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Archives for April 2005

Dynamic Link Ranker

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| 15:04 UK time, Friday, 15 April 2005

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[Made by Â鶹Éç Staff]

Ok, this was submitted as an idea about 1/2 an hour ago, but I don't like hanging around :-P

The synopsis is to re-order links in left & right-hand nav bars according to popularity so that the most popular links appear at the top. The least popular links can be turned into promos to push visitors to them. It's like a 'live' extension to the 'go' tracking.

This idea can also be turned on its head to allow user-testing of site designs. Rather than changing the links according to popularity, you leave them as they are, but as the users progress throught the site, they leave an aggregated trail of what they clicked on.

Data can be used to visualise popular paths through bbc.co.uk

Photographic Portrait of the UK

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| 10:31 UK time, Friday, 15 April 2005

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[Made by Â鶹Éç Staff]

Okay, so this is a prototype I built a while ago and doesn't currently use any Â鶹Éç feeds. However, it could certainly be integrated with postcoder, and just seems to me to be the sort of thing the Â鶹Éç should be doing.

So, why? Digital photography is hugely popular, and there are already many sites out there that allow you to organise your photos in all sorts of clever ways, but none that I've seen geographically.

On the other hand, there's the , which gives a fascinating picture of the globe, but can only really be contributed to by a few people and all the easy confluence points are long gone.

So the idea was, reduce the scale, remove the need for expensive GPS hardware, and let everyone out there contribute to a photographic portrait of the UK with all those photographs being presented geographically with a fancy zoomable interactive map thingy. The scale would be much finer than shown in the prototype, I was originally thinking you'd need two different scales, one for 'countryside' and another for towns/cities, though this could be a challenge in the interface.

There are different angles that could be taken - an artistic one with photos being rated by users and maybe prizes for the best, or a more practical one, say you wanted to move house, you could explore photos people have taken of the areas you were interested in them to get a flavour before having to actually travel (which is where integration with postcoder could come in very handy). I'm sure there's more.

Of course the main feed needed here is geographic map data which is not something I'm aware of the Â鶹Éç having. It'd be nice if it did though.

Â鶹Éç Complaints in RSS

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| 09:23 UK time, Tuesday, 5 April 2005

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[Made by Â鶹Éç Staff]

This simple perl script (after all I only write simple perl scripts) scrapes the HTML of the Â鶹Éç's Complaints site to produce an RSS feed of the Â鶹Éç's published responses. It also scrapes each article to make the RSS feed a bit richer by including the opening couple of paragraphs of the Â鶹Éç's response as the .

I formatted it to RSS0.91 because that is what News use - however it may not always validate if there is HTML embedded in the articles themselves that I have failed to strip out.

In my short term "to do" list I'd like shoe-horn some sort of date-stamping of the publication date into the RSS, and learn how to cache it so it doesn't have to call all the pages on every request. Because that is dumb. And maybe include the original complaint to give it more context.

In the long term to improve it I'd get it generated automatically by Scoop like the Comedy blog has, but I forgot to specify it during the project :-)

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