Janith Leanage has updated Kottu. Check it out – www.kottu.org/beta. Kottu was innovative when it started, but stagnated after, oh, five years. Janith, of Colombo bus route fame, has kindly rebuilt the whole thing to be faster, better and smarter. The notable features are that it’s more of a social feedreader now, at least in terms of calculating ‘buzz’. Check it out.
The problem with Kottu was that it got too bug (over 1,200 blogs) and lost the small-world feel. Now Janith has changed it such that A) you can view by language and B) you can see popular posts. This popular posts algorithm is based on the social buzz around a post as well as the clicks it generates on Kottu. Hopefully more useful and less corruptible.
Anyways, the beta is up, use it and see. Feedback welcome. Also check out Janith’s blog, he wrote all the code and he has a more comprehensive write-up there.
Another idea! How about allowing to browse posts based on categories and tags posted on blog posts themselves. Like wrdpress.com does for wordpress hosted blogs.
That is possible, the only issue is that categories/tags quickly explode. I, for example, have like 50 categories. Multiply that by a 1000.
Did that on an earlier version of Kottu and it crippled both the database and usability. Those wordpress tag pages are cool though (http://en.wordpress.com/tag/writing/). Perhaps there could be a few really rigid categories (tech, politics, arts), or some sort of hashtags.
Anyways, keep the ideas coming. I think we’ll open source this soon.
I think it looks great Indi, but will have to try and write something interesting now!
Hey just checked it out. Pretty neat! Way to go :)