Sunday, August 09, 2009

Beefing up community feeds


Planet MySQL

If you weren't paying attention, you may have missed the latest news in Planet MySQL. A few months ago, the site has added the ability of voting for posts (in addition to searching and tagging, which make it much more useful than it was before).
However, if you, like many, read Planet MySQL using a feed reader, the recent benefits are not easily usable.
To allow everyone to vote on the posts they like, even from a feed reader, the feeds now include two links at the end of for each post, to vote on a deserving post even from a feed reader.

The feed may look like this one:

Since I liked this post, I can click on Vote UP, and the link opens in my default browser, showing the result of the voting.

The same happens for the MySQL Librarian feed. At the end of each post, you can click on vote UP or vote DOWN directly from your feed reader.
In both cases, the vote works only if you are already logged in. If you aren't, you will be taken to the login page.
This is not the end of the story. More goodies will come. Stay tuned.

2 comments:

Shlomi Noach said...

Hi Giuseppe,

My initial reaction to the voting system (and to Kaj's call for opinions) was that it only created competition, whereas we act in an open source, open community environment, and should collaborate rather than compete.

Anyhow, if you really want to work out a voting system, then work out a javascript code, which can be planted by the end of users' posts (like a WordPress plugin, for that matter), which can call upon mysqlplanet. This way, people can vote from the posts themselves.
I'm using a firefox plugin for reading RSS feeds, and don;t have the voting system working.

Regards,
Shlomi

Giuseppe Maxia said...

Hi Shlomi,
Thanks for your comment. The Javascript plugin is next to come. It has already been made (by Diego), and you will see the instructions of how to install and use it in your blog probably today or tomorrow.

Giuseppe