I want this exact project the person below was describing:
I would prefer to buy it already built if someone has written one.
I need a news aggregator website developed. This site will gather content within a specific topic and display it on the site appropriately based on popularity within the Internet news/blog - sphere.
This site is similar in concept to [login to view URL], but in a different industry.
News will come from:
- Mainstream online news sources (local and national papers, online magazines, etc.)
- Blogs - this will be the main source for content
- User submissions (we need to offer a way for readers to easily submit content)
Features needed:
- RSS syndication for readers
- ability to comment on headlines/stories (like [login to view URL]) - the actual articles/entries will be on their respective domains, but there will be an ability to comment.
- Digg-style reader interaction - the ability to give stories more weight be giving them a "buzz" (the site's theme/mascot is a bee). This adds an element of human-edited content, which improves relevancy and ranking.
- member management system (secure log-ins, etc.)
- customizable page for members - the ability to add certain blog authors or news sources as a feed to their customized homepage
- for SEO purposes, the homepage would create a cache for search engines to index (see how they did it here: [login to view URL]:techmeme.com&num=100&hl=en&hs=Jh7&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox&rls=[login to view URL]:en-US:official&start=0&sa=N)
- this is crucial to the project
- Also for SEO, the H tags and other important factors need to be customizable.
- the ability to go back to a date and time to see what the page looked like
- see that here: [login to view URL] (this may help with the cache issue noted above as well)
- the site needs to have the usual social bookmarking suspects
I am honestly not sure how this would work best - would this type of aggregator site use a bot? Or analyze RSS feeds? I really want to automate the process of collecting news (though I am sure there will be some hand-editing involved), but also take into account other factors to determine what's important:
- How many other people have written about this event? (More people, more important.)
- How many comments are these posts getting? (More comments, more important._
Etc... Ideally, a bot (perhaps that isn't the right term) would head out into cyberspace and literally scan the thousands of blogs that may mention this specific niche (I can supply a list of keywords that would flag that we want that content) and pull that content in to display on the site. I need a way to monitor hundreds of news sources at one time, but I am not sure how that would work (hence the project! :D).
I have a long list of news sources for content, but I want to make SURE that I would grab any content written anywhere that is indexed about this topic even if it isn't a source most people monitor for this topic - ie. mainstream media.
One interesting way to display news, it's age and importance can be found here: [login to view URL];selected=us&categories=world,nation,business,technology,sports,entertainment,health
This is not exactly what I want, but it demonstrates a creative way to aseemble news from various sources.
PAGE LAYOUT:
I want the layout somewhat like Techmeme (with the title, snippet, related content,etc.)
I need areas for users to add feeds in the sidebars (the main news will be in the center, and if they haven't customized or logged in, there shouldn't be a blank hole)
I want an area to randomly feature a video (this is relevant to the niche)
I want built-in ad space (to be determined)
I want an area for text links in one sidebar (link to our other sites and/or paid links)
I want the layout to be somewhat modular so that I have the freedom to shift things around if we find a slightly different set-up would work better.
I want a clean management interface to manage all of this. Ideally, it would run on a CMS like Joomla. Please see examples of possible looks here:
[login to view URL]
Note: Versatility II would be a great layout and I would LOVE to have the upper right-hand corner functionality to change the width and font size. (Also note, these are not the colors of fonts I would want - just the layout since you can get a lot on that page.)
Above all, the site needs to be FAST, CLEAN CSS! No extra junk in there.