Gavin Joyce's Blog

New DNK Features: Kick Spy & Shoutbox

This week there have been over 100 commits to the DotNetKicks open source trunk. Some fantastic new features are now available on DotNetKicks.com and many others are in progress.

Kick Spy

The Spy displays each action a user takes on the site including submitting stories, kicking, tagging, commenting and shouting.

This is a work-in-progress and will soon become a self updating filterable control using Ajax.NET professional and jQuery. There are plans to extend Kick Spy to user profiles and stories too.

View it in action here >>

If you would like to shape how this feature end up, please let us know your thoughts : issue 86 on Google Code

Shoutbox

The Shoutbox allows users to have little conversations in various places in the site.

There currently is one on the Who's Online page and on every members profile.

Feel free to drop me a note on my profile.

Issue 87 on Google Code

Other Improvements

Since joining the project a few weeks ago, James Welch has become a regular contributor to DotNetKicks.

One of the many features that he has added is the ability to view stories both kicked and submitted by friends.

Here are the latest stories that have been submitted by friends of mine on DotNetKicks:

http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/friends/submitted

He also improved the paging control which now looks like:

Community News

I asked Scott Guthrie if he would consider placing a 'kick it' button on his blog and he agreed. His posts are some of the most popular on DotNetKicks as you can see from the ScottGuthrie tag. This is a nice boost to the community, I'm sure that we will gain new fans from his blog. Thanks Scott.

Jon Galloway's JavaScript technique is used to inject the 'kick it' link and image into the page automatically.

Coming Soon

A number of new features are in the pipeline:

DotNetKicks Zeitgeist

DotNetKicks Chats

They (spammers) look like ants from here

Since adding some basic user visualisation to DotNetKicks.com the other day, I have become slightly addicted to viewing the who's online page. This morning I added colour coding to the users based on their status - green for new users, blue for existing users and red for spammers.

Spammers don't really know that their account has been flagged, although they may notice that their posts have been deleted. When they attempt to post a new like, everything seems fine - they are shown the confirmation page like everyone else. Their story isn't added of course, so our upcoming feed isn't troubled by spammed links to random topics.

What is interesting is how often these spammers come back to the site trying to peddle their dodgy wares. I take a great satisfaction is seeing them squirm hopelessly through their pointless little loops, trying everything and achieving nothing.

DotNetKicks 1 Spammers 0

DotNetKicks Beta 2 Available For Download

I have just tagged and uploaded SVN revision 283 as DotNetKicks beta 2. This beta includes a number of great new features.

Enjoy!

DotNetKicks New Features: Profiles, Gravatars, Sortable Upcoming Stories

The DotNetKicks.com open source project has picked up quite a bit of steam lately, over 75 commits have been made to the SubVersion trunk in the past week (rss feeds). It is great that the project is moving again, thanks to the wonders of open source and a great community. If you would like to contribute in any way to the project, please let me know.

The two big new features this week are user profiles and upcoming story sorting:

User Profiles

Following on from last weeks great 'Who Kicked It?' control by Kevin, we have now enabled user profiles and gravatars. Gravatars are 80x80 images and are provided by this free service. There was some concern from the community about the speed at which the gravatar images are served from this service, I have addressed this by implementing a server side gravatar cache. I'll post about this in more detail in the near future.

You can set your gravatar and other profile details on your DNK profile page (there is a new 'your profile' link in the top DNK menu). The url will be similar to:

http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/profile

We now also have the ability to see a paged list of:

• User Kicked Stories (eg. http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/kicked)
• User Submitted Stories (eg. http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/submitted)
• User Comments (eg. http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/comments)
• User Tags (eg: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/tags)

Thanks to james.e.welch & simone.busole for contributing these new features.

Upcoming Story Sorting

One of the limitations of the DNK upcoming story view was that it was easy for good stories to get lost. Is takes about 6 kicks for a story to reach the homepage feed, many on 5 kicks never make it. To address this, there are now two extra ways to sort the upcoming stories:

• Latest Upcoming Stories : http://www.dotnetkicks.com/upcoming
• Top Today: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/upcoming/popular/today
• Top This Week: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/upcoming/popular/pastweek

The 'Top This Week' is especially useful for find those quality stories that sometimes did fall away.

Thanks to pedicool for contributing this new feature.

Whats Next?

That's up to you. Please let us know which features you would like implemented next. Clicking the star icon on any issue in the list will bump it up on our priority list. Also, please do let us know your great ideas for DotNetKicks.com.

EDIT: I've just deployed a 'Who's Online' feature which lists the users who have been active on the site within the last 30 mins.