We were talking today in our super secret Boing Boing Gadgets chat room how much we’re liking the News Faucet. It’s really nice to have a place to drop links to stories we find interesting but just don’t merit a full blog post. It’s a useful middle ground.
One thing I don’t think I mentioned before, though, is that we intend for it to be a permanent feature. It’s not just a temporary promotional thing, but something we intend to keep around for as long as it’s useful. So to that end, if you have any features you’d like to see us add that would make it more useful to you, don’t hesitate to suggest. And there are several of you regular commenters I’d like to get plugged into the system, so email me if you think you’d like to give it a shot. strider_m2k, I’m looking at you.
I’d like to know who’s using this feature. Who’s reading what gets put in the News Faucet?
As a newly converted RSS reader of BBG, I’m finding reading the News Faucet somewhat difficult in that I have to be on BBG’s site to read it. Could you make it available in other formats like RSS and Twitter feeds? Since the Faucet is mostly Twitter based, it should be fairly easy to have it send out tweets when it gets a message.
On top of all that, why is it so slow? I’m noticing a good three or four hour time delay between posting and the Faucet updating, not just for myself, but for the other contributors I’ve now subscribed to (specifically Joel, he posts a lot).
How queer… this post and the others older than it suddenly appear in a very small font indeed, while the ones above are in normal, legible font.
I’m far from blind and yet it has me squinting.
I don’t really have a feature suggestion, but rather bug/critic report:
1. The whole thing is too low on the site, or rather, the ads above are so large they push it down to where I won’t see it in any average sized blog post.
2. Sometimes it doesn’t show up at all, and I get a two-lined text-ad reading “Try BB’s new Classifieds” instead-
3. The font used does not lend itself to easy reading, imo. Well, a stylish script could fix that for me I guess
4. The last line gets cut off sometimes, like container won’t stretch to accomodate larger text entries.
Take a look at this screenshot to see what I mean.
(5. The comment box reads “use HTML tags for style, but it ignores 95% of them, like lists, strongs etc.)
I’ve got the same issue Airpillo does. The text in this post, and in all older posts is significantly smaller than newer posts.
As for the faucet, I’d like to see a scroll bar or something that would let me check on some of the older posts, more than the 10 or so that you can normally see (especially if Brownlee keeps forgetting his links. :p )
It’s slow because the cron job that refreshes it isn’t set up yet. We SSH in and hit the script manually.
RSS! Of course! We never even thought about it, but the XML is right there, so it will be easy to implement.
I’d love to see some kind of archive even if it’s just the items for a 24 hour period.
Second the request for a scrollbar, or a clickable link/area/button to go to a scrollable history page.
Bah! Why use a cron job? Why not have it just return the current content on load? Cron jobs are messy, and even then it shouldn’t be hard to set up.
The scroll bar is a great idea, but unless you wanted to write some kind of Flash component to this, or allow your frame to be scrollable, that could be difficult.
If you want to be totally weird about it, this may be one of the very very few situations in which a javascript accordion will work.
It’s also been mentioned, and this should not be ignored, that the faucet should be higher on the page. If it’s a legitimate ad (and likely a higher paying one at that), there’s really no reason it shouldn’t be higher up and more visible.
You may also want to give the News Faucet its own page. Use this nice little sidebar here, then allow a link to a full page designed to go through the archives, search for specific topics, and see more content and Delta ads.
You’ve opened the door to a lot of great options. Get cracking.
Dean
Any updates on Faucet available via the RSS? That would be awesome. It saddens me to miss whatever shenanigans that go on in there…