New Features on Urban Vancouver: Tags, Open Comments, Firehose Feeds, and More?
By Richard Eriksson on April 16, 2007 - 2:55pm
A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded the software that powers Urban Vancouver to version 4.7. The way the version numbers work for Drupal, that means we're still one major version behind, but at least it's better than being 3 major versions behind. The site is also on a new server which is humming along nicely, and after a bit of fiddling around, the aggregator (which powers the right sidebar links to blog posts by Vancouverites) seems to be working smoothly too. Here are some of the features that the new version gets us:
Tagging
This means that for every blog post, you can quickly categorize something by adding key words describing it, separated by commas. A good example of this in action is my previous post, which is tagged with the phrase "Marty Turco", among others. This creates an entire page of all posts having to do with Marty Turco. The way I usually go about it is that every person mentioned in a post is a tag, as well as every subject discussed. Again using the previous post as my example, the tags "2007 playoffs", "Dallas Stars", "Jan Bulis", "Marty Turco", "Taylor Pyatt" and "Vancouver Canucks" seemd appropriate. We still have primary neighbourhood ("Vancouver" in the post's case) and subject ("Sports") categories. The "Tags" field appears below the "Topics" list. If a tag already exists, the software will drop down a list of suggestions. You aren't bound by the suggestions: you can freely add your own!
Commenting
We no longer require people to create an account to comment on Urban Vancouver! We instituted the requirement because of comment spam, but now we have some reliable measures against that. This should make for a little bit more lively chatter here, so I'll be watching the recently updated posts page for the discussions!
Firehose Feeds
For advanced users of RSS-powered reader software, each category in the aggregator now has what I call a 'firehose feed'. Want to subscribe to an RSS feed of all the Vancouver blogs we syndicate here (over 400)? We have a feed for you. Warning: it's very high frequency, but Vancouver's blogosphere is that big, and that active. The feed itself is capped at 30 posts per hour, so if you subscribe to it, you may miss some of what the Vancouver blogosphere, but if you can handle the volume, it's an interesting window into what Vancouverites are talking about.
The Future
That's it for now. Some sections of the site are still a little broken (image galleries come to mind), and we have some ideas for the future, including adding the ability for people to add tags to other people's posts (sort of like trusted collaborative categorization, but without the 'trusted' part) and new ways to navigate and view what conversations are happening on the site. Please let us know, either by commenting here or contacting us, if you have any other ideas for the site!
