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Kottu has been completely recoded by Janith Leanage. What’s different? Well, it got too big and now Kottu has tools to make the experience a bit more relevant again. You can filter by language on top (English, Sinhala, Tamil). The popular posts thing is now back, except smarter. Before a few people would sit and click all day and mess up the rankings. Now clicks are only one factor in an algorithm, other factors are buzz on Twitter, FB, Twitter and Google Plus.

Thus, you can see what’s popular today, this week or this month. That will automatically be filtered by whatever language you chose, if you did choose. That’s the basic functionality all, I should note, completely recoded by Janith. Kottu is no longer running on WordPress, not because WordPress isn’t great, but because you sometimes don’t need a Swiss Army knife to open a bottle 1,000 times a day. Sometimes a bottle opener will do.

I added some stuff on the sidebar, namely the Flickr feed and a Twitter Widget, genius copy and pasting, I know. As a note the Twitter widget settings for near:Dambulla within:200mi simply doesn’t work. You have to enter a geocode (latitude and longitude). I entered the code for Kandy Batticaloa, not for any political reasons but simply because it’s vaguely near the center of the country a 200 mile circle from there generally covers the island (and not India). It still randomly pulls in Chinese or Indonesian tweets. Perhaps they’re visiting? I dunno.

Um, that’s all for right now. Let me or @chav_ know if there are any bugs. What’s in the pipeline is, broadly, making Kottu awesome again. What that means is A) that I’ll start adding people again, sorry bout the delay B) uh, what… user accounts, some sort of user account. Right now people literally just send me emails C) community support for new, young rural bloggers D) tagging E) print/email arm F) social media G) I dunno, what do you want?

Posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 in blogging, kottu.