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Summary

Possible Subtext Features

see http://www.subtextproject.com

Content Discoverability

One thing that's always annoyed me about blogging software is their temporal-only organisation. It's only easy to find the most recent blog entries. Sometimes you can narrow it down by some broad category but that's about it.

It should be easier to expose "the best bits" of a blog and make them easier to find. If you've written a piece that you think is a brilliant insight or important to keep visible, you want to make it make it more discoverable. If there are blog entries that form a theme, you should be able to easily navigate between them.

You've invested a lot of time writing a blog. When someone comes along and randomly ends up on one of your pages via google, you want to keep them interested and show them around.

So here's some ideas for features to address this issue of content discoverability:

Blog Entry Ratings

Have a rating for each entry (eg. 1..5). An entry "I'm going on holiday for two weeks" would be a 1. An entry "I've got a brilliant idea..." would be 5. You could then have a "Best Of" link which lists your best 20 entries in the last year or "Top 10" in a specific category. I suggest only the admin can set the rating.

Implementation Notes

The simplest approach is adding a "Rating" integer field to blog_Content. Note you could even rate comments then. There's an argument that you should rate on a per category basis (have a "Rating" field in blog_Links) but I think it makes it too complicated.

Most Talked About

Some posts start generating a huge amount of comments. It should be easy to find these topics and display a list of them along with the comment count. A "Last Comment" sidebox on the home page would be good too. These particular entries gather their own momentum.

Implementation Notes

The data is there; just need the right SQL and UI controls.

Related Entries

After a blog entry but before the comments, I would love to see a list of links to "Related Entries". For example, at one point I was learning to sail over a period of a year. I wrote several entries and a couple of articles about it. If someone discovers one entry, I want them to easily discover the rest of them.

A series of blog entries like these form a "thread" and is a finer-grained concept than a category. You could have a "next in category" link but it wouldn't allow you to stick to a specific train of thought.

Implementation Notes

A number of approaches are possible.

1) Make explicit links using a table with a (PostID, PostID) tuple. Pain to manage though.

2) Create a ThreadID field in blog_Content. To continue a thread, you first pick an entry that is part of the thread and the new post inherits the original ThreadID. Otherwise, the ThreadID equals the PostID. It's like "Reply to Post" vs "New Post".

3) Use keywords. Related entries are posts which have at least one keyword in common. You can think of them as dynamic hidden categories. Flexible but not as good for performance. More powerful in that a single entry can belong to more than one thread.

4) Create a new hidden category type that get created "on-the-fly". Posts can then get associated with a hidden category. This feature would require no database changes.

5) Extend categories to be hiearchical so they can be much more fine-grained.

Readings About Hiearchical Categories

http://www.simongbrown.com/2005/06/16.html

http://blog.consumerpedia.org/

http://jena.hpl.hp.com/~stecay/papers/xmleurope2004/040420_semblog_draft10.html

http://www.xaraya.com

http://frassle.net

http://codex.wordpress.org/Manage_Categories_SubPanel

http://www.allpeers.com/blog/category/semantic-web/