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:
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:
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.
Kick it on
DotNetKicks.com:
