Crispy News & Digg Clones
I've just spent a morning using the Crispy News website tools to make a near "digg" clone - but focused on Extreme Tales
I cheated a little - by recycling old Extreme Tales blogposts to fill it up with news a bit - but it allowed me to get a feel for the interface and figure out what I could and couldn't do.
I use digg quite a lot - but the emphasis is on technology - the recent update to digg v3 included video games - but no sports of any description, not even under "entertainment" - and nothing about Extreme Sports either.
So I have built my own digg clone thingy totally focused on Extreme Sports - you can try it here - and please add stories, vote on some stories and give some feedback - and it does RSS as well.
I'll report back in the future about how it goes - early days yet ....
Tags: extreme sports, extreme tales, digg, digg clones, crispy news, rss extreme tales news
Comments
Hey Dr K,
I was browsing around on technorati and noticed you had started a site on crispynews. I'm one of the guys who works on crispynews, and I'm glad to see you've discovered our site.
I definitely agree with your comment about digg. They're a great site, but it seems they want to keep control over the brand and how the topics expand outward. We're much more of the free for all approach. We figure people like you know more about whether crispynews is needed in these other topics or not.
Excited to see where your site goes, and let me know if there is somethign I can help you with.
Posted by: bathow | July 14, 2006 3:18 AM
For Extreme Tales News it was a clear choice between CrispyNews or Ning.
I chose CrispyNews because I *only* wanted a digg style site for Extreme Sports News that complemented my weblog and other Extreme Sports projects.
It was really easy to set up - I already had lots of content - and only took me a morning to go beta and an afternoon before I was satisified with the results.
As for any help - see the admin forum - I'll post there for the whole Crispy Community- but here is my current Crispy Wish List ..
(i) an xlmrpc interface so I could use Performancing to post and del.icio.us daily links for Extreme Sports links
(ii) an RSS module for pulling headlines (or any other RSS file by URL) into a sidebar
(iii) a blogroll extension that took a structured OPML file and turned it into a sidebar with blogroll links.
(iv) TagCloud views based on categories (a) for individual blogs, (b) for the whole CrispyNews Community and (c) for the whole community but with a "stoplist" of categories which you do not wish to be included in the TagCloud.
Finally, I really appreciated the crispy admins removing the s*x spam news sites which sprang recently - the last thing us crispy critters want is to get our sites filtered because the website is deemed "inappropriate" by censorware.
Posted by: drk | July 14, 2006 12:40 PM