news site?

[matt3o]

I'd avoid to reinvent the wheel whenever possible. I agree a custom CMS would be pretty simple but I don't see the point for a blog/news site.

[webwit]

ah! it worked! you are listening then

wouldn't a deskthority.net (forum) + deskthority.com (news) be confusing for new users?

We have .net, .org and .com, personally I wouldn't use .com for anything but commercial, which is nothing, but it's up for grabs if you feel differently.

Our current domain setup isn't ideal because it doesn't scale well. I.e. we have http://deskthority.net/ which means that if we have subdomains like webwit.deskthority.net, your browser will sent all cookies from the subdomains to the main domain, with each request. So http://www.deskthority.net would be better for the forum for scaling, but less pretty.

Anyway, whatever setup you decide on, let me know what you need from dt in the end and I'm sure we can work something out. It's a club server, not my server, my job is to facilitate. I'm not sure if we can securely sync user logins and sessions across servers easily, if you need that, so that's something to watch out for.

[Muirium]

Good to see the duck's approval.

An idea I just had is a ticker tape - those scrolling text things, with article titles/summary's. This is my favorite, in combination with full articles.

But please, not this. Ticker tapes are the stupidest thing to ever get on TV news, let alone the web. Distracting. Slower to read. Distracting. Actually, really quite annoying. Distracting. Distracting. And, uh. Distracting. And the whatever it was.

Also: distracting.

[matt3o]

I believe a nice feature would be "new articles since last visit", it's something that I don't see often, but might be nice and very easy to do.

Re the domain. I'm pretty neutral about the .com domain, I don't feel it's just for "commercial" anymore. What do you think of dtne.ws ? it still has the "DT" in it but with a twist

[Muirium]

Nah. There's plenty of DT News's's's's out there if you do a search, including Detroit's, which has a better claim on DT than we do! I think it really has to be one and the same domain. Otherwise it'll look daft, like some link farm always pointing to the same external source. Even if we are the same people behind both, first impressions count!

[matt3o]

I still find .net + .com confusing.

[webwit]

www.google.com news.google.com mail.google.com etc.
www.deskthority.net news.deskthority.net wiki.deskthority.net etc.

Is what I like most, but as you prefer a standalone domain, I'd go for keyboardnewsbingobongo.com

[matt3o]

would you redirect deskthority.net to http://www.deskthority.net? I'm pretty sure google doesn't like that very much

[DerpyDash_xAD]

Good to see the duck's approval.

An idea I just had is a ticker tape - those scrolling text things, with article titles/summary's. This is my favorite, in combination with full articles.

But please, not this. Ticker tapes are the stupidest thing to ever get on TV news, let alone the web. Distracting. Slower to read. Distracting. Actually, really quite annoying. Distracting. Distracting. And, uh. Distracting. And the whatever it was.

Also: distracting.

These always have been, and always will be, love it hate it tbh, ~60% of the population hate them :'( lol

[webwit]

would you redirect deskthority.net to http://www.deskthority.net? I'm pretty sure google doesn't like that very much

Google seems fine with permanent redirects, we've done it before with pretty urls.

[matt3o]

few years ago I did something similar with a site I admin (with permanent redirects) and we were wiped out from google altogether. We had to file a complain and we were slowly reintegrated.

[webwit]

They even have a tool for it now, and you can set the "preferred domain".
https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... 3633?hl=en

[Icarium]

An idea I just had is a ticker tape - those scrolling text things, with article titles/summary's. This is my favorite, in combination with full articles.

lol

[matt3o]

They even have a tool for it now, and you can set the "preferred domain".
https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... 3633?hl=en

why not forum.deskthority.net then?

[webwit]

For the same reason it isn't search.google.com. It's our main entity.

[matt3o]

I agree, Deskthority should stay a forum/community and don't mess with other things.

[Halvar]

Why sarcastic? Google has maps.google.com and news.google.com, but www.google.com still brings up the search box.

[matt3o]

did it come out sarcastic? sorry, I really didn't mean it.

What I mean is that thinking about it I find that DT should stay a forum driven community (like webwit said).

Now regarding the news site, you never know what direction it will take and I see it very well with a domain of its own. That's all.

[Halvar]

Ok, I see what you mean. You're probably right, to be on a subdomain might be an impediment, either from the beginning on or at some later point. If (and I'm not sure if you mean that) the news site is handled and hosted by the DT club, it should be enough if we just say so on the site and have the club own the domain.

[matt3o]

connecting the site to DT won't be a problem I think. A "Discuss on Deskthority" link on each news would be a strong enough connection (instead of an internal comment system).

I find it a very elegant way of keeping the site and the forum bound together but keep the independence of both.

Please note that this is just how I envision it, I don't know if the DT Club wants to do something different or under news.dt.net

[Icarium]

Any news about your endeavors, matt3o?

[wheybags]

Re domain, why not just deskthority.net/blog ?

[DerpyDash_xAD]

Re domain, why not just deskthority.net/blog ?

that would come off very unprofessional - it feels cheap/low quality. You wouldn't go to Forbes.com/blog and take it seriously, would you?

[scottc]

Re domain, why not just deskthority.net/blog ?

that would come off very unprofessional - it feels cheap/low quality. You wouldn't go to Forbes.com/blog and take it seriously, would you?

Why? There's no reason for that. We already go to deskthority.net/wiki and it works absolutely fine.

[Muirium]

Actually, I access the wiki from the forum front page, where it alone among the categories is a whole other entity. Does feel distinctly odd, in fact. But I use Wikipedia too much for DT's wiki to take top spot on my predictive bookmarks.

The Wiki gets more traffic in general than the forum because of Google searches for Cherry MX switches. Indeed, I first found it that way too. "Which one's clicky again? Purple or orange?"

[matt3o]

Status update.

I tried many wordpress themes and even purchased a professional one. Now, I am not a great developer myself but the code quality of these themes is depressing. I was trying to customize some aspects of the theme and I spotted a couple of very stupid bugs. I can't image what would come out if I dig a little deeper into these things.

Regarding the domain name I feel that a dedicated domain would be better... which name I have no idea.

[Muirium]

Is deskth0rity.net taken?

Never pay for open source software. Those beardy hippies sink all their money into weed…

[webwit]

Re domain, why not just deskthority.net/blog ?

that would come off very unprofessional - it feels cheap/low quality. You wouldn't go to Forbes.com/blog and take it seriously, would you?

Why? There's no reason for that. We already go to deskthority.net/wiki and it works absolutely fine.

There's a reason for that. Wikipedia has urls like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<pagetitle>.
There is no support for urls like wiki.desktority.net instead of deskthority.net/wiki by mediawiki, because:
1) They try the fix the bugs but their own entities don't use it because of 2, so bugs remain.
2) It's because of the way the wiki creates new pages. For example if you enter deskthority.net/wiki/MyNewPageName,
it will show a page and ask if you want to create MyNewPageName. However, without the /wiki/ part this request would be in the web root. Many bots, crawlers and people request things from the webroot. For example robots.txt. Now if this file does not exist, the wiki would show the page with the question if you want to create the wiki page 'robots.txt'. While it should return a 404 error. Or, if you want to use google webmaster tools, google requests you place a file with a code in the filename in the webroot to check that you own the domain. With such a wiki setup, this would always validate.

[DerpyDash_xAD]

Status update.

I tried many wordpress themes and even purchased a professional one. Now, I am not a great developer myself but the code quality of these themes is depressing. I was trying to customize some aspects of the theme and I spotted a couple of very stupid bugs. I can't image what would come out if I dig a little deeper into these things.

Regarding the domain name I feel that a dedicated domain would be better... which name I have no idea.

that is the exact reason I suggested a bespoke system.
1) bad coding in most solutions, esp. open source
2) We don't need many features, and turning them off is sometimes not possible - wastes server resources.
3) We can cut costs heavily with a bespoke system.

I would offer to do it myself, but I am not skilled enough for the forum auto post integration.


Edit: Even our most advanced ideas are relatively simple to implement. It would never need to be near the advanced level of the forum, and Deskthority's simple design is beneficial in this.

[matt3o]

1) bad coding in most solutions, esp. open source

This is so untrue

Anyway the most complicated thing of a custom system is probably users/roles management.