newslanka.org

News

Monday 25^th August 2008

I changed the link text colours to match the header colour of the contributing site. Let me know your thoughts. Some colours don’t contrast that well, but keeping the standard blue for all the links seemed so brash and boring…

Thursday 21^st August 2008

One week later, and the site seems to be picking up some minor traffic, which is nice.

Added feeds from Newsvine - Sri Lanka and The Lanka Sun today.

Thursday 14^th August 2008

I was toying with the idea of adding the Topix Sri Lanka Wire, but decided against it, as some stories link to private blogs. I think newslanka.org should stick to reputed news websites for now. Besides, many of the articles on the Topix feed appear here already, and I don’t want too many duplicates, it’ll just make the site too clunky.

I’m also not sure whether to add the Google News - Lanka feed. It covers a lot of stories, but I don’t like how each post contains so many links. I’d like each article to be a link to a single story, like the Yahoo News feed. It just looks neater that way. Added to this is the duplicate post problem mentioned in the above para.

If you have any thoughts, please do Contact me.

Wednesday 13^th August 2008

While I’ve got the time, I want to document a few of the conceptual ideas behind the revamp of newslanka.org.

I guess the main idea behind newslanka.org has always been to be a first-thing-in-the-morning site to read with your coffee. I wanted it to be clean and user-friendly, and have the potential to be set as a user’s home page.
I wanted to create a design with each article in a small colour-coded block. Much easier to read and navigate. The previous theme was too bloggy, and was way back when I didn’t know how to build a WordPress theme by myself. Not that I do now. I’d love to have had rounded corners on the blocks, but short of doing some messy coding, I’ll have to wait for CSS3…
My idea has never been to make money out of this site. It’s cheap to run, for now. If the traffic ramps up significantly then the hosting will probably get more expensive, at which point I’ll ask for donations towards the hosting. That’s all. This is a 100% non-profit venture.
I don’t want to set restrictions on what kind of site can or cannot be added, other than for technical reasons. I feel newslanka.org should be about all the Sri Lankan news on the web, giving a broad overview of what’s out there.
For the record, I was always against displaying the post text internally, as opposed to linking straight out to the author’s news site. newslanka.org is about giving readers an easy way to click through to the top Sri Lankan news stories on the web - I’m not trying to generate internal traffic on this site.
Early on in the site’s redevelopment I had to decide whether to allow comments on articles. It would have created a lot more traffic on the site, but I decided against it, as it would have taken traffic from our contributors, without whom the site wouldn’t be here.
I wanted to have a record of how many times a news article had been clicked on, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a plugin to make this happen. (Lester Chan’s one didn’t work, sadly.) If you can help me to add this functionality, please do get in touch. So instead I opted for a post ratings plugin, which ideally will show what stories are the most popular of the moment.
I had also planned to have a list of links to the sites that contribute to us. I may add this on a page of its own a bit later.

Sri Lankan news on the web is still fairly thin on the ground, relatively speaking. I would really like to see:

all the newspapers having better websites, with properly coded RSS feeds.
TV channels news programmes with websites of their own, with well-coded RSS feeds. The best news in Sri Lanka still comes via TV and newspaper, and their web presences range from non-existent to okay. Nothing incredible as yet, although the Daily Mirror site deserves a special mention, it’s getting better all the time.
An Ada Derana News Alerts RSS feed! I get these on my mobile phone, why don’t they list the alerts on the web? JasmineNews are doing it.

Tuesday 12^th August 2008

Everything seems to be in working order - for now. I’m gonna keep an eye on the site for about a week, until I’m happy that everything is working properly. Then I’ll start telling people about it…

I checked the Daily Mirror feeds to see why FeedWordPress wasn’t picking up the permalinks properly. From what I gather the code in their RSS feeds doesn’t use a <link> tag for the permalink, so FeedWordPress links to the article internally on newslanka.org. So I sadly can’t add them, unless the Daily Mirror webmaster adjusts their RSS feed code. As I understand, their site is built on WordPress, but they don’t use WordPress’ feeds functionality, choosing instead to use their own RSS code. Strange, as WordPress can offer distinct feeds for different post categories - which would be a much neater way for the Daily Mirror website to offer their categorised feeds. Whilst I’m on the topic - Daily Mirror webmaster, please add <link> tags in your site’s <head> section so browsers can pick up the feeds in their address bars.

Monday 11^th August 2008

Sadly, had to remove the defence.lk RSS feed, for the date problem listed yesterday. Many stories were being scheduled in the future, due to the day and month being the wrong-way-around in the feed. Hope LBO and defence.lk can fix this so newslanka.org can add them back.

Still trying to fix the problem with posts jumping to the top when their feeds are updated.

[Update] The post-updating problem seems to be fixed now, after I added the FeedWordPress Duplicate Post Filter. That’s stopping FeedWordPress from updating posts that already exist in the database, and therefore stopping it from updating the posts’ timestamps.

Sunday 10^th August 2008

The main problem I have at the moment is that articles from CricInfo, Lankaenews and LankaNewspapers.com seem to constantly push their way to the top. Instead of an article staying in the timeslot it was published, it comes up to the top every time their site regenerates their RSS feed, probably because their RSS generator resets the time of each post at regeneration time. Will try to see if I can come up with a work-around for this.

I had added a feed from LBO, but had to remove it, as FeedWordPress picks up their date format the wrong-way-around. MDY instead of DMY, I guess. For example, a post from today is dated as 8th October 2008, and WordPress schedules it for the future… Not sure if this can be worked around - LBO webmaster, if you can fix this from your end, it would be much appreciated.

I think there is a similar problem with posts from the defence.lk site. For some reason their posts have been filed under July 2008 and earlier, but the actual articles on defence.lk say 8th August 2008. defence.lk webmaster, can you see if you can fix this at your end please? I have left the defence.lk site added for now, as it’s not interfering with the latest posts - yet.

I also had to remove feeds from the Daily Mirror, as somehow FeedWordPress was able to get the articles from their feed, but not the permalinks to their articles. Will investigate this too, when I have more time.

If I have one tip to any webmasters that would like to add their news site to newslanka.org, it would be: please make sure your RSS feed validates! It helps a lot, and makes life so much easier for all around. Most of the problems above are caused by poor RSS coding.

If you could also ensure that your sites are W3C standards-compliant too, that would be great - the framework of this site validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but when the HTML from the various feeds is brought in, it no longer validates properly.

Webmasters, please try to make sure that your websites validate to W3C standards.

Saturday 9^th August 2008

newslanka.org v2.0 is uploaded to the web. It’s still experimental, as I am having trouble with some of the feeds. Added about 15 feeds. Was disappointed to find the The Lanka Academic doesn’t have an RSS feed! I wish that the UTHR(J) had an RSS feed too.