As you may have read, Geof asked someone to take over hosting and maintenance of the Urban Yukon site. I volunteered, and now the site runs from my web service.
My name is Dave Rogers, and I write the What He Said blog, a member of Urban Yukon for a couple of years now. I run a one-man computer programming business, when I’m not somehow occupied with the College (new site — check it out).
I had a few changes in mind for Urban Yukon, but I think the site really belongs to its bloggers, and so I’m asking for suggestions that I can hopefully implement. Although, while I’m pretty good at the background coding of websites, I’m not much of a graphic designer, so I’ll need help for that.
This blog is the first of my changes: something to spread the word about the Urban Yukon community of bloggers. Changes to the site, coming meetups for fellow-bloggers, and new member announcements will be posted here.
And many thanks to Geof from all of us for starting Urban Yukon in the first place and encouraging blogging in, and about, our glorious territory.
Please send all questions, comments, suggestions, and concerns to: urbanyukon strudel yukondude full-stop com.
You’ve already knocked off one of the many new features I wanted to add to the website: a blog. Imagine that. A blog on a blog network site.
Thanks for the kind words and taking over the reigns, Dave. I know Urban Yukon is in very good hands.
Geof, what other new features did you want to add? I was thinking of an RSS feed of the UY feeds (although Feed Informer’s version contains all of the article contents, which not everyone will want), and maybe tweeting new postings that show up on UY.
Thanks Geof, for all that hard work you put into Urban Yukon. And thanks Dave, for rising up to the challenge!
I like Urban Yukon the way it is, but there have been times where I haven’t been able to check it for a week and wanted to scroll back to some older posts.
Other than that, a meet-up is long overdue!
As far as new Urban Yukon features go, it’d be cool to see:
1) A better search engine
Currently the site uses the advanced EE search engine, which really only displays author names and blog entry titles. In fact, this is all it can search, as it’s all that EE has in its database. As the homepage main feed is coming from a third party, EE can’t go after that data. If you used something like Simple Pie I think you get EE working in this manner.
2) Categories
A couple of years ago I proposed categories to the membership, but a fair number of people said, No Thanks. I personally think it’s because at that time, there wasn’t outright value in organizing the content this way. Today, with 50+ blogs in the system, it could really use some categorization.
3) Global RSS feed
You mentioned this above. I agree and have wanted to do this for years, but as you state, there’s limitations with the third party app and what it can spit out. Again, Simple Pie or some custom coding could probably aid in this regard.
4) Expanding beyond blogs
My vision was to turn the website into more of a aggregated voice for Yukoners, pulling in content from a variety of channels, blogs, Twitter, SMS, Flickr photos, etc. Actually, I tried the Flickr photo thing a couple of years ago, but at the time, it was loading way too slow. Perhaps their APIs have improved.
More in my head, but this should get you started!
Thanks, Geof. You’ve had a lot more time to think about this, and those are some cool ideas, especially #4. In the meantime, I’m going to take a closer look at SimplePie.