Skin of Stars

Machines, Media and Miscellanea

by Kevin Carmody

Boxfire 1

I’m preemptively titling this post as Boxfire 1 as I know there is more info to come. My dissertation produced a website, or should I say that I have produced a website for my dissertation. Either way, it’s a collaborative news filter for Oxford that relies on user interaction to find the most important news story for the area. Please try it out and tell me what you think:

http://boxfire.co.uk

Comments

By Anonymous on

First impression: it took 30 seconds to load. Most people’s attention span is shorter than that.

The Brown-on-Orange menubar is quite unpleasant. The black-on-Olive at the bottom is hard to read. Changing colours is easy, choosing good ones is hard…

Leaving a comment results in: “We’re sorry, but something went wrong”.

Overall: it looks like a re-implementation of digg.com for local news. See also pligg, drigg, and isn’t reddit also open-source?

Have fun.
Parker

By Kevin on

Appreciate you checking. I should say that this is still kinda proof of concept. I’ve also had to leave it on freeze while my dissertation is marked. After that, I can carry on improving it and I’ll be sure to get on those bugs.

The first difference between this and the other Open Source projects you mentioned (pligg, drigg and let us not also forget the very good SocialCMS) is that this is written in Ruby whereas the others are in PHP. A opening in the Open Source bazaar I spied. Also, this is just a starting point and I hope to make some unique changes. ;)

HTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> . To display code, manually escape it.