Some site changes [New]
In anticipation of the upcoming auto-scheduler (and auto-promoter), I’ve changed it so only posts marked Front Page will appear on the front page. Others will still appear in their respective categories. Posts now have the [New] functionality and each category tells you how many new posts are in them (up to 5). The posts shown on the sidebar do not include anything on the front page, so they are easier to find.
Once the auto-scheduler is working, each post to the front page will be scheduled, typically for one each second hour (unless we get more content, then one an hour), during regular hours. To fill in the blanks, each hour a post that is not on the front page will be promoted (or every other hour if we don’t have enough content). At the moment it uses comment count as the primary method of determining worthiness. It seems the php level on this site is lower than what I have at home, so what runs there is an error here, but I should be able to get this running by tomorrow night, I think.
I’ve ‘promoted’ all recent posts to the front page, so it looks the same. Feel free to post quickhits, etc to the front page for now, to keep what we currently use working. (Or if it really is a QH you don’t want on the front page, feel free to not. People should be able to find it now.)
What Do You Think?
3 Responses to 'Some site changes'
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Oaktown Girl [New]
Monday, 14 Mar, 2011 at 10:12 am
Is there someway in the future we can determine “worthiness” besides number of comments? Often there’s a really great post that a reader loves, but they just don’t feel like they have anything to add to the discussion. I’d hate to have to always write “Thanks for posting” (which is shorthand for, “This comment is to register my interest in this topic and my appreciation that it got posted”). Besides, everyone who agreed with my “Thanks for posting” would have to actually do the same thing, not just “rec” the comment.
Monday, 14 Mar, 2011 at 10:24 am
Yes. We need recommendations for posts, but don’t have that yet. Comments seemed to be the best substitute. I actually take type into account, so Actions are rated a bit higher. Here is the code at the moment:
// score the posts -- should be based on ratings, but we don't have those yet
...
$rating = $p->comment_count;
if(in_array("Editors Choice", $cats)) {
$rating += 100;
} else if(in_array("Actions", $cats)) {
$rating += 6;
} else if(in_array("Diaries", $cats)) {
$rating += 4;
} else if(in_array("Quick Hits", $cats)) {
$rating += 2;
}
Tuesday, 15 Mar, 2011 at 10:37 pm
It is active now. See http://www.merge-left.org/discuss/topic/auto-scheduler-now-active for more details.