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Last night I could not sleep, so I played around a bit with this idea I have had for a while to have a section for quick links to interesting blog posts or news. I realized that not only would this be fairly easy to build, but the functionality to promote, or like, things was already built and I had the code for it installed! I just need to adjust the code a bit and give it some design love and it should be good to go.

Anyone who remember the old Digg site probably remember the many great things you could find there in the early days. While I have no ambition to reach anywhere near the same popularity, I hope that some people might find it useful at least.  With so much content, it is hard to keep up with all the great things, so this can at the very least be a nice way for me to drop in great articles that I find.

The idea behind this setup is fairly simple. Provide a simple way to add links to specific articles or news, so content creators can get some links back to their websites. Use a simple boost button to let people vote up good content and a bury button to vote things down. Allow for the users to see things based on last added content, curated content or based on ratings.

In short, it will be a news aggregator like the good old Digg and it's many copycats. While it will not have as many bells and whistles, I will add a few things that I have not seen before. The perhaps most interesting thing will be the connection to other databases. This will allow me to not just share links in the Stories section, but also to cross post to for example products, companies and later on people and certain add-ons like the Atlassian add-ons.

For now, I am just playing around in Figma to see what kind of designs I can come up with. All the heavy lifting has already been done by Ralf Herrmann, an amazing IPS creator that provide some of the best plugins for Pages. His plugin SuperVote have all the features I need to build this, even if I will hack it quite a bit.

For now, I have an idea in my mind where I will keep the same style as for other parts of the website, which means that I will color each story based on category. I am also playing around a bit with RSS imports for certain sites that I want to keep tabs on. These will be added as hidden and then manually edited for now. Later on, I plan to have them be fully automatic, but I want to control them a bit first. Images, for example, will only be added if uploaded by the owner of the links, or if I have their permission.

I will start small and then see what happens.

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