About

Welcome to Newsgrail.

What is it? The idea behind Newsgrail is to add a collaborative angle to improve the promotion of topics worth seeing and find the best link for the topic.

Submissions are gathered together by subject and members can attach other alternative sources about the subject. The sources are independently ranked, so what members judge to be the best source for the subject can replace the original submission.

It's probably easiest to imagine a lot of newspapers all gathered together, with the similar stories from each paper gathered together. The papers then compete for the "top spot" for each story. You can see an example here: Google Street View UK.

I'll talk some more about the Who How When What Why Where of the site separately, although Who and When are easy enough. Who is just me, Sam, a freelance web developer. This is a personal project that rather got away from itself. When is now, although the general idea came about around 6 months ago. But first, I'll go over a couple of features.

Fully multi-lingual. In potentia. Both the content and the interface can be independently set to a local language (the en part of the web address means for English). There is no limit on the languages that can be added, but it does depend on someone providing the alternative text and an availablity of moderators. If there is interest in this, I will put in further work on the feature.

Fully mobile. It should be more or less just like the main site, minus a few changes and almost no pictures to keep bandwidth charges down for you. The site is not separate, so all the content you see now is available for you to see on your mobile phone, iPhone, Blackberry, whatever else. You should be automatically directed but if not, the address is easy to remember. Just add m. to the beginning.

Customize the news. Restrict the site to certain categories and languages, and automatically hide items, sources and comments which fall below your chosen rating thresholds. All items and categories can be viewed separately, each with their own headlines and news feeds, so you can read and submit content locally important to you.

Intelligent headlines and content. Headlines, sources and comments are all ranked according to various factors weighted primarily by the ratings assigned by members of the site. All the content is frequently recalculated and headlines are rebuilt several times an hour to keep with the the latest changes and voting trends.

Internationally local. While the "World" section contains every submission from every section allowing for a globally unrestricted view of the site, it is also divided up by region so that local items of interest can be highlighted above international content, much like more traditional news sources.

Top source permalink. Don't miss this, it is in the right hand menu when viewing an item's sources or comments. This is a static link to the top source which will automatically and invisibly redirect you to the top rated source for that item. It allows you to provide a link on a forum or blog or whatever else to always send people to the best source regardless of it changing.

Conversational private messages. The private messaging system works much like an ordinary comment thread as if it were restricted to two people. Private messages are grouped into chats so a discussion can be followed, and you can edit and delete messages at any time.

All AJAX, all the time. In places, anyway. AJAX is the technology which allows web pages to be updated without having to reload the page. So when you submit a rating or add a comment, you can see your changes immediately.

Affiliates instead of adverts. There are the ubiquitous Google Ads here still, but that is more or less by default while the site finds its way. Affiliates allow site users and members to help provide revenue at their own initative. If the venture is particularly successful, it may mean no advertisements at all. If there is an online store you shop at regularly, please do send me a private message and let me know.

Don't miss... The syndication feeds, available in both RSS and Atom formats for each section of each country. Your browser should detect them automatically, or you can find them at the bottom of most content menus.

The comment tree highlighting: Hold your mouse button down over any comment to view its parent, replies and siblings in a colour-coded arrangement for easier following (Currently works in any modern browser only other than Internet Explorer. It is a feature planned for inclusion with Internet Explorer 8.).

When viewing replies to your comments, your original comment is included for context.

If the appropriate icon is displayed with a private message, it means the recipient has not yet read it and you may retract its sending by deleting it.

The slightly inappropriately named Developers has details and icons for you to add a Newsgrail submission button (or just an icon) to your website.

Comment markup can also use some traditional BBCode you may be more familiar with (i.e. [url ]Link[/url ] instead of [a ]Link[/a ]). But don't rely on it, it won't necessarily be there forever...

The "breadcrumb" navigation just under the site title doesn't just show you where you are, it allows you to skip up and down the levels of the section you are browsing.

And that's that. I hope you like it and there are some people who are willing to stick with it through the early growing days and help shape the direction it takes. I have plenty of ideas for the future and already there are things I'd like to change/improve upon. Feedback is welcome, the comments are open.