December 2010
1 post
But by Jesus Christ and God the Father
When God wants to drill a man,
And thrill a man,
And skill a man
When God wants to mold a man
To play the noblest part;
When He yearns with all His heart
To create so great and bold a man
That all the world shall be amazed,
Watch His methods, watch His ways!
How He ruthlessly perfects
Whom He royally elects!
How He hammers him and hurts him,
And with mighty blows converts him
Into trial shapes...
April 2010
5 posts
Accurate Searching
Last week, we implemented a smarter RSS feed and content searching capabilities into FaithfulNews. This was a crucial step because every now and then, we would get some odd contents poppin’ up such as pro-wrestling videos!
This was mostly due to some of our keywords (e.g. Billy Graham) having multiple meanings! (so apparently there is another famous pro-wrestler called Billy Graham?!?!)....
Upcoming FN changes
We are planning some major changes at the backend of FaithfulNews in order to bring you more accurate and relevant contents. We hope the change will be in place soon.
Meantime, we are glad to see more people joining up our fan page and also following us on Twitter. Our goal remains the same - to make this Web more faithful for Him.
FaithfulNews speaks LOUDER!
FaithfulNews has been knocked down a NUMBER of times since its launch about a year ago (I still cannot believe it’s been a year!).
We’ve been hacked, we’ve been shut down, we’ve been compromised. But I still do believe there’s a value in delivering the faithful Christian contents out there, to block out the bad ones and to promote that Web is a God-made tool, and it...
A major update.
We have been hard (but we admit, it’s been a little slow) at work for updating FN. There are a few major enhancements to the site, which should make your news browsing much more enjoyable!
Implementation of “related” images on the news articles
Layout change for the first page to hightlight more recent articles
Date implementation for viewing articles by different dates
In...
Navigations..
Fixed the menu system a little bit. This is really just for looking ahead to ensure that any changes in the future will be handled correctly. There are still a few glitches, which I am not 100% satisfied with, but I think it serves the purpose.
March 2009
5 posts
Feeds feeds feeds!
A number of Christian news feeds have been added to FaithfulNews. Hope to bring a summary page soon so you know where we are at. But meantime, enjoy the multiple news articles from all around the world. The articles are now collected every 15 minutes! Talk about frequently updated news site! :) Enjoy!
NOTE : We will implement a feature where users can suggest a site for feeds. It will come...
Javascript Hashtable.
I wanted to put more statistical information on the FaiftfulNews front page. That means having a persistent data structure during each “view” of the page in which I can store the statistical values accurately.
At first, I thought an array will do. A simple 1-D or probably 2-D array would do the job. It will work, but since the data structure will involve key-value pairs, a hashtable...
FaithfulNews is now on Facebook!
YEP! As simple as it is, we now have FaithfulNews Facebook Application! It’s nothing too fancy, but it does the job. Join it today!
http://apps.facebook.com/faithfulnews/
Seek and you will find.
A much anticipated “search functionality” has been now released for FaithfulNews. It’s a simple one at the moment. Type in some keywords and you can search all articles that are related to your search query.
Advanced features (e.g. sort by date, sort by source etc) are definitely desirable. So we’ll see how this feature gets extended in the future.
I hate Mondays.
Man I’m tired.
Anyway, the pop up window from the main page has now been re-implemented. The previous javascript had quite a number of difficult problems, which I couldn’t work out. Going through a third-party javascript and trying to work its features out is the most cumbersome task. I just wanted a simple, flexible and extensible script I can adopt. And adopt I did! search...
February 2009
1 post
picking up again where we left off..
It’s been a crazy month and minimal progress has been made at FaithfulNews.com.
But no need to worry, the development is slowly coming back and to start off with, we removed ALL ads from the site for now. How silly of me to distract users from their viewing with these ads. My bad.
January 2009
6 posts
Feature update
Things at FaithfulNews.com is flying at the moment. Here are a few more updates on your way.
Domain name is finally active! HOORAY
Added a new link “all articles”, which shows all the articles saved on our database with an easy CodeIgniter pagination mechanism also implemented
A slight change in the interface for viewing the bubble contents
A page redirection at PHP level for...
UI & Accessibility of FaithfulNews.com
A short update on FaithfulNews.com
the domain name has been registered. It should take about 2 days for all the DNS to be propagated
Updated the website front page
User interface enhancement
The critical component of FaithfulNews.com is the front page. I wanted to implement a Google-reader like bubble, that displays the further information of the article, before taking the user to the actual...
Priorities for FaithfulNews
Sure, this is a pet project of mine. FaithfulNews isn’t derived from an original idea. In fact, it’s far from it. C’mon, how many “All-You-Can-Get-News-Aggregation” websites/web apps/programs are there?
You can easily create something similar using tools like “Feed Chronicles”. So what am I really trying to achieve here? Who am I targeting? (if I am...
Top 100 Done.
I’ve added a new table, (which is populated by another CRON job) that selects the top 100 articles (by time). This will give a quick access to the articles, rather than application loading up and sorting the entire articles table.
Having done that, now I am after a good layout. Need to find a good/unique design for NEWS site. Hopefully I’ll find one soon!
Processing feeds
The CRON job I set up yesterday will ultimately read different feeds and store them into MySQL DB. Currently, there are 3 sources I am reading from.
A slight problem here is that read/write process can take awhile. Sure, it’s a CRON job, which will run behind the scene, but still, it presents some performance issue. The most critical one I guess would be the “timeout” on PHP. So...
Task 1. Setting up a CRON job for updating RSS...
So a personal project of mine is to create a news aggregation website. Rather than visiting all the websites, I want to collect all the relevant RSS feeds together and present them for all to see.
I am using MySQL and PHP (using CodeIgniter framework) for this and I wanted to set up a CRON job on the cPANEL, which is set up on my hosting server. After a little investigation, I got this part...