I integrated Channel9 forums better with thredr.com. Now popular threads (those with several recent comments in them) will bubble up in the list of “interesting” conversations going on with Microsoft-focused developers. Here’s a snippet of a couple forum discussions that made it to the list. Nothing big, but nonetheless, things people are actively talking about.
I had a few minutes in the evenings this weekend to add a couple features to thredr.
Now there are permalinks to each story, which is useful for linking to the content in blogs. There’s still no way to manually navigate back and forth in the archives though. That’ll be a project for next weekend.
I also added RSS feeds for each of the topics. There are some bugs, but for the most part it works. One problem? There are some illegal characters that need to be encoded. I tried to fix this, but I think I was too tired to think clearly and get it right. Again, this will have to be a next weekend project.
Oh, and I adjusted the ranking a bit for each of the stories listed. Some people were commenting that older, active stories were staying on the top of the list for too long. I increased the weighting that “pulls” older stories down the page. Hopefully that’ll help.
One last thing: Layne experimented with adding advertising to the pages. Some approaches looked OK, although, it was easy to create ads that are too overwhelming. It’s going to take some thought to get a better mix. I’m not sure anyway if advertising is the way to go right now anyway. There are so many other issues to work out and frankly there aren’t enough readers yet to make it all that worthwhile. Layne’s a better judge of that, however.
And lastly, I’ve gotten some feedback on the “thredr” domain name. Many people don’t get it. The name is too obtuse or hard to pronounce or confusing. Yeah, the problem is there aren’t very many short, one or two syllable domain names available that only cost a couple dollars :-). We’re cheap.