Posts with tag Politics

Shortening URLs, Creating Categories: All in a Day's Work at #propeller

Friends of Propeller-

I wanted to let you know about a few additions to the Propeller web site today, designed to better serve our community. The first affects the URLs that are added to our Facebook and Twitter share feature. Up until now, we have been using the TinyURL shortening service to encode Propeller story links to better fit into the message length restrictions of Twitter. As of today, we are using our own URL shortening service, which uses the domain http://pplr.us.

The pplr.us service is different from TinyURL and other shortening services in that pplr.us links will only point to Propeller story pages (we may extend this beyond Propeller story pages in the future.) For those who have used our Facebook or Twitter share already, this change will be fairly transparent--you will notice that the links that end up in your Facebook/Twitter feed have the new pplr.us domain. Beyond that, nothing has changed with story sharing.

Additionally, thanks to a great suggestion by a relative newcomer to the Propeller community btatman22, we now have 2 separate Politics categories: Political News and Political Opinion. Since its initial launch 3+ years ago, the Propeller community has been interested in both the play-by-play and the color commentary of politics. Adding this new category will help distinguish between news reporting and opinion, and (we hope) reduce any related confusion. All existing Politics posts now appear in the Political News category, so that old links can be preserved, and the Political Opinion category is now open for business--members, please begin to use it for your opinion posts.

That's all for now--let us know how we're driving.

Live Long and Prop It!
Tom (member tdrapeau)

Continue reading Shortening URLs, Creating Categories: All in a Day's Work at #propeller

New Categories, Testing New Home Page

In an effort to improve the quality of the Propeller.com home page, today we have added 5 new categories:
  • Politics-Right: For the conservative point of view
  • Politics-Left: For the liberal point of view
  • Politics-Neither: For points of view neither conservative or liberal
  • Health & Fitness
  • Religion
You will notice these categories during the story submit process:



We are testing an alternate home page that attempts to strike a better balance with categories than the current home page. Right now, the Propeller home page shows the top ranked stories on the site, regardless of category. Propeller members show a great interest in politics, and this being an election year makes the focus even stronger. As a result, the Propeller home page has been dominated by politics stories. Also, we have noticed an imbalance in the political ideologies represented on the home page. Changes to the Propeller ranking engine, using these new categories, attempt to allow highly ranked stories in each of the Politics categories to co-exist, and the overall balance highlights other categories as well.

Important to note here is that this balance was requested (no, demanded) by you. We have been listening. We hope to have a short testing cycle on this new home page configuration - for those that want to see this alternate home page right now, you can view it here. Also - please start submitting your stories in the correct (in some cases, new) categories, to help us really make the new home page great.

Thanks to everyone for submitting feedback -- it has been monumentally helpful.

Happy Propelling,

Tom

Continue reading New Categories, Testing New Home Page

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