tech seed blog

A little later than planned, the tech seed RSS syndication is now complete. To use this feature, go to your account page, and select “RSS Articles.” Then after inputting your RSS feed, it should show up all the reviews that you have available to post. Simply clicking on one of these reviews will automatically fill out most of the submission form for you.

There has also been a few fixes as of late. The thumnail submitter was allowing those without a thumbnail to be present in the top most spots of the homepage, this is no longer so. There is now also a defaul “select category” category, which means you must change it to the correct one before submitting. No more GPU reviews in the competition section.

The feed reader is almost working, though not quite. Currently it will automatically fill out the submission form for you, but it won’t be able to actually post the article. This should be fixed shortly.

The RSS feed syndication feature is nearly finished, and will soon allow you to have your own feed automatically fill in your tech seed submission form. This will be implemented over the next couple of days. We are also currently toying with the idea of a “seed this” button. We’ve got a few ideas, but we havn’t decided on anything concrete yet. What would you find it usefull for? Please send all ideas to admin[at]tech seed.co.uk, or comment here.

Well, only a day after launch (and 2 after the pre-release mail out to authors) we’ve had a great surge in activity, and I’d like to welcome all the new publisher’s to the tech seed folds. In regards to the questions raised over the RSS feed submission, this feature is still being tested but will become active within the next week if all goes well. We also have a “seed this” button in the works but are debating on it’s functionality. If you have something specific you’d like it to do, then let us know and we’ll do our best to implement it.

I told you to watch this space didn’t I? tech seed is officially launched as of this morning. I know there are still a few bugs to iron out so bare with us on those, but please do comment here with any feedback, or email it to admin[at]techseed.co.uk. The email feature as previously stated, seems to be working fine, so any categories you want extra news in, be sure to sign up. You can do this in the “Change Syndication Settings” part of your account page.

Recently techseed’s ownership has changed, and although the original developer will be on hand occasionally if needed, the site is now being run by a different team. While this is a shame in some senses, it also bodes well for the site, as it means we have now drawn very close to the eventual official launch of techseed, some 9 months or so after it’s original conception. Watch this space is all I’m saying.

In other news, the email feature should be just about finished now. If you look in your account profile you should be able to select certain categories of interest to you. When a post is made into one of those categories, it will automatically email you a cookie cutter version of what was posted online in a simple, easy to read format. This is designed to make news collecting much simpler. Any feedback you have on this new feature can be sent to admin[at]techseed.co.uk.

Since my last post, quite a lot has changed on the site.

First, the site now runs PHP5 instead of version 4 which means that its more secure and runs mildly faster. However, you may notice a couple of errors while I complete the upgrade path. This also allows me to use functions that weren’t present in 4 so less work-arounds and more streamlined code.

The second is the new image manipulation script that isn’t yet implemented but is complete otherwise (implementation will take minutes). Instead of only allowing perfectly scaled and sized JPG’s, the script will now except nearly any image (GIF, JPG/JPEG, PNG) with or without transparency, and use aspect ratio scaling to resize any image to 100×75. While it will do the work for you, its better to choose your own thumbnail, as the script might change the image to something that you don’t want.

After using the site for a few months, I soon became bored of the blue on orange look of the site, so I’ve just injected some colour into the header tags.

It looks a little more friendly now, which is exactly how I want this site to look; rather than being crampt and difficult to find the information that you want.

I’ve been working on the RSS feed grabbing backend and it should be pretty easy to scrap data from valid RSS feeds of the most popular types (atom, RSS1, RSS2 etc.).

The email alerts are now in the final stages of load balancing so that hundreds of emails aren’t being sent as soon as a post is made, and instead spaced over a longer time span.

The archive page is now how I’ve wanted it for a while. You can now search by month and year for the article that you want to find, and also then narrow your search by category. The category page itself is more or less redundant until I add the awards for individual articles based around the month (i.e. article of the month, most popular, underdog etc.). I believe that this style of navigation will help anyone looking for something specific from a certain date. It’s also completely future-proof so when more articles are being posted on a daily basis, you’ll be able to sift through them quickly.

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When the idea struck that making a standard place where all reviews are kept would be a good idea, I thought I was onto something new. Unfortunately, I wasn’t.

So, instead of making a clone/copy, I decided to hand-code a completely new CMS (SorXMS Core) that can deal with the content that I want to show, and in the way that I want to show it. I’ve seen many sites that are similar to tech seed, but not one of them is clear as to which are new articles, which are the best articles and none that concentrate solely on reviews.

I decided that clarity is key to making tech seed a success. If you look at the front page, you get the latest reviews in your face as soon as you click ‘Go’, in what I feel is a clear and concise manner. If I don’t like how it looks or works, then I’ll change it, there are simply too many sites out there that merge together their content and advertising to create a confusing image of information. You’ll notice that the front page has a SINGLE advert, thats just text and quite clearly seperate from the information provided. And on that note, thats what we are providing; information. This is a service, not a money spinner.

While the look of a site is critical to whether people want to use it, the features also can make or break. I think that I’ve made the easiest tools for publishers and viewers alike. With the comprehensive RSS feeds of each category or all of them, mailouts to publishers with user-defined constraints, easy posting, and viewer interaction, I hope that it’s easy for you to use.

Not only this, but I’m coding features that I don’t think have been implemented elsewhere… ever. Such as RSS scraping from publishers to make the process completely automatic, ranking by a variety of variables and other features.