Introducing calc.news, which is a website that does one job, and does it well: it's a simple feed aggregator, or as some would call it, a planet (nothing to do with TI-Planet, though). It have all your favourite calculator-related websites' news all in one place and many more! It follows on the steps of ancient TI aggregators such as TI-News, which was open until 2007, spanning multiple incarnations. Have suggestions? Tell us here!
(http://calc.news/custom/img/calcnews1.png) (http://calc.news)
The URL is simple to remember, so visit it here: http://calc.news/
My two cents:
-Maybe some other sites could be added if they have news, such as TI-Planet, TI-BD, Planète-Casio, Casiopeia, Tout-82, TI-Gen, TI-Fr and Casiocalc. It depends if they still are maintained, though.
-Filter out CW music and site maintenance news. (the ones with a music/C icons. It might require something else than RSS, though, like TI-News did with most sites (custom parsers for each site)
-Same with TI-Planet exam news (they have checkboxes to filter news), except maybe the Correction ALGO news, due to the Casio fx-CP400/ClassPad II lulz they sometimes generate.
-I don't know if Cemetech has a filter per category, but you could maybe filter anything that has Unreal Tournament, UT2004 and/Minecraft server in the title.
-Make sure that articles link to original topics and not RSS feeds, for easy and quick access to each forum.
-Maybe navigation block in the sidebar that has direct links to each major site parts (news, forum, downloads), as well as TI-Story.
-Google Translated feeds for non-english news (like TI-News did from 2004 to 2007)
-A logo with calc elements
I like the idea, though, and the domain name. Shame the ti-news domain names were lost to squatters, though. You should cross-post this topic on all conglomerated sites.
Yeah, I'm slowly adding the ones I can. Most have RSS or ATOM feeds, some have feeds for only the complete forum or have it disabled (so I'm not adding them until they add a suitable feed) and some like TI-Planet have feeds for each category (I should look at which category I should disable because they post news as much as every other site combined (EDIT: it did not work so well)). Each article does link to the website. And if someone want to design a logo, then feel free to do so.
For the little history, DJ gave the idea a while ago and I grabbed the domain because it sounded cool, then I tried to find suitable software for that (a Wordpress with plugins? Yeah that didn't work.), didn't found then forgot about it until now when I finally found it.
For sites with no RSS feed, what TI-News did was using an HTML parser script that was different for each site. The requirement was that the site doesn't change its layout. This is also how Omnimaga post notifier used to work. But if you do that you'll need to include the news article content or parts of it in your database or generate your own RSS feed from parsed HTML. I doubt it would be very hard, but you would need to only check like 3 times a day to avoid putting stress on the other site.
For now, active sites seems to have an RSS/atom feed already, so not having those smaller sites in wouldn't be a big issue for now
On a side note, it would be nice if there was a section below the site or an option to enable Wiki edits to be listed in the news conglomerate (perhaps not each edit, but rather grouped by days that have edits). For example, WikiPRIZM, WikiTI, TI-Story, Nspire Lua, Planet-Casio wiki and TI-BasicDeveloper. Or this could be inside the sidebar where the last edits are listed, so that people can see recent WIki activity. I don't know if Wikidot and Mediawiki have RSS/Atom feeds, though.
You could also have recent posts listed in the side bar for all included forums, as links and shortened link titles.
EDIT:
@Juju I made some mockups of changes that could be added to the site:
(https://img.ourl.ca/calcnewsmockup.png)
(https://img.ourl.ca/calcnews1.png)
(https://img.ourl.ca/calcnews2.png)
(https://img.ourl.ca/calcnews3.png)
The logo colors are the same as each site's primary colors or close.
Nice, I like the revival (even though I never saw the original :P) personally I only look at CW news but calc.news should make it easier than going to all the sites ;)
It does look nice :) It make easy to have all new in on source whereas loading each site could be time-consuming. Keep up good work :P
Yeah, that was why many people including myself liked TI-News back in the days. The first TI-News was first known as TI-Net and was active from 1999 to 2004, but they kept moving from one URL to another until they died for good due to lack of activity and their second domain name being stolen again. The second incarnation was a restart from scratch that used a similar setup as Calc.news (conglomerate feeds) but it also had discussion forums and Google-translated feeds. Sadly, the author lost interest in 2007 and instead of giving the site to someone else or keep it running as inactive site he just closed it outright.
In the meantime there was also another site called Calcnews, which lasted from 2002 to 2004 I believe, but it pretty much served the same purpose as TI-News at the time. TI-News also had many more conglomerate feeds, such as Omnimaga back when it was just a personal HTML site, GForce Programming and other small pages.
There were multiple proposals to revive it on Omnimaga back in the days, but none ever came to fruition until recently. However, it was agreed long ago that a new TI-News incarnation would not include discussion forums and instead encourage people to use existing forums. While having all news on 1 page made people who only read site news less inclined to visit each site for more content, it gave each site more visibility and after TI-News shut down I noticed that many smaller sites had a noticeable activity/traffic decrease.
Yeah, well, that's the goal. It just do one job, you have to go to the respective website to comment, etc.
That said, I think it needs more site promoting features, hence the mockup I posted above. For example, under or next to site names, I think there should be links to file archives and forums, when applicable, or even tools/tutorials. They could be hard-coded too, as sidebar blocks. Is it easy to add custom sidebar blocks?
As for latest forum posts, there are RSS feeds for that but I don't know if all listed forums have them. That block would need to be hard-coded as well.
My reasoning is that while those sites got news, I think calc.news should take the initiative to also promote other parts of those sites to give visitiors the incentive to visit their forums, etc.
Also, maybe you should limit news to 1000-2000 characters or so to give even more incentive to visit said site for full news, but also to avoid a very long news scrolling.
Another thing: Is the theme responsive?
Well, I can easily add some HTML, add some hard-coded stuff or change the theme completely (because templates!).
Hmm this is interesting.
However, I might want to give you a TI-Planet feed URL excluding our non-calcs stuff (which basically only happens during the french exams period, i.e. these days of the year)
I'll have to find it... or make one if we don't already have that.
Although technically you could also break down some categories so that users could actually filter things out themselves if needed. For instance:
- z80/ez80 news: https://tiplanet.org/forum/feed.php?f=41
- Nspire news: https://tiplanet.org/forum/feed.php?f=43
etc.
Yeah, I tried that, but seems it also picks replies up.
Quote from: Adriweb on June 08, 2016, 07:58:02 PM
Hmm this is interesting.
However, I might want to give you a TI-Planet feed URL excluding our non-calcs stuff (which basically only happens during the french exams period, i.e. these days of the year)
I'll have to find it... or make one if we don't already have that.
Although technically you could also break down some categories so that users could actually filter things out themselves if needed. For instance:
- z80/ez80 news: https://tiplanet.org/forum/feed.php?f=41
- Nspire news: https://tiplanet.org/forum/feed.php?f=43
etc.
Yeah that was what I suggested at first, so that the conglomerate feed doesn't get flooded by dozens (or more?) exam news per day. But it would be nice if the feed picked up the Correction Algo news, because those contains calculator-related stuff and occasionally some ClassPad II BASIC rants about its extreme slow speed.
Quote from: Juju on June 08, 2016, 08:00:15 PM
Yeah, I tried that, but seems it also picks replies up.
Do you mean for my suggestion or for Adriweb? That said, if it picked replies up I guess it's fine too, but you would need to make the list larger.
Yeah, turns out phpBB can't create a feed with topic only from a certain forum...
I'll try to see if I can mod that a bit.
Ah, sorry to hear. As for CodeWalrus I am surprised that
@Juju's feed work, because news can be anywhere on the forums and I didn't know that SimplePortal articles system had an RSS feed.
BTW, ndlessly isn't updated anymore, it seems, but I suppose you could read the ndless repo's releases feed instead: https://github.com/ndless-nspire/Ndless/releases.atom
Also... might as well do that for software like:
CEmu: https://github.com/CE-Programming/CEmu/releases.atom
CE toolchain: https://github.com/CE-Programming/toolchain/releases.atom
CE libs: https://github.com/CE-Programming/libraries/releases.atom
Really? I thought Ndlessly was still the official Ndless blog. But again, was it maintained exclusively by ExtendeD or did anyone else have access? IIRC ExtendeD has left the TI community over 2 years ago because I haven't seen him post anywhere nor idle on IRC for over 2 years.
It would definitively be nice to see it updated again, but given the shrinking size of the TI community, it would probably make more sense if Ndlessly news were posted on another established site, on Ndless.me or a forum topic.
Or Github could work too. Your suggestion about a Github repo feed for major projects is a great idea. Should it be separate from news, such as being in the sidebar, or be combined?
Ha, didn't knew GitHub had ATOM feeds of releases. Can always be useful. For other stuff, like wiki updates or forum posts, I'd use another installation of moonmoon.
Isn't it possible to have both in one install? Also I don't think the site should parse new forum posts content, since the goal is to get people to go to forums, but rather topic titles, like our recent posts page.
@Juju: I did a quick mod (cleanly, even: https://i.imgur.com/hhOTcvO.png), and it's now available here: https://tiplanet.org/forum/feed.php?mode=calcnews :)
Yay! Also
@Juju should really include Planète-Casio in the mix. It's the most active Casio site. I don't know if it has a RSS feed for news but maybe
@Dark Storm could help or make one since he's admin there?
Didn't found a suitable one there but if someone from there can help it would be appreciated.
Hi!
Yes, there are RSS feeds on Planète Casio. You can find them on the forum main webpage: http://www.planet-casio.com/Fr/forums/index.php
They are not very ergonomic, but it's better than nothing.
By the way, we opened our GitLab instance last month: http://git.planet-casio.com
You can find there some public projects, like the C-Engine by Fife86, or in few weeks Gint, a interruption manager by Lephenixnoir.
The main idea of this GitLab is to regroup and share source code of Casio addins. I hope it will be useful. :)
Ooh, didn't saw it. Thanks!
For software, I'd only put releases of those that are important for calc dev, like the various toolchains, else the list won't finish.
Welp, for some reasons calc.news is 100% empty now. No more feeds. Do you know what happened
@Juju ?
EDIT: Nevermind, it's back now, but you might need to check to make sure this won't be a chronical problem. Also the site takes a long while to load (over 5-8 seconds)
Quote from: Dark Storm on June 09, 2016, 05:23:34 AM
Hi!
Yes, there are RSS feeds on Planète Casio. You can find them on the forum main webpage: http://www.planet-casio.com/Fr/forums/index.php
They are not very ergonomic, but it's better than nothing.
By the way, we opened our GitLab instance last month: http://git.planet-casio.com
You can find there some public projects, like the C-Engine by Fife86, or in few weeks Gint, a interruption manager by Lephenixnoir.
The main idea of this GitLab is to regroup and share source code of Casio addins. I hope it will be useful. :)
aah nice I didn't pay attention to the sub-forum list. I didn't know they had separate RSS feeds. Juju could definitively use the news one.
Quote from: Juju on June 09, 2016, 05:31:12 AM
Ooh, didn't saw it. Thanks!
For software, I'd only put releases of those that are important for calc dev, like the various toolchains, else the list won't finish.
Ah I see. That should work.
Looks like it's down again... "No news. Good news". :P
Oh yes, and a suggestion to help the language barrier (mostly for us English speakers) could we run posts from all sites trough a translator for both French and English so we can read all posts?
I think something is causing the news script to fail during server hiccups. Maybe someone could help juju fixing it.
And yeah I agree about Google translated news.
I have removed this topic from front page news until there are serious attempts at fixing calc.news stability issues. I don't think it's newsworthy unless it's a serious attempt at reviving TI-News/Calcnews
@Juju. And yes, the news feed is down again now. Otherwise a big announcement for a site that breaks down every two day and often takes hours to be fixed will just alienate people and they'll never come back. I'm not trying to diss your work but currently it's not ready to launch.
I'll probably remove the site from the CW affiliates section if its issues are not fixed by June 18th
Goddammit, stupid piece of software that doesn't work. By then we'll probably have to complain upstream.
I think it,s just not properly configured. You need to configure it so that when CodeWalrus or the newsed sites suffer from 0.1 seconds of downtime the news feeds reboots automatically. Or maybe there is an alternative to this software?
Also you should change the default "No news? Good news!" message to say "ERROR: The news feed has crashed. Please contact
[email protected] to fix it."
Well, the main problem is that the feed list clears itself once in a while... You know what I just did? I've made it read-only. That is, chmod 444. That workaround should work, else I have no idea what should do it.
Meanwhile, I'll have to remove the read-only if I want to add new feeds, but eh.
Doesn't that mean the list will no longer update itself anymore? That would probably be a bit counter-productive. Could you just make it so that it detects when it's empty and in such case, performs what you normally do to restore it automatically?
No, I mean, the list of RSS feeds, the same one you can download on the site in OPML format. If the cache deletes itself, it will just attempt to rebuild itself and you'd see nothing.
Oh ok. I hope this fixes it, but we will need to wait a few days or so to see if it really is fixed.
Hm so far it seems to work fine at least, so I'm gonna re-add this to news.
However I noticed some issues:
-For the sake of consistency, since some RSS feeds truncate news at 1000 chars, why not do the same for every feed?
-Youtube videos and large stuff overlaps outside the news boxes
By the way juju, do you think you would be able to not parse Youtube videos from CW? Because as soon as a Youtube vid appears on the site the news cuts off there.
Good question.
@Juju there is a bug with the Omnimaga feed: It shows every news reply rather than just the news itself
Did you see my suggestion a few pagers back? Could you add an option to parse everything through a translator for the English speakers or french speakers?
Yeah I suggested something similar too. I don't know if it's possible to display RSS feeds ran through Google Translate, though.
Eh, it's possible, I saw scripts for ATOM feeds, but I need a script for RSS feeds.
Anyway, I fixed the thing with Omnimaga.
Ah ok. Maybe it would be possible to generate the RSS feeds with a custom script?
Also, TI-Planet has an English mode that shows certain news articles in English when in that mode, but I don't know if they still translate important Nspire news.
I have made a TI-Story page about calc.news: http://tistory.wikidot.com/calc-news
I also edited TI-BANK page to include the bit about how they also revived TI-News from 2007 to 2011, sort of, via the international news page. I think they only showed news titles, though.
@Juju , maybe this could be helpful for you? http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-translate-rss-feeds/5110/
Else, I wonder if Bing translator offers RSS feed translating services or an API...
Or maybe you could setup TI-Planet/PC news so that they're translated on your server and then make an RSS feed out of them. You would need to make sure to link properly to TI-Planet and Planète-Casio
Yeah, I tried that, but the French feeds are in ATOM format.
Ah right. Could this be useful? http://devtacular.com/utilities/atomtorss/
Else
@critor @Adriweb @Dark Storm and
@Lionel Debroux might maybe know a workaround? Ideally we want to avoid giving more work to do to other site admins. The issue right now is that despite Calc.news being intended to replace a former English site while still offering non-English content, 90% of the news relayed there are in French, which, while it's not a bad thing due to the high-quality content they provide, the lack of a Google/Bing-translated copy could turn away some visitors.
Oooh, yes, thanks.
Yay! I wish you good luck. I hope it doesn't cause massive lag when loading pages, though. Calc.news is already pretty slow.
Meh, RSS. Atom has been around for a while, and it's how phpBB does it apparently.
You could try the converter thing, but it indeed takes a few more seconds - Also the feed validator says the atom feed is okay, but the rss-converted one isn't.
Hm I see. I hope it doesn',t mean a translated feed is impossible for TI-Planet/Planète Casio x.x
Suggestions to improve calc.news:
-Make the site mobile-friendly. A few months ago, I noticed that some text overlapped outside the windows (such as calculator programs source code) and that the site was not responsive
-Add a small latest file uploads section, either at the top or on the side (if it's at the bottom you should reduce the amount of news per page to 25 or 30 so it doesn't take too long to be reached. Cemetech and ticalc.org have RSS feeds for their respective file archives, but I'm unsure for TI-Planet. For CW you would need to make one that checks if the topic has been cloned into the file archive sections or if it's located there in the first place and make your own RSS feed.
@Juju and
@Streetwalrus http://calc.news is down now. It redirects to a Rick Astley pic and warns me of invalid certificate :/
Weird, it works fine for me. Sounds like something is forcing you to use https.
Yeah I think Opera switches to https by default as soon as you attempt using it at one point in the past.
Anyway this is definitively something that needs fixing if it only works for certain users