Big Idea: Introducing HubCityHeadlines.com
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HubCityHeadlines.com
And when you spend as much time writing about strictly local topics as I do, you start to think that a really good idea — a cracking good one, actually — would be for someone out there to build a website of dedicated to just local content. It’d be a place where you could get your daily fix of headlines from the locally relevant news from all the available media outlets, both local and national. It’d show locally relevant YouTube videos, recent Twitter post from folks living in Spartanburg, local photo and art uploads, local calendar feeds … everything and anything relating to Spartanburg.
At this point, I’m about to take a lot of fun out of the spitballing session where we all collectively say “Yeah, that’d be great, and it could work like popurls.com and have cool hover functionality and …” as well as that one guy who says something along the lines of “It’ll never happen because there’s no money in it … free market …” That’s because I went ahead and built it.
The site is called HubCityHeadlines.com, and I only just finished the very basic part of the design yesterday, after working on it over the weekend. As you’ll see, it has a robust collection of feeds coming from a variety of local sources, and room for more. It is a little rough, largely because my coding and CSS skills are still at the level of stubborn amateur, but the main thing is that it’s functional.
But how is this a big idea? I mean, it’s cool and all, but isn’t the Big Idea supposed to be about brainstorming? About starting a local conversation on a topic? About stirring the pot?
Sure it is. This week’s Big Idea is to help me make HubCityHeadlines.com into the best local content aggregator possible. What can be improved? What feeds could be added to really increase the usability? How can we make this go from being a neat time-saver to something truly useful for the community?
And what other projects can be created to make this work even better? What local websites are there that really should be feeding to this project, but can, because they don’t exist yet? What can we change on the local level to make shared information that much more available?
Remember, this is a brainstorm: There are no bad ideas. Also, feel free to be harsh in your observations of HubCityHeadlines.com, as long as they’re constructive.
ooooooooohhhhhhhhh….i REALLY love that. For news junkies like myself who need news and info every morning like it’s crack…it is the perfect site.
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The first big area to start would be to develop a global RSS feed, maybe get something going with Yahoo! pipes or even a ground up solution. Pull everything into one RSS feed, get a parser and then build a categorical design around that, with individual feeds within.
With that you can leverage accessibility on two levels for two reader types: people who want a broad overview of what’s happening, and those who want nitty gritty details.
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In fact, I’ll get to work on the global feed right now.
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Thanks for the insight, Dave. I built this with an admittedly limited understanding of the best tools and practices, so any insight is helpful. Let me just make sure I’m with you conceptually. You’re saying: Make a big, central RSS feed that pulls in everything Spartanburg-related; break that list up into categories; divide the list from there so it displays in a more manipulatable way on HubCityHeadlines; use the central feed as a means of giving, say, the top 20 headlines from ALL sources?
I think that’s a very, very good idea.
Building it might be a little work, but I can certainly see the benefits. It’s also more-or-less how the SparkleCityBlogs.com feed works, since that comes from a local blog aggregator I built last year. One thing I was thinking about doing was breaking up that blogroll into categories and feeding it in a similar manner onto SparkleCityBlogs homepage (so there’d be a “Mommyblogs” feed, as well as a “Political” one and others), and it’s an easy conceptual leap to expand that to being all local content. Building another aggregator that did the same with all news headlines — even some sources I’m leaving out at the moment — shouldn’t be too much more complex.
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Pretty much yes. I see that SparkleCityBlogs has an RSS feed, that’s pretty much what I’m referring to. A good RSS strategy means extending your distribution options to areas other than web browsers and browsers running full HTML/CSS combinations to email/rss readers, and even mobile browsers with RSS capabilities, that might not be able to render every aspect of a web page fully.
Unless you’re on an iPhone or a full-featured mobile device, sometimes browsing pages can be a cumbersome, and challenging task that takes up precious time. The more time users spend waiting for a page to load, the less likely they are to actually wait around to see what happens beneath the fold. If you get a good RSS implementation scheme going that can produce content in an easily parsed fashion (say plain text) you can even start doing email and SMS alerts for people on the go, but still want centralized access to their favorite Sparkle City blog posts.
Web Strategy is what I do.
you’ve got my email, let me know if you’d like some help.
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I’d love some help with getting the feed to be more flexible and accessible, and generally getting feedback on the technical side. I’m very much self-taught when it comes to pretty much everything like this, and could definitely use some pointers. You’ll be hearing from me.
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About the Twitter feed: I’ve set this to pull location-specific feeds from Spartanburg, but they’re not required to relate to Spartanburg itself. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no standard Spartanburg hash-tag (like #sprtnbrg, for instance), but I could set it to pull tweets that use the word Spartanburg instead. Thoughts?
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Also, after a few non-Spark discussions about the range of feeds, I’ve added the following …
Three Craigslist feeds: For Sale, Housing and Jobs. These all come from the Greenville/Upstate Craigslist, but are search-query limited to Spartanburg.
Blognetnews: This is a political blog aggregator, and the results are search limited to Spartanburg.
Google Blog Search: Another good source for local online content, although not as comprehensive as some of the other projects.
Local Sports: This is actually the Spartanburg Herald-Journal’s sports feed. The heating guy who just came to my house asked me if I had a local sports feed on the site, as was rather surprised when I told him it didn’t. I’ll work on trying to create a more comprehensive feed, and suggestions are welcome.
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Ok I understood not a word of the details of making the new site better, but I do like the idea of putting local content into a central location where accessibility to thing would be easier.
If I can help in any way, I’m in. But now to bookmark the new site.
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You should be able to leave the technical bits to me. But if you’re looking at the site and saying “This would be great if only there was a [cool thing here],” it’s that bit in the brackets I’d like to know about.
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I will look into it. Believe me the tech bits I will leave well enough alone, I don’t even know what to do with drill bits, much less website bits
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Any way to access Etsy.com sites featuring handmade items and art made and sold by people in Spartanburg?
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I had the same thought myself, as my wife is an absolutely Etsy fan.
You can search Etsy for local goods, but I’ve had a hard time getting it to generate the RSS feed needed to display on HubCityHeadlines. Here’s the search query, though: http://www.etsy.com/shop_local.php?place=spartanburg
I’ve written to Etsy’s tech team to see if there’s something I’m missing, since they do have a relatively strong API. Hopefully they’ll get back to me.
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After hearing back from Etsy that there was no easy way to set up a local feed, I created one in Yahoo Pipes (thanks for the idea, Dave!). It is limited to the 23 Etsy shops that existed when I built the feed, unfortunately, so new shops won’t show up until they’re manually added.
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Curious if the twitter feeds gets all us here in the Sparkle City area. Just sent a tweet to see, but it doesn’t seem to be showing up. But then I am not as big a twitter addict as some. A nice curiosity to the site.
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I have to learn more about Twitter’s API and feed structure before that will work as well as it could. Right now, it’s set to display all posts tagged with “Spartanburg,” but it only updates once an hour. I did have it set by the location near Spartanburg, but what it was returning was just regular Twitter noise like “@joe funny! #lulz,” which is of very little use to most people looking for locally relevant content.
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yeah from what I understand about the Spartanburg tag, is that is just highlights tweets that actually say Spartanburg. I am sure there is a tweak in all that somewhere.
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I am IN LOVE with the site. Especially the Etsy bit (I’m a big ol’ Etsy junkie). I can’t think of anything else you would need to add to it. Great job!!!
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Bravo! But what’s up with the “more” hypertext?
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That doesn’t appear to be working right. I’ll take a look and see what the problem is.
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