Local Thoughts blog

One of the most requested features for Local Thoughts has been the ability to view shorter versions of the feed items. The main reason for this request is the desire to skim quickly and read only the items that are interesting. Well… this feature has now been added to Local Thoughts.

Local Thoughts now has three different item display modes.

The “Title only” display mode removes all of the body text and only displays the title of the item as well as date and author information.

Many feeds are nice enough to offer a short version or description of the item content. The “Short” item display mode will show the content description if it has been provided. If the feed did not provide a content description Local Thoughts simply creates a short version by truncating the content at around three hundred and fifty characters.

The “Full” mode displays the entire item content as was always the case before the addition of the item display modes.

What is really nice about this new feature is that not only can you select the item display mode for each topic and city, you can also quickly select the display mode for a particular item without reloading the page. The display mode settings which affect the entire page are located near the top of the page beside the city or topic description. The per-item display mode settings can be found in the top right corner of each item.

For those of you who login to create and modify feeds or to take advantage of the favourites system your selected display mode setting for each topic and city will be remembered. If you view the site anonymously the display mode setting will be applied to every city and topic you visit.

If you have any comments, questions or problems relating to this new feature please let us know!

This is a short note for anyone who is following the development of Local Thoughts via this blog.

Most of the posts made here so far have been about new features. While I will probably point out major new features here, the smaller changes which are made everyday will not be posted. If you see something new you would like an explanation of feel free to send an email.

And now back to your regularly scheduled blog reading…

Over the last couple of days some changes have been made to Local Thoughts. Here are a few user visible highlights.

Digg links

As an experiment, submit to Digg links have been placed at the top of each topic and city.

Each time a user ‘diggs’ a page it is like a vote. Enough votes makes a page visible on Digg’s site where lots of other users can find it. Hopefully this will help new people find Local Thoughts.

New navigation bar

Some of the buttons on the right side have been removed and replaced with a horizontal navigation bar at the top. I think this design makes these options much easier to find.

What’s new? page

A new section was added called What’s new?. This section lists, in reverse chronological order, the creation of cities, topics and feeds allowing the user to find out what has recently been added to Local Thoughts with a quick glance. The user can choose to list just cities, topics and feeds individually or they can view a combined list.

New help text

A bit of help documentation has been added. It is not nearly complete enough but it is a start. Help can be accessed from the new top menu bar.

Some new features have been added to Local Thoughts today. Besides lots of behind the scenes stuff here are a few user visible changes.

Favourites system

A new favourites system has been added. This allows users to add topics and cities to a favourites list which is available on every page making it easy to quickly navigate between them. As the number of cities and topics keeps growing manually locating topics and cities was just getting too hard. Also, the favourites bar uses Ajax to avoid reloading the topic and city pages which are often quite large.

Related tab on topics

When you view a city there is a tab available called “List Topics”. This tab gives users a list of all topics which are related to the current city (example). Until now there was no similar feature for topics. The newly added “Related” tab will list all topics which are geographically related to the current topic as well as provide a link back to the city page.

Timezone stuff

Previously all time data was displayed in EST. Now Local Thoughts has been modified to display all dates in UTC for anonymous users. Also, users who are logged in can now specify the timezone they want time data displayed in.

I think it might be useful to give people a sense of where Local Thoughts is going and perhaps collect some feedback so here is a incomplete list of features that I plan on adding as time permits.

A feed for every city and topic

Seems an obvious thing to do. The feeds will probably be in Atom 1.0 format unless someone can point to some very important client software that doesn’t support Atom.

More collaborative features

If people are going to collaborate on the lists of feeds for each city they need the tools to do so. A small part of that toolbox is in place with the history information that is attached to every topic and city. A first step will be to add a feed containing this history information. Other required features include a discussion platform where the addition and removal of feeds can be debated and a notification mechanism (email?) which will allow interested individuals to keep track of the changes made to any city or topic that they help moderate.

Favourites

It would be nice if each user could specify a list of favourite topics and cities which would be displayed in a way that makes it easy to navigate to them. Update: Since writing this entry I have mostly completed this feature. It will be made available once I am done testing.

A new look

The current look of Local Thoughts is OK but it could be a lot better. Fortunately the back-end code is almost completely separated from the theme so changing the look shouldn’t be that hard from a programming standpoint. All I need is the time and some inspiration. No matter what though, the simple nature of the site will remain. Local Thoughts is about information not glitz. It has to be just as easy to look at on the 100th visit as the first.

The main motivation for developing Local Thoughts was the wish for a single place where I could find current news and information about my local community. The basic idea comes from the Planet feed aggregator which is used by many open source projects to create amazing community sites. A few Planet sites I visit regularly include Planet GNOME, Planet Jabber and Kernel Planet. A more complete list of Planet sites can be found on the Planet website.

Before starting to build Local Thoughts I had thought about setting up an instance of Planet for my home city but I didn’t relish the idea of functioning as a gatekeeper, deciding which blogs were good and which ones were not worth syndicating.

Then one night while I was lamenting the fact that there still wasn’t a Planet for my city it occurred to me that perhaps an editable Planet was the answer. A kind of wiki/Planet site that would allow other people to add the blogs they know about. This site would also allow the community as a whole to be the gatekeeper not any single individual. Local Thoughts was born.

After mostly finishing the city related features of Local Thoughts I expanded the scope to include not only cities but topics in general. The idea being that there are likely other organizations or groups of people with similar interests who could benefit from a Planet-like community site. I think the wine and cooking topics in particular have worked out very well.

So that’s how Local Thoughts was born. A place to bring together the thoughts and ideas about a city or topic into one location where they can be shared with everyone who is interested and with no single individual or company being the content gatekeeper.

Today the layout for Local Thoughts was changed a little bit to incorporate a new search field in the top right corner on every page.

The previous design had separate a “Search by keyword” menu option for cities and topics. It seemed like a good idea at the time but on second thought it was just confusing. Searching only topics or cities is still possible by clicking on the cities or topic tabs at the top of the search results. The new search field performs keyword searching on city names, topic names, topic descriptions and of course the geographic information attached to each topic and city.

Also it is now possible to do keyword based searching on feed names. The search results will show you which topic or city contains the matching feeds.

This post is the first public announcement of a new content aggregation service called Local Thoughts. How new is Local Thoughts? New enough that the theme for this blog does not even match the rest of the site! Come be one of the first people to check out Local Thoughts.

What is Local Thoughts? If you are a web veteran you can think of Local Thoughts as Wikipedia meets blog aggregation.

What exactly does that mean?

Many sites allow you to search for blogs and blog content. Technorati being perhaps the most famous example. These sites allow searching based on tags attached to the individual posts or by searching for text in the post content. Unfortunately, searching based on tags does not work as well we might like because posts are not always tagged with the relevant information. Content based searches are useful but even this type of searching often fails because not every post contains the information we require. Consider the task of trying to find blog posts related to your local city, many of the interesting posts will not contain the city name.

An alternative to text and tag searching can be found in the various sites which contain categorized lists of blogs. Assuming the list is kept up to date these lists can be useful in locating blogs but they do not provide a convenient way to actually view the blog content on a regular basis. Who really wants to constantly check the blog catalog and add new blogs to their feed reader or browser bookmarks? Also, building and maintaining the categories is just too much work for any individual or company alone.

Like other blog catalogs Local Thoughts divides blogs into categories but it also aggregates the content from each blog into a single page which is constantly updating. Take a look at the topic page for wine or cooking for examples.

What makes Local Thoughts different from other feed readers? Local Thoughts is not a personal feed aggregator. Each topic (category) is shared by all Local Thoughts users and every user of Local Thoughts has the ability to create and modify any topic as well as add new blogs to any topic. The hope is that over time each topic page will grow to contain a useful list of blogs related to that topic and provide a single location to view the content of those blogs. In order to facilitate collaboration between users, Local Thoughts will follow a model similar to Wikipedia by providing a history for each topic and a comment area where users can discuss which blogs belong in a particular topic. At present the history features are in place and the discussion features will be added in the near future.

If any of this sounds interesting to you please visit Local Thoughts and add a topic or a page for your city.