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…
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.