projects (putting voting up for SR, and working on a Android version of AE)

On another note, I've been having memory issues on the server - I'm looking at going from 2GB to 4 or 8 GB. Should help.