Gavin Joyce's Blog

CarList.ie Presentation - Dublin 8th April

Gavin Joyce — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:16:12 GMT

I'll be presenting the my first rails application, www.carlist.ie to the Ruby Ireland group tomorrow night in the Morrison hotel Dublin at 7pm.

Please let us know if you plan on attending. As usual, there will be drinks and chats after the presentation.

DotNetKicks: Search and a new build server

Gavin Joyce — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 09:53:33 GMT

Search DotNetKicks with Lucene.NET

One of the features most requested on the DNK issue tracker over the past number of weeks was search. Mark McAvoy recently joined the DNK project team (welcome Mark!) and took on search as his first task. Utilising the open source Lucene.NET search engine, you can free text search DNK stories using a number of query operators.

Here are some example queries:

If you are a member of DNK you can also restrict the search to stories which you have kicked.

DotNetKicks CruiseControl.NET Build Server

Another recent development is the addition of a build server on http://build.dotnetkicks.com/. Thanks to Simone for setting this up. We will soon integrate our unit tests and other reports into the build output.

DotNetKicks Tags: DotNetKicks, OpenSource, Lucene.NET, CruiseControl.NET

DotNetKicks - Now Serving SVN Revision 501

Gavin Joyce — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:50:30 GMT

The DotNetKicks open source project is blistering ahead, there have been 336 commits in the last month taking us up to revision 501. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the project so far. Our main contributors the past few weeks were James Welsch, Simone Busoli, Kevin Fricovsky and Atif Aziz.

JSON Services and DNK Widgets

We have launched an initial set of DotNetKicks JSON Services, these will be expanded upon in the near future. We currently support the following anonymous operations:

getFrontPageStories()
getFrontPageStoriesPaged(pageNumber, pageSize)
getPopularStories()
getPopularStoriesPaged(pageNumber, pageSize)
getPopularStoriesPagedFromTimePeriod(pageNumber, pageSize, timePeriod)
getTaggedStories(tag)
getTaggedStoriesPaged(tag, pageNumber, pageSize)
getUpcomingPageStories()
getUpcomingPageStoriesPaged(pageNumber, pageSize)
getUpcomingStories()
getUpcomingStoriesPaged(pageNumber, pageSize)
getUpcomingStoriesPagedFromTimePeriod(pageNumber, pageSize, timePeriod)
getUserFriendsKickedStories(username)
getUserFriendsKickedStoriesPaged(username, pageNumber, pageSize)
getUserFriendsSubmittedStories(username)
getUserFriendsSubmittedStoriesPaged(username, pageNumber, pageSize)
getUserKickedStories(username)
getUserKickedStoriesPaged(username, pageNumber, pageSize)
getUserSubmittedStories(username)
getUserSubmittedStoriesPaged(username, pageNumber, pageSize)

Kevin created a screencast demonstrating how to create a 'my recent kicks' widget using jQuery and the DNK JSON services. Atif created a live display widget using jQuery which show the live DNK front page, popular and upcoming stories on one page. Let me know if you have seen any other uses of the JSON api.

DNK Zeitgeist

James has continued his great work on the new DotNetKicks Zeitgeist. Looking at the Zeitgeist for September, we can see that there were:

496 stories submitted
172 stories published
4733 Kicks
349 Comments

This feature will become a first class citizen in the UI when we redesign the UI.

DNK Growth

September broke all the previous records - it was by far our most active month on the site (pdf). In an effort to be as transparent as possible, we are now publishing the Google Analytics statistics for the site on two Google groups:

Please join either group if you would like to receive these stats by email. It is also a good time to let you friends and colleagues know about DNK and its fantastic .NET news feed.

Custom Kick It buttons

Simone recently added another nice new feature which allows you to customise the 'kick it' buttons. You'll see the new options after submitting a story. It will soon be easy to create these kick it buttons from any story page.

Facebook Group

James also created a DotNetKicks facebook group which already has 9 members. Search for 'DotNetKicks' on facebook if you would like to join.

Seen in the wild

I have come across two website using the open source DotNetKicks code base so far:

Anyone seen any others?

DotNetKicks Tags: DotNetKicks, OpenSource, Zeitgeist, JSON

New DNK Features: Kick Spy & Shoutbox

Gavin Joyce — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:58:24 GMT

This week there have been over 100 commits to the DotNetKicks open source trunk. Some fantastic new features are now available on DotNetKicks.com and many others are in progress.

Kick Spy

The Spy displays each action a user takes on the site including submitting stories, kicking, tagging, commenting and shouting.

This is a work-in-progress and will soon become a self updating filterable control using Ajax.NET professional and jQuery. There are plans to extend Kick Spy to user profiles and stories too.

View it in action here >>

If you would like to shape how this feature end up, please let us know your thoughts : issue 86 on Google Code

Shoutbox

The Shoutbox allows users to have little conversations in various places in the site.

There currently is one on the Who's Online page and on every members profile.

Feel free to drop me a note on my profile.

Issue 87 on Google Code

Other Improvements

Since joining the project a few weeks ago, James Welch has become a regular contributor to DotNetKicks.

One of the many features that he has added is the ability to view stories both kicked and submitted by friends.

Here are the latest stories that have been submitted by friends of mine on DotNetKicks:

http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/friends/submitted

He also improved the paging control which now looks like:

Community News

I asked Scott Guthrie if he would consider placing a 'kick it' button on his blog and he agreed. His posts are some of the most popular on DotNetKicks as you can see from the ScottGuthrie tag. This is a nice boost to the community, I'm sure that we will gain new fans from his blog. Thanks Scott.

Jon Galloway's JavaScript technique is used to inject the 'kick it' link and image into the page automatically.

Coming Soon

A number of new features are in the pipeline:

DotNetKicks Zeitgeist

DotNetKicks Chats

DotNetKicks Tags: DotNetKicks, OpenSource, KickSpy, Shoutbox, ScottGuthrie, JamesWelch

They (spammers) look like ants from here

Gavin Joyce — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:52:53 GMT

Since adding some basic user visualisation to DotNetKicks.com the other day, I have become slightly addicted to viewing the who's online page. This morning I added colour coding to the users based on their status - green for new users, blue for existing users and red for spammers.

Spammers don't really know that their account has been flagged, although they may notice that their posts have been deleted. When they attempt to post a new link, everything seems fine - they are shown the confirmation page like everyone else. Their story isn't added of course, so our upcoming feed isn't troubled by spammed links to random topics.

What is interesting is how often these spammers come back to the site trying to peddle their dodgy wares. I take a great satisfaction is seeing them squirm hopelessly through their pointless little loops, trying everything and achieving nothing.

DotNetKicks 1 Spammers 0

DotNetKicks Tags: DotNetKicks, Spam, OpenSource

DotNetKicks Beta 2 Available For Download

Gavin Joyce — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:08:26 GMT

I have just tagged and uploaded SVN revision 283 as DotNetKicks beta 2. This beta includes a number of great new features.

Enjoy!

DotNetKicks Tags: DotNetKicks, OpenSource, Beta

DotNetKicks New Features: Profiles, Gravatars, Sortable Upcoming Stories

Gavin Joyce — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 12:36:15 GMT

The DotNetKicks.com open source project has picked up quite a bit of steam lately, over 75 commits have been made to the SubVersion trunk in the past week (rss feeds). It is great that the project is moving again, thanks to the wonders of open source and a great community. If you would like to contribute in any way to the project, please let me know.

EDIT: Beta 2.0 is available for download

The two big new features this week are user profiles and upcoming story sorting:

User Profiles

Following on from last weeks great 'Who Kicked It?' control by Kevin, we have now enabled user profiles and gravatars. Gravatars are 80x80 images and are provided by this free service. There was some concern from the community about the speed at which the gravatar images are served from this service, I have addressed this by implementing a server side gravatar cache. I'll post about this in more detail in the near future.

You can set your gravatar and other profile details on your DNK profile page (there is a new 'your profile' link in the top DNK menu). The url will be similar to:

http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/profile

We now also have the ability to see a paged list of:

User Kicked Stories (eg. http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/kicked)
User Submitted Stories (eg. http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/submitted)
User Comments (eg. http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/comments)
User Tags (eg: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/users/gavinjoyce/tags)

Thanks to james.e.welch & simone.busole for contributing these new features.

Upcoming Story Sorting

One of the limitations of the DNK upcoming story view was that it was easy for good stories to get lost. Is takes about 6 kicks for a story to reach the homepage feed, many on 5 kicks never make it. To address this, there are now two extra ways to sort the upcoming stories:

Latest Upcoming Stories : http://www.dotnetkicks.com/upcoming
Top Today: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/upcoming/popular/today
Top This Week: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/upcoming/popular/pastweek

The 'Top This Week' is especially useful for find those quality stories that sometimes did fall away.

Thanks to pedicool for contributing this new feature.

Whats Next?

That's up to you. Please let us know which features you would like implemented next. Clicking the star icon on any issue in the list will bump it up on our priority list. Also, please do let us know your great ideas for DotNetKicks.com.

EDIT: I've just deployed a 'Who's Online' feature which lists the users who have been active on the site within the last 30 mins.

Kick it on DotNetKicks.com:

DotNetKicks Tags: .NET, DotNetKicks, OpenSource, Gravatar

Who kicked it?

Gavin Joyce — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:35:51 GMT

I've just deployed SVN revision 160 to www.dotnetkicks.com. Included in the release is a nice feature from Kevin Fricovsky and some bug fixes from Pedram Shahsavand.

Who Kicked It:

Thanks to Kevin, you can now see a list of users who kicked a particular story:

eg. http://www.dotnetkicks.com/tipsandtricks/Scott_Hanselman_s_2007_Ultimate_Developer_and_Power_Users_Tools

Who want's to be a moderator?

I have also improved the site moderation features, mainly the ability to delete any spam posts. I am looking for a few members who are willing to become moderators. Please send me an email if you would like to help out (gavinjoyce@gmail.com). Please include your DNK username.

Subkismet to the rescue

Gavin Joyce — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:55:37 GMT

Since jumping to a PageRank of 6, DotNetKicks.com has become increasingly attractive to spammers. For the past year or so I have been deleting the posts manually, there would maybe be one or two spam posts per day. In the past week the number of spam posts has jumped to about 60 per day.

After a little searching, and a little prompting from Mads, I came across Subkismet. It bills itself as 'The Cure For Comment Spam'.

Project Description:

A stand-alone comment spam filtering library. Includes Akismet, Invisible Captcha, and Visible Captcha. The Akismet library included is based on code in use by Subtext and DasBlog.
This library is based on code originally developed for the Subtext Blog Engine project (http://subtextproject.com/). A variant of the Akismet specific code is in use by DasBlog http://dasblog.info/ as well.

I integrated it into DotNetKicks.com earlier this morning, the Invisible Captcha is being used on the SubmitNewStory.ascx control. The number of spam posts has reduced considerably although some are still getting through. I guess that some spammers may be using a scripted browser or spam bot which has JavaScript enabled.

Enabling a Visible Captcha is my next move, I hope that this will further reduce the amount of spam. I'll also add the nofollow HTML attribute to posted links in the upcoming page.

If you a looking for a cure to your spam problems, Subkismet is certainly worth a try.

DotNetKicks Tags: Spam, DotNetKicks, Subkismet

DotNetKicks Beta 1 Available For Download

Gavin Joyce — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 09:48:34 GMT

I have just tagged and uploaded SVN revision 132 as DotNetKicks Beta 1.

Enjoy!

DotNetKicks Tags: DotNetKicks, OpenSource, Beta