These days it feels good to be from Sweden! I’m of course talking about the fantastic performances in Vancouver! Just finished watching the mens relay, wow!
Updates on XCStorm development
We’ve been working on a new version of XCStorm (2.0!) for some time but it’s not until now we’ve got started “for real”.
Control the flow
One of the main issues with the existing XCStorm is that when the flow of news becomes large, the page is practically useless. It’s very hard to find relevant and interesting news on the front page. That has gotten many people to prefer using only the RSS-feed (including me) from XCStorm.
We’ve been peeking at Reddit and Worldofo for solutions to how they have solved this. So we are planning on doing our own flavour of a “voting-system” where you upvote news you find interesting. That way we can construct different pages for “featured” and “latest” news.
We’re probably removing or at least changing the “Most read in x days” (insert date into x) completly.
Filtering and other good stuff
In the new version everything will be filterable as well, we’re also adding Twitter-news for those interested in that. I’ve also begun creating an API for XCStorm so you can snatch the news you want from us. It will be accessable by JSON.
Cheers!
/ Anders & Pär
http://www.xc1.se
XC1 Group is doing a lot of exciting stuff atm! This weekend I’m (Anders) going to Åre to visit Pär and to discuss some of our upcoming projects.
The upcoming olympics will completly destroy my freelancing and school, too… much… sports! Three of our clients are going to compete (Anna Haag, Emil Jönsson & Ida Ingemarsdotter) and we’ve got a good feeling they’ll “own” the games.
We’ve just updated the layout of our feeds at http://www.xcstorm.com/rss/ and the country-feeds.
You can now see the source-image and a direct link to the source, imo much better. Too bad we did it with tables, we will change it so it uses XSLT later.
2009
XCStorm has increased it’s visitors to about 400 unique/day. I think it’s about time to redesign and hopefully get better structure as the items increases (since we add more sources). We published more than 16 000 (16 401) items this year.
The majority of visitors are still from Sweden, but we’re getting more and more from Norway.
Later in 2009 we added a feedback-button, please people: use it! Tell us what we can do better, or why we’re so awesome. Look at the right (next to the scrollbar) for the button at XCStorm.
2010
The backend is doing some stupid heavy cache, my goal for January is to fix this. If I get what I want, it’ll be a lot easier to handle the view count on the items. This will result in a faster XCStorm for you folks.
There’s some trouble loading the static media files at XCStorm right now. We’re working on it!
Thanks to Björn Lilja I’ve found the english version of Kundo as well.
So please, give us some feedback and we will try make XCStorm even better (although it’s kind of awesome today).
Hello everyone!
I’ve just added a feature to help us improve XCStorm, it’s currently only available to swedish users. If you’re using the http://www.xcstorm.com/se/ site, take a look in the right for the “Tyck till”-button.
Thanks in advance!
/ Anders Hassis
It’s been quite some time since I my last post!
Here’s some updates on what’s going on:
- Working on a new Feed-reader for XCStorm, I’m gonna use the new sparkling Zend_Feed_Reader. Hopefully that will solve my problems with doubleparsing some of the RDF-feeds.
- Started working on a project that involved a webshop, the client also wanted a simple-to-use UI like the one I’ve already choosen for him at his other site, he digs Wordpress.
- Tried and thrown away WP e-commerce, bought us a license of Shopp, Shopp rocks.
- Joined the beta team and made a swedish translation of it.
I’ve spent the last couple of days/weeks doing some work in Wordpress. Since I’ve had a lot of questions myself and spent quite some time Googling these, I could as well post them here.
How do I debug SQL-queries? Including listing all queries.
My first thought was to use the get_num_queries(), but that couldn’t be done. So I found the plugin Debug Queries
How do I make internal page links in Wordpress from one page to another?
Use the plugin RB Internal links
How do I rearrange the menu order without manipulating the #”!”## ‘priority’-field?!
Use the plugin pageMash
One of the problems with moving a page is that all the content-url:s goes to hell, so usually I make a search/replace in the db for the old url and replace to the new. There must be an easier way?
Yes, and I will most certainly use it in my next move, Velvet Blues Update URLS
Is the e-commerce plugin something worth trying? Is it easy to implement payment gateways.
Yes, it’s quite nice. Just remember it’s not very easy to customize if you still want the core intact. Haven’t tried upgrading it to a new release (since I’m up-to-date now) so I can’t say how easy that is.
I’ve made a few modifications to the core, and I’m certain I’ll have to do more of those…
How do I make an menu-object link to an external page?
Use the plugin Page Lists plus
