Overheard in Dublin is a new site which has sprung up like a spring something something. Such is the site’s popularity that the site its self is becoming a topic of conversation I occasionally over hear in Dublin.
Being the pedantic, socially minded sort that I am, I’ve devised a list of improvements that could make this site much better and sent it to the webmaster.
Here are my recommendations:
- Individual links for quotes, either using anchors on a page or individual pages. The latter means more page impressions so hopefully more ad-revenue. Individual pages or links make it really easy to share a great quote with others.
- A moderation system is something that should be seriously configured. Some of the quotes are great. Some are dupes, blatantly false or simply not funny. If readers could click a link to indicate whether they thought a quote was funny or not, or perhaps mark a quote for review if there’s something seriously wrong with it, spam or offensive material for instance, it would really increase the value of the data. Following from this, if quotes have a popularity rating users can browse quotes by popularity, a chart of the 10, 50 or 100 quotes could be kept.
- Searching bu Quote ID or content would be useful.
Using PHP on the site as you are means that implementation of any one of these suggestions should be quite easy.
My input is influenced by QDB which is the software that runs the very popular quotes database bash.org
Like most of my recommendations my advice or suggestions will probably come across as patronising. Just last week I was speaking to the new girl, who uses a portable cd player to listen to music in work, and asked if she wanted some help transferring music to her PC. She let me know that was something she knew how to do. Boy, did I feel like a condescending heel.
Check out the newly launched Overheard in Cork from the same person/people.
What about an RSS feed? I set something up myself using RSSxl (http://www.wotzwot.com/rssxl.php), which generates RSS from HTML. It’s not perfect, but at least I can see when the site is updated from my aggregator.
That’s a good idea, they could put Google AdWords in each syndicated article/quote too.
There’s nothing that technology can’t ruin.
Besides the fact that I don’t believe the stories they decided to spam the Cork City forum which I moderate on Boards.ie so I won’t be going to their site now for sure.
Well, sure there are some obvious fakes and dupes there’s no reason not to believe that the hundreds of submitted quotes haven’t come from people’s own experiences.