Editorial:News Elephant: My Experiment in News Aggregation
From Tech Elephant
It has been a while since I last posted anything and, I'm assuming, you may be wondering why.
Well, part of the reason is that my day-job has taken over my life for the past month -- gotta love projects with a 2 month product lifecycle ;) The other reason is that I've been doing some other experiments on my off-time. (Yes, being a nerd doesn't stop when I clock-out).
One of these such experiments I am "officially" announcing today: News Elephant[1]: my experiment in news aggregation. Yes, news aggregation has been done before and it's not really "sexy" anymore, with sites like digg and News Vine.
By developing and launching this site, I'm simply trying to do the following:
- Build a simple/lightweight news aggregator (obviously)
- Incorporate my research in new Javascript frameworks
- Understand the limitations of AJAX[2]/JSON[3] resultset navigation[4]
- Have a bit of fun :D
One thing to note: News Elephant[1] was privately launched way back in August and (kind of) lost my attention for a while when I switched hosting providers.
That early prototype used the Scriptaculous[5] and Prototype[6] javascript frameworks[7], both of which I now can say are bloatware[8]. Last weekend, I decided it was time to give News Elephant a makeover and incorporate my newly found love of jQuery. What a difference using a lightweight javascript framework made... life is much easier now ;)
[edit] Notes
- ↑ 1.1 1.2 News Elephant is a lightweight/simple news aggregator
- ↑ AJAX: Asynchronous Javascript and XML]
- ↑ JSON:Javascript Object Notation
- ↑ Pagination is the system by which the information on a newspaper, bookpage, manuscript, or otherwise handwritten or printed document are laid out.
- ↑ script.aculo.us is a JavaScript library built on the Prototype JavaScript Framework, providing dynamic visual effects and user interface elements via the Document Object Model.
- ↑ Prototype provides various functions for developing JavaScript applications. The features range from programming shortcuts to major functions for dealing with XMLHttpRequest.
- ↑ A Javascript Framework commonly offer visual effects, DOM manipulation, and/or widgets.
- ↑ Software bloat, or bloatware, is a term used in both a neutral and disparaging sense, to describe the tendency of newer computer programs to be larger, or to use larger amounts of system resources (mass storage space, processing power or memory) than older versions of the same programs, without concomitant benefits being provided to end users.
