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Extraordinary feature

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Extraordinary feature
Have someone thought about the newsletter for users? If you have a lot of cats it is very uninteresting for users to use this newsletter, cause they will get all the new entrees;
so there should be a form , where a user could choose from which cats he could get the new links.

I have about 4000 Visitors at my site a day, but the less are interested in this newsletter. If i could improve the value of it; they would be more interested i think - and thats important cause this function could be just another good tool to increase traffic.

Robert

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Re: Extraordinary feature In reply to
I've thought about it, ever since we've been unable to get PostmasterDirect to work with us to get the forms installed properly. They keep claiming it's easy, I can't get it to work.

Anyway... an advanced newsletter feature is certainly on _my_ list :) I've toyed with it a bit, actually, but don't have any reliable working code. Maybe after the next release, once the user features are installed, it might be better able to set up a "newsletter" table and let people join/unjoin from various newsletters.



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Re: Extraordinary feature In reply to
Hope so. Cause our next links would be a heavy tool with homepage-generator and a document-center, too. This feature would be great. Do you know something about the >REVIEW< - Feature for 1.11. As it looks now, we will order a new license, when 2.0 is out and let the old site stay like it is, cause there are too many modifications inside. Im afraid, when 2.0 is out, nobody would care about the 1.11.
And there are some features like REVIEW or the spoken Newsletter-Feature, we miss hardly.

Robert

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Re: Extraordinary feature In reply to
I actually know nothing more of the next release of links -- let's hope it's a 3.0 release (<G> to avoid confusion with links 2.0 flat file) -- than Alex has posted here, and maybe less since I've tried not to read too much into it.

The big things I see besides all the bug fixes, are the new category arranagement, the new search features, and hopefully more user features. ALong with that he's added a banner script and reviews script, both fairly easy mods, but dependent on the central logic of links which Alex has the blueprint for.

Once this release comes out, I think the program will be stable enough that mods will be made that will not affect future releases too much, and Alex will be able to upgrade parts of the program without having to upgrade the whole thing. For instance, increase the functionality of DBSQL.pm by just upgrading that module, and not having to do anything to existing scripts.

I think, and this is my opinion, that he's bitten off a very big mouthful, trying to get all his ideas down and out at once. When doing this, you end up with a great suite of programs, but often they don't get all done when planned.

One thing that goes along with the new features is a new philosophy of maintainability and modularity that will allow more customization and feature addition without changing the core program code (engines). That way, people can change the output (and input) but the engine doing the work can be upgraded independently of those user features.

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Re: Extraordinary feature - make that features In reply to
Actually, what would be even better I think is to utilize the member / login in a more efficient way. Some things I want to implement on a site I'm working on (probably after I launch it) include
- personalized newsletter (ie, using categories)
- personalized home page (letting the user select up to say 5 or 10 category links and have links directly to those areas only if there are new sites since they last visited)
- personalized weather (I already have this hooked into some of my categories, but I want to let them select a city and have a link to the weather with this using hamweather)
- maybe some personalized news headlines based upon whatever selections that may be available

I'm sure there are things that I'm missing and I'll think of later when I get into this, but it seems to me that all these things can be stored in the Users table (and the Username in a cookie) and dynamically generate the page when they visit based upon check if a cookie exists and then go from there.

This isn't unlike what Excite does. I saw a reference to www.auto-homepage.com somewhere but wasn't sure if anyone here had any experience comments on using that or if anyone else has found something that does something similar. My concern with these products is in creating a second database and putting a lot more load on the server than there really needs to be...

Jerry


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Re: Extraordinary feature - make that features In reply to
The extra databases isn't going to cause a problem. HamWeather 3.0 promises to be SQL based for many of the more intensive look ups, which will cut server load significantly for that.

Any time you make more calls to the database, there is going to be more load and more performance problems.

This is why I keep reenforcing the idea that dedicated servers, and hosting, costs money :) The more you want to do, the more resources you require, and the more you will have to pay your ISP to make them available to you.

It sounds like you are having a fairly intensive cgi based site, and you might even want to consider going to page.cgi to generate it, rather than static pages. You'll save the diskspace, the nightly build, and all the problems of trying to get "fresh" content into your pages. The cost is of course the need for more CPU, but that might be cheaper in the long run than all the gyrations you'll have to go through to keep fresh content on the static pages -- SSI, PHP, etc.

There's no right way, or wrong way. If you get a lot of hits to the same 10% of the links, then caching the processes may be the way to go, rather than static pages even. With mod_perl and proxy cache, you might pick up a lot of performance there. I don't know...

One thing I'm definitely doing is setting up a User-Documentation project, where several threads/chains of documentation will be available for people to comment on and add to (this is what the FAQ is morphing into shortly). This way we'll have a dynamic growing database for things like Apach_mod_perl, dual apache, os-dependent set-up issues, etc. Things a little above and outside of the standard "mods to Links".



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Re: Extraordinary feature - make that features In reply to
All you write is done on a lot of german sites, like www.redseven.de or spray.net. Its the same direction than i want to go. My problem is always, that links was build to be a links, not more, not less :-)

But with a little tricky you could do so much more; i have planned a new site with two linkssql; one only for users (like now the small user-reg); one for the content. But we will see, what alex could do with the next version. Maybe i wouldn´t need that.

I have same thoughts as you pugdog; im wondering that he releases the mailscript and the new version of links; maybe i understand him so good, we have 12 aktuall projects to do for ourselves, and i cant do only one at one time.
But i wish, Alex would do the links ready before all other things. As i checked out the mailprog, it would be a lot of work to bring it so far as links is. But maybe i have not seen all features, only the demo here is not the hit.

Just another idea: Why alex dont offer modules for a small price or give them a sign (proofed by Alex)(dont know the word for that what i want to say); so everytime some users say : oops, we need these or that, we maybe could do some work, but he makes the real module like linus with linux. Then there are less different links around (in my links there are so many modifications, i cant do them a second time :-(

Robert

PS: The next weeks we will be partners of cassiopeia.de the best and only chat-program here in germany. Maybe i could get a copy for alex; so we could discuss some things in real time.

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Re: Extraordinary feature - make that features In reply to
The site I'm working on is somewhat cgi intensive, I haven't even sat down and figured all the mods I have in place... Fortunately, I do have my own server and the load on it isn't that bad at all right now and I still have plenty of space on the hard drives. The biggest site I have on it gets about 5 million "hits" per month with a fair bit of cgi included, and the other sites might generate another million or so... With this new site I'm working on, it's a tough call on going to page.cgi because there isn't any traffic to it all yet. I'm just trying to get it up and running so I can figure out from there what needs to be done. I have tried to build as much of the customization as I can into the build process, which seems to be working well so far. For example, in certain regions, it simply creates the appropriate link to the weather, based upon a field I have added to the category table. I think the only SSI I have right now is for the four banner ads on each page and basically here I have even built my zone into my category table so I can target banners to specific categories if I want at a later date. I also want to add some news to various categories, but I have decided to use a headline java applet for that instead and that way I can automate the updating of news via a cron job once an hour or something like that and use less space on the page. Here again I will just add the category of news into the Categories table, then on build, include the appropriate code for the java applet. The one thing I have really found so far is that the more you can switch the customization into the build process, the better off you are. Oh yeah, javascript helps a lot too...

Jerry