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Welcome to the New Look of News!
Remote Central finally gains news commenting, tagging, an RSS feed... and yes, even titles!
Posted by Daniel Tonks on November 12, 2007 at 8:31 AM
RC News Story
It was only 18 months ago when I decided it was finally time to abandon our up-to-then static news pages (something that were an utter nightmare to modify and keep up-to-date), and went through the laborious task of converting years of news and hundreds of articles stored in hard-coded HTML files into a friendlier database format. Unfortunately the end result, while marginally more convenient for me to use, was still far from ideal. The software I had written tended to follow the same static principles employed by regular HTML pages, and didn’t take advantage of any of the capabilities that a database could offer.

Well, over the past few weeks I’ve been attempting to rectify that situation by writing brand new software for our news database from scratch (yes, Remote Central uses almost exclusively custom software written by myself – and not off-the-shelf packages).

The end result is what you see here. All previous news articles have been expanded to include items formerly missing such as titles, captions, author name, the actual time of posting and tagging categories. Also new is the ability for our members to add their own comments (if you’re logged in to your Remote Central account the comment box will automatically show up lower down on this page), a “related articles” section, a list of the most popular headlines, plus an RSS news feed for those who use them.

To go along with this software I’ve also come up with a fresh, clean new look, and have so far applied the same style to our home page. Be sure to let me know what you think, as well as if you spot any problems or glitches.

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Comments
Looks nice!

I can also say I'm the first to comment here!
I must be getting old. I liked the old layout... but then I think I said the same thing the last time you changed Daniel!!! lol

No we need more reviews!!!!

No rest for the wicked.... or for you, Daniel! ;-)

I'm glad the new database will make it easier for you in the future.

Keep up the good work!

Greg
looks good, I like the comment field, makes it much easier to discuss
Curious, why did you decide on newer on top.
Anthony: when I looked around, that seemed to be the way article comments were generally done. I know it's the reverse of the forums, but it's not meant to be traditional discussion and so the most recent at the top made the most sense (especially if there were multiple pages of comments).

Just like in the User Reviews section the most recent reviews are at the top.
I know, I was thinking that too...I'm lucky enough to make the first ever article comment...and what do you know, it's the farthest to the bottom where nobody will ever see it.

However, it does make sense though, as it's not as much a discussion thread as it is comments on articles...therefore newest and most relevant come on top.
It's REALLY easy for me to reverse the order, so if it continues to throw people off I can simply make it oldest-at-top.
That leads me to another thing...I still can't believe you wrote this code totally from scratch!


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