The news site was not publishing articles to the blog: todayamericannews.blogspot.com
This issue was fixed yesterday night. It should be working anytime now.
This issue was fixed yesterday night. It should be working anytime now.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Monday, September 12, 2011
What is special about todayamerican?
You might want to wonder or ask why todayamerican is different from any other site which either creates news or publishes news from different sources. Today I will attempt to answer this question in detail.
First it is neccessary to understand the primary reason we exist - because simply put, today you have to search for tech news or keep pressing refresh on the existing tech blogs to read content online. If you follow many tech blogs, this can quickly get old. RSS readers alleviate this problem to some extent, but how many people really like installing software on their desktops?. Even with an online service like Google Reader, it is just a dumb website, which pulls in data from different sites you subscribe to, without any idea of what content it is pulling or whether it is of interest to anyone or not.
Our service is very intelligent in comparison. And it has features for advanced users as well as completely non tech-savvy users who I think form the bulk of the population.
We get the latest tech news hourly from the internet, we ensure that duplicates are minimized - even across multiple tech blogs, we sort the content based on how many people show interest in it (without having a manual interface for "liking" content). You will notice that we don't tweet all the news we publish - but only the more interesting ones, and we have a content rank, though we don't ask you to "digg", "+" or "like" an article.
We make it very easy even for the most non-technical user to just get the latest, most interesting news. For the tech savvy users, we have personalized RSS feeds which keep track of what they have read, and only server those articles which they have not read before.
In this respect, we compete more with sites like stumbleupon, rather than content publishers like engadget or tech crunch. I think we have gone slightly ahead of the norm by both having our own website, a blog which contains our tech news as a separate entity as well as a twitter account which notifies everyone of the headlines. In effect, this encompasses most of the requirements needed by people who read tech news.
First it is neccessary to understand the primary reason we exist - because simply put, today you have to search for tech news or keep pressing refresh on the existing tech blogs to read content online. If you follow many tech blogs, this can quickly get old. RSS readers alleviate this problem to some extent, but how many people really like installing software on their desktops?. Even with an online service like Google Reader, it is just a dumb website, which pulls in data from different sites you subscribe to, without any idea of what content it is pulling or whether it is of interest to anyone or not.
Our service is very intelligent in comparison. And it has features for advanced users as well as completely non tech-savvy users who I think form the bulk of the population.
We get the latest tech news hourly from the internet, we ensure that duplicates are minimized - even across multiple tech blogs, we sort the content based on how many people show interest in it (without having a manual interface for "liking" content). You will notice that we don't tweet all the news we publish - but only the more interesting ones, and we have a content rank, though we don't ask you to "digg", "+" or "like" an article.
We make it very easy even for the most non-technical user to just get the latest, most interesting news. For the tech savvy users, we have personalized RSS feeds which keep track of what they have read, and only server those articles which they have not read before.
In this respect, we compete more with sites like stumbleupon, rather than content publishers like engadget or tech crunch. I think we have gone slightly ahead of the norm by both having our own website, a blog which contains our tech news as a separate entity as well as a twitter account which notifies everyone of the headlines. In effect, this encompasses most of the requirements needed by people who read tech news.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Content improvements in Today American
Now that the website is up and running without issues, I am happy to announce that we have been touching the inner plumbing of the site for the past few weeks. Basically, I want to improve the content quality of what comes through the RSS feeds and even what is shown on the website, before going to improve the layout and other design aspects of the website.
Because we provide an RSS feed now, we leave the RSS readers available on all platforms to provide the UI chutzpah for us.
We want to focus on improving the content you get so that, even more of you would want to actually read what we give you through the feeds and the website. Looks like I have succeeded to some extent, because I have been noticing the significant improvement in the quality of the news which shows up when I refresh my RSS feed reader in the morning.
Even though the presentation may not be as flashy as say - engadget.com, atleast the content seems much more intresting and relevant to read than was before. Our only request to our readers is to send us more feedback, so that we can continue improving our quality.
Because we provide an RSS feed now, we leave the RSS readers available on all platforms to provide the UI chutzpah for us.
We want to focus on improving the content you get so that, even more of you would want to actually read what we give you through the feeds and the website. Looks like I have succeeded to some extent, because I have been noticing the significant improvement in the quality of the news which shows up when I refresh my RSS feed reader in the morning.
Even though the presentation may not be as flashy as say - engadget.com, atleast the content seems much more intresting and relevant to read than was before. Our only request to our readers is to send us more feedback, so that we can continue improving our quality.
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