Archive for the ‘Ideas’ Category

Codename: Fraxi, Part I

I’ve been working on a new template to be used on Pligg.com in the near future, and it has come to be known as Fraxi among the Pligg developers because I originally began designing the template for the domain Fraxi.com. The new template will be made as a Pligg template and as this point I am not intending on making it available for download. Right now it only exists as a Photoshop .psd file of what the future homepage will look like for Pligg, but over the next couple weeks I will finish designing the 14 other pages that need to be made.

We are going to use this new template to help launch the next version of Pligg and help increase the traffic to Pligg.com by demonstrating Pligg on the homepage. I don’t want to give away too many details early on because I’m not sure if we can offer all of the features that I have imagined. I also don’t want to over-hype something that doesn’t exist yet because it’s ridiculous when people get excited over a series of images. To give everyone an idea of the style and color scheme I’ve decided to share a small snippet from the current image. More information will be shared about this template in a follow up post to come soon.

Posted in Development, Templates, Ideas, Graphics | No Comments »

Graphs: Educational and Fun!

A little over a week ago I was browsing through one of my new favorite sites for inspiration Consumating.com and had a great idea for Pligg, “let’s use graphs”! Oh sure, when you first think of a graph you immediately compare it to your TI-83 calculator and high school Algebra class. But graphs are some really great ways to display data in a very informative and easy to see say. Many web site statistic scripts like Google’s Analytics program (Free) and Mint ($30/domain) use graphs to display large amounts of data in easy to interpret ways. The reason they do this is because graphs are excellent ways to determine purportions and people tend to like pictures better than words. Pictures help describe the overall idea of something very fast, rather than reading and interpreting numbers from text.

Back on to my original mention of Consumating… I won’t go into detail about Consumating.com because the site deserves an entire blog post about what it is and all of the great ideas that they have come up with. The basic idea of the site is for social networking nerds seeking other nerds to date. The site however isn’t purely driven by the typical dating site profiles and match-making software. It rather lets users answer from a list of whacky questions (one new question each week) and other users rate that users with a thumb up or down depending on their answers. The answers are also able to get a thumbs up or down, for every thumbs up you get 2 points and for each thumbs down you lose 1 point. This then ranks you on the site and the basic goal is to become the most popular person. My favorite feature is their Popularity tab, which shows you how popular you are and graphs out how people have been voting for you recently.

Wouldn’t it be great if Pligg used graphs to display data for both stories and profiles? Imagine being able to see the voting pattern for an article to help detect spammed articles, or to watch the popularity of an article rise and fall. Or imagine being able to show how popular or active a user is on their profile. By putting these types of graphs onto user profiles it gives them an incentive to use the site more. AshDigg pointed me to an article about CSS for Bars and Graphs when I mentioned this idea to him a week ago. The tough part is figuring out what data we need to start building into Pligg so that later down the road we can extract the data for things like this.

Posted in General, Ideas | 2 Comments »

Star Rating System (Optional)

Some of you just leaned forward in your computer chairs, either intrigued by this idea or disgusted by it. I know what the latter of you are thinking, “Stars?… those aren’t very Digg-like”. Well, who says we have to do everything like Digg? In fact Pligg isn’t supposed to be a copy of Digg, we’re an improvement. Digg’s system of voting is based on a “vote or no vote�? method. This works for Digg, but any other site that uses this method not only makes their voting system less accurate to user opinion, but they also confuse casual browsers.

I think the reason that most users are turned off by the idea of using a star rating system is because it’s been done over and over again on the web. Digg’s “vote or no vote�? method is something new to the web, making it fresh and hip. But using this method really handicaps your site on two levels. The first level is the usability of voting for new users. Digg’s one vote method is so fresh and singular to Digg.com (excluding clone projects) that it really doesn’t catch on right away for new users who have never visited the site before. People aren’t used to this voting method because it hasn’t been introduced to us before. There’s a good reason that this hasn’t been introduced before, because it isn’t very accurate.

Imagine you’re reading an article in the newspaper that lists ratings for the last 10 movies. The critic can only express his opinion of the movie using a quick and effective voting method to get the point across. Think of how handicapped his ability to express how good or bad a movie is if he has a voting system with two options, “see it�? or “don’t see it�?. How is the reader supposed to interpret this data from such a method? You don’t see this method used in the real world for rating movies; instead you see either a number rating from 0-5, 0-10, 0-100, or some other variation. Critics have also come up with rating movies with either a thumbs up or thumbs down, similar to the see it or don’t see it method. However, movie critics always pair their thumb reviews with a second opinion and a full paragraph review. This in a way gives us a rating system equal to a 0-2 rating system. I for one hate the thumb rating method and I feel like it wasn’t created to give accurate representations. I believe the thumbs method was created to get the reader intrigued enough about an article that they feel like they need to read the full paragraph of text to get an accurate representation of the rating.

My personal opinion is that switching Pligg from a “one vote or no vote�? system to a five star rating system will make voting more accurate and more comfortable for new users. We will of course still offer the option to use the older one vote method in future releases of Pligg, but for now it is my intention to make star rating default.

Posted in Development, Ideas | 11 Comments »

Call for Template Ideas

We are about a week in to the new template and already planning the framework for the next template. Instead of writing the next template from scratch we have decided that the best idea would probably be by using a generator to produce a very stable frame for the site and make modifications and addons as needed. There are two template CSS generators that we are testing out right now:

• Option 1: PositionIsEverything.net
• Option 2: Skidoo Too

The new layout will only have one left sidebar starting with the user panel on top, followed by a custom link area, then the navigation area and finally the google ads. I think that I will also design it so that the google ads could optionally be placed in a box above the articles in the main content area, since this was requested by a user in a previous comment. I have always been a fan of verticle ads, but I see why someone might want to lay them out horizontally and I would like to keep everyone happy

AshDigg is also working on figuring out how to make changing templates easier by adding the ability to have multiple layouts in subdirectories and selecting which template you wish to use from the admin panel. This idea is really only in a conceptual stage right now, I don’t believe that he has started working on it just yet. The next template will hopefully also include a revamped administrator menu to make it easier on the eye. One of the areas that I think Pligg really stands out from the original Meneame code is the ability to act as an administrator through a simple interface, and I think we should really focus on making it easier and nicer for admins to access and maintain their data.

Lastly and perhaps most important for some of your aspiring web designers is this fun bit of news. Pligg will be hosting a template design contest for Pligg’s default template. We will feature the template in a future release of Pligg and the top three designers will be given cash prizes. First place will be given $50, second $25 and third $10 via Paypal. I know it’s not much, but we’re still a pretty small project and that pretty much maxes out our Pliggy Bank. The money given away for the prizes is coming from our donations that we have been given over the past few months, and I would like to take a moment to thank those who have donated to Pligg. We have collected about $250 in donations, $100 of which was my own money used to purchase a vbulletin license and domain name. I have recently added a link to the donation page to my signature in the forum to hope that we receive some more money to help pay for competitions like this one. I hope to hold more competitions in the future for things like Pligg mods, templates and integrations.

Back to the template competition… Here are some rules that all authors/artists should follow for the competition:

1. All work submitted must be original (by you alone), or the code/imagery must have written permission by the original author to be used for the Pligg project, aknowledging its use in a competition and for free public distribution. The written permission must also have the original authors and your own contact information including a telephone number and current address. This must be scanned and emailed to me. If you choose to have a partner in this project you must do the same and both of you should sign and scan your information.
2. All work submitted must be copyrighted by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. This will allow anyone to use, modify and distribute your work even commercially.
3. Three winners will be selected. The first place winner will receive $50 via Paypal and his/her template design may be used in a future release of Pligg. The second place winner will receive a $25 dollar prize via Paypal and his/her template may be used in a future relase of Pligg. The third place winner will receive a $10 dollar prize via Paypal and his/her template may be used in a future relase of Pligg.
4. All winnings will be distributed via Paypal. This means that you must have a Paypal account to accept the winnings.
5. All designs submitted are giving away their rights of ownership and will stand a chance at being used, or parts of their design being used, in a future release of Pligg.
6. The template should NOT link to your own site anywhere in the template, including the footer. It may however link to pligg.com in the footer and/or the admin panel.
7. We aren’t looking for something that looks just like an existing site. Be original, be creative, make us proud. Please don’t be a copy-cat.
8. You may use CSS generators to assist you in developing a template, but DO NOT copy any CSS from existing sites.
9. You may include Javascript in your templates, but it must be put in the /js directory with the existing Pligg Javascript.
10. You may include any portions of Pligg’s current 6.0 template CSS or image files. This does not include the meneame1.css file.
11. If you need help, ASK! You can contact us either through the forum boards or the IRC channel. Please remember to please try Google first if it’s related to CSS.

Posted in Templates, Ideas, Requests, Contest | 2 Comments »

Beta 6 Mock-Up

We’ve made some progress with Beta 6’s new template and we are really happy to present a mock-up of what Beta 6 might look like when it is completed. In it’s current form Beta 6 is pretty far off from this mock-up, but I am confident that we will be able to release something close to this image. The only feature that you will see in the image that might not make it into Beta 6 is the demote button. I haven’t really discussed the ability to allow negative voting for articles with AshDigg yet, but I’m sure it’s something that will probably come to be in the future of Pligg. The design is really “girly” right now, but the current color selection isn’t definite. Click on the image below to see a larger version.

Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about the current template. Leave any ideas, suggestions, critiques and I will try to address them.

Posted in Development, Ideas, Graphics | 7 Comments »

Pligg Want List and Beta 6

I thought it would be nice to update everyone about how far off we are from what I am hoping for to take the step to Beta 6. Here are my goals still left to be completed before we will hit the next Beta release.

• User Avatars/Photos
• User RSS Feeds
• Tags / Folksonomy (ability to turn on/off)
• Spam Protection (ban user, ban IP, etc.)
• Ability to physically delete stories, rather than discard
• New Pligg Template
• Second navbar at the top of the page for custom links
• Threaded Comments
• Ping Blog Aggregators
• Better Search Capabilities. Search by category, search partial words (ex. “tag” search would also show “tagging”)
• Firefox Pligg Plugin
• BlogIt! Feature
• Weighted vote system (karma)

I know that Ash is working on the tagging system now. I was working on the template heavily a while ago, but I became ill for a full week and stopped working on it for a while. I will try to devote some time to work on the template this weekend, but once again I will mention that I would greatly appreciate any help. Until we tackle at least the bolded goals above we will continue to consider all releases Beta 5.x.

Posted in Development, Ideas, Requests | 1 Comment »