All Change at Citynoise.org

For those who are interested I’m going to start documenting the upgrades and improvements I’m making to citynoise.org over the coming months. The site has been struggling under some pretty heavy traffic and several internal optimisations including query caching for some of the more complex database operations has gone a long way towards making the site feel usable again.

Syndication Feeds

Since the beginning of time citynoise.org has had an RSS 0.91 feed, and a broken one at that, but the most recent upgrade has provided solid and stable feeds in a variety of formats including RRS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and ATOM. On top of this Peter has implemented a nice Twitter feed using… um twitterfeed

The old RSS URL points at the new RSS 0.91 feed so there’s no need to update your bookmarks/aggregator/whatever. Unless you want to.

Namespaces and hackable URLS

An important part of any social site IMO is the URL scheme. Hackable urls, that is URLS which the user can inuitively modify to navigate the site in a way which suits them, are integral to this. To this end the “articles by location” pages which were previously in the format

http://citynoise.org/hood/london@uk

are now in the format

http://citynoise.org/place/uk/london
This makes it much more obvious that the URLs are ‘hackable’ in that you can remove the ‘london’ segment and use http://citynoise.org/place/uk to view all articles in the UK.

All pages are still available at their old “hood” addresses for backwards compatibility.

Climbing The Technorati Tree

Every new post is now automatically submitted to Technorati and a handful of other aggregators. This should ensure maximum exposure for new posts especially if they’re tagged correctly. The next step here would be ensuring posters tag their posts adequately. It makes all the difference.

[[wiki:topic here]] style Wikipedia links also now configured to work as tags within the ‘blogosphere’, though this isn’t yet detailed anywhere on the site.

More to come soon…