DrupalDev Project: Newsing Project

The present newsing system is broken.  We need a solution that displays the links properly and it might be as simple as defining a new newsing content type and then creating a template for it that puts the url where it should be.

You can now post news stories you find all over the web at sites like Digg.com and Slashdot.org right here on Empowerment Newsing.

Posting news is easy

Click Post a news link in the Actions menu. Add a link to a news story and write or paste a short blurb about the story. Post stories that you think other Empowerment users should see. Discuss the news stories. Build intricate wall charts showing the connections between the news stories and read between the lines for hidden Communist messages to uncover craven plots to subvert western civilzation. Be merry.

Podcasters need news

Some news stories will get picked up by podcasts like our own empowerment.tv podcast so posting news here helps gather information for all kinds of journalists.

This is only the beginning

This is just a functional alpha of an onoing project to develop an ideal Empowerment Newsing system. Check in there if you have ideas for developing the system into something revolutionary. We are developing a Mediapedia newsing medium guide to using the full spectrum of newsing outlets to get the word out about important matters to people who need to know.

"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code."

Click Here To Download Empowerment.TV Podcast Episode 2 in iTunes M4A 3.9MB 16min

Pinging all hands in the concrete trenches of the dystopian front: come out of the cold! We have common ground to build and there's monster truck loads of code to be written.

I'm Alex Peake, founding executive director of The Empowerment, and this is the second edition of empowerment.tv, your backstage pass to changing the world one line of code at a time. This is a developer podcast for developers, roadies and groupies only. If you aren't interested in Empowerment development and you still find this podcast interesting, you may be weird. Might want to have that checked out. You might be coming down with a case of aspiring developeritis.

Drupal Camp LA

I just returned from Drupal Camp LA 2007. That it was a smashing success comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with organizer extrordinaire Crystal Williams. Crystal's barcamps span the globe from Los Angeles to Shanghai, which she organized without speaking Shanghainese, no mean feat.

Check out flickr pictures from the event! This one is of our Community Building panel in which Kirk, Markus and I led a discussion about our communities and the best ways to create social spaces using Drupal. That's me with long hair (for now) on the left. I controlled the projector, so I made sure Empowerment got a lot of screen time!

I went in with two goals: Collaboration and learning. I wanted to find Drupal allies for Empowerment and to develop my own Drupal module development skills.

Collaboration happened in a rocket-assisted fashoin. I met many brilliant folks there to collaborate with, to name a few:

• Markus of OurMedia and several others who live around Santa Barbara. We're planning a regular Drupal Santa Barbara meetup to get the creative juices flowing.
• Scoobesteve from Achieve Internet is interested in collaborating on extending Organic Groups to allow complex relationships like we need for Empowerment's profiling
• Raffy who works extensively on Quiz module which we're eyeing as part of our empowered learning system
• The WorkHabit team who had a lot to say about large-scale deployments and a common interest in developing e-learning systems around Quiz
• Jacob of userpoints maintainer fame got us up to speed on the new features and roadmap for Userpoints and uploaded a parting patch before absconding until further notice to China with his wife.
• I met some folks into game development too.
  
  • Marty of MartysMind and socialsage.com spent years at Sony working on their online games and he's got a lot of good ideas about social economies and fun game design.
  • Ken Caple of Achieve is also an avid gamer and liked the idea of the Empowerment game.
  • Mike suggested we check out Gaia Online.
  • Aaron Stewart described how he came up with a dynamic reusable story engine when younger before doing things like Wayback Machine and turning into a mighty enterprise developer.
• I shared a panel with Markus introduced by Kirk Eisele of CommutyBuildrs where we talked about a lot of ways to make sites social and viral
• I set up a twitter account for empowerthyself.com that will eventually allow us to keep people posted on site updates and things. Anyone feel like assembling a guide to the twittering medium?

Learning happened too.

• I made the most progress by sitting down face-to-face with Jacob as he helped me through the pitfalls of creating my first module which you can see at work already on empowerthyself.com, the icons module.
• I'm now developing the administrative interface for icons.module and this will serve as a stepping stone towards all the other module development we have to do.

Right now we're in a very interesting phase. I am getting as many collaborators and as much hands-on knowledge as I can to assist in the critical development planning for the empowerthyself.com project. Thanks to influxes spurred by Sean Kennedy's Army of Flying Monkeys and Agent, we now have talented folks like TDH and Nihi ready to work on the project. We now also have a huge contingent of professional Drupal experts who want to collaborate on some of our key module developments.

The onus is on me to get the plan hammered out and begin actually doing my job as a project manager so that our development is purposeful and effective. I relish this challenge and I will be getting my first module online and the development plan hammered out in short order.

To everyone who inspires and assists and supports Empowerment, I salute you!

Coming soon: The first empowerment.tv video podcast episode featuring an interview from Burning Man with Fireseed, the founder of Topians. We'll take an in-depth look at his Topians vision and explore how Empowerment can best realize our common goals.

Until next time, empower yourself.

NOTE: Actual podcast audio will be recorded later!

 

http://drupal.org/node/127994

DOWNLOAD EMPOWERMENT.TV PODCAST EPISODE 1: DEV BLOG: MISIONS ACCOMPLISHED

2.9MB iTunes M4A Format

(Listen to my first crack at podcasting. There are things in the podcast that aren't in the news post. By the way, I created all the music for the show. You're listening to works in progress for the Empowerment Soundtrack and there's lots more to come.)

Tonight's global SITREP on my headspace and timing: It's 1:36 AM and I'm going to bed to heighten my mastery of timing, despite my insanely inspired headspace. I've been thinking heavily about chronicide and how life's too short to let those timesharing mind parasite memes hijack us into neglecting purpose.

I worked for 9 hours on EmpowerThyself.com after putting in 8 hours at work programming up a storm without even eating lunch, so focused was I on the code. I didn't even play more in the Bioshock demo, which I bittorrented on Zero Day last night. It was incredibly tempting, but the real world is the most exciting game of all when you're winning.

Missions Accomplished:

Messages have Target Audiences. Editing those Target Audiences shows cool help text with actual iconlinks to open new tabs with the relavent guidance information needed to create good content. The help text in the create page actually provides guidance and tips such as recommending using empathy rather than confrontation to target audiences.

You can define Audiences! Audiences are target groups with shared ideas.

I created a funny test message called "Atheism: Attack The Darkness!" and defined its audiences: atheists and internet humor fans.

Newsing. I began work on the the DrupalDev Newsing System Project with the help of Agent Pugsly, coder Tinkle Doom Hammer and our newest contributor, Pfhorrest, the creator of a very cool Marathon mod called Eternal. He had some very interesting ideas about a newsing system that emphasizes your friends to filter your news. We're making it possible to post news stories (you can post storylinks already, but we're going to do something much more sophisticated). If you post stories now, we'll do our best to migrate your content to the new system, so don't let waiting for the project's fruition stop you from posting news!

I made a nice comment voting up/down widget spaced to the left of comments you can see here.

Progress. I also got to know another new member, Cid Viscous, yet another NewsReal listener we are grateful to have with us thanks to the SKTFM NewsReal interview.

Future perfect. Lots more things accomplished, lots of work to be done on the unified What's New dashboard, the fully realized ideas/skills/tech/groups Profiler, the Newsing system, and the whole dev roadmap to give all our coders some concrete pieces to tackle.

At this pace, we'll be out of beta and opening the Spread Empowerment floodgates in no time.

So in the DrupalDev: Empowered Newsing System project we've already got a discussion of what the ideal newsing system should be able to do. As the wishlist of ideas grows, lets also talk about how we can best implement the system under Drupal.

There are several links to look at where people discuss this already:

• http://shakk.wordpress.com/2006/06/12/creating-digg-clone-using-drupal/
• http://drupal.org/node/24686
• http://vigillar.se

There are certainly other sites and threads to read and study.

So far our design looks like this: 

Alpha: Get something working

The alpha can be implemented so far using a content type and organic groups. We already have several candidate tyes. There's a story type built into drupal, there's a storylink type that has a link field, and we could CCK a new content type with an apt name like newsing link that refers to the broader medium more specifically. The story and storylink content type names sound a little generic and confusing.

Beta: Develop advanced features

We could do better than this crude application of basic Drupal features. Where should we begin to extend and improve? Do we have modules that can be combined to get what we want or do we need to write new modules? 

Omega: the ultimate possible design

We will always strive to obtain this and envision loftier heights

Feature request list so far:

• RSS aggregator node integration
• friend-weighted vote measurement as per Pfhorest's suggestions

 

What do you want in an ideal Newsing system? Submit your ideas here.