Let's open up Crossroads
209
vote
Hi all, one of the biggest issues Crossroads has is that it's a closed platform. Let me explain this concept better: I already have a blog in which I post what I want to share with others, I don't want to have another blog to keep just my travel posts in. I already share my pics on Flickr, I don't want another service to post pics to. Usually I use my newsaggregator to see what's new... I don't want to check every time the "recent page" here. My suggestion is: let's open up Crossroads. Let's turn it into a platform that is also able to aggregate information from other social tools, including my blog and my Flickr account!
And, most importantly, let's open up that RSS feed that still doesn't work!
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By giorgio on 2006-10-19 09:10
admin
Absolutly one of our goals...
You may have missed the "new feature" announcement yesterday: you can now syndicate external blogs on Crossroads.
Click on "Blogs" on the site tools menu, then click on "outside blog." Fill out the form, submit the new feed, then click "refresh feed" to force a refresh (this will take a few seconds the first time).
Posts from your external blog are now integrated into your Crossroads blog. There's still a few features to add, including filtering by tag (ie "only show posts tagged "travel"), but the basic functionality is there.
Images are the next step. Allowing outside image streams is one of the reasons we're going to move away from Gallery2...
As for "recent changes" RSS, it should be there already. Click on the small orange icon (which should probably be labeled better) at the bottom of the page if autodetect isn't working.
Again, all the rss stuff is working, just not available to anonymous users/readers.
Feedback welcome of course!
giorgio
Where is the "outside blog" link?
Maj, I can't find the "outside blog" link... could you, please, tell me where is it? Also: as I previously suggested the actual navigation menus/labels are still confusing to me: for instance I see "blogs" on the top-right corner and "blog" on the left... which is the difference? Ok, one links to the blog aggregator, the other to my blog but this is not clear until you won't click on them.
My suggestion is to simplify the navigation, rationalizing it.
admin
Menus
Note to self: don't give directions to a link just before changing the menus ;-)
You should now see an "external blog" tab on the blog indexes.
I've change the 'blog' link in the left menu to 'your blog' -- it was part of the link title but was left out of the link text.
Feedback on what would make the menus more simple and rational would be great. I tried to greatly reduce the amount of links in the right nav and get rid of all the duplication, but it will be an evolving process.
Thanks! Admin Maj
evan
Agreed
This is such a great point! I think that you're right on target about aggregation. It's one of the design principles in the Crossroads roadmap, and the recent addition of "blog aggregation" is a step in the evolution of that process.
For publishing RSS feeds: this is happening right now. However, we have the entire site available only to logged-in users during this alpha testing phase. Why? Because we want to make a good first impression when we announce the site to the world. We don't want people saying, "There should be reviews!" or "You should be able to tag things geographically."
So, for this private alpha stage, you can only read the RSS feeds for Crossroads in a feedreader that supports cookie-based logins. As far as I know, the only feedreaders that do this are Firefox's Live Bookmarks and the Sage in-browser reader, as Reen mentioned.
When we get to a public beta (expected in the next month or two), we'll open the doors to the public. Everything on Crossroads will be readable by anyone -- blogs, photos, reviews, and RSS feeds.
We could spend more time trying to optimize this private alpha period for testers, but I for one would rather concentrate effort on getting things ready for real production use.
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