pckrt experiment

What is this site?
Ever read through a news aggregation site, read a headline and think, "I know I saw something like this before.." With pckrt the community groups stories that belong together, so you don't see stories in isolation, but rather with other, related stories. Readers (who are registered) can then vote if certain stories belong in the group or add new stories. Stories that rank highly appear first in the list, within the the group of stories, as the community has indicated they "belong" the most. Grouping related things together, and seeing related things assembled is something hard-wired into people and the creativity required to do it well is something that a computer will never be able to do well.

Isn't this like news site [fill in the blank]?
Yes and no. The big difference is that users group related stories together and readers of the site can vote if stories belong in a group or not. The idea of grouping became apparent when viewing news aggregation and seeing users put related stories in the comments or seeing stories posted that were mostly collections of pointers to other stories. Since this is how people were using the site informally, why not just make something that allowed users to do what they were already doing?

Why can't I vote on a group of stories?
What would you be voting for? pckrt isn't about the community voting for the popularity of any pck, but being able to group things that are related so the community can get a better picture of what's happening.

What's the deal with the "experiment"?
I wasn't really sure how people would group stories and if that notion would attract both contributors and readers. It takes more work to contribute a story so that may result in fewer contributions and therefore fewer readers. On the other hand, grouping makes life for the reader much more interesting, as it reduces the randomness of the articles. Once enough pcks are in the system, I'll be able to make some interesting observations about what gets grouped together and how people how the items belong.

I also wanted to get my head around drupal and learn best from practical examples. At the same time, I'm getting quite an education about the the rest of the building blocks that drupal employs.

Where are all of the graphics?
The design vocabulary uses colors and font sizes. There's quite a bit of information out there about how text sites are easier to read and comprehend. Unless a need makes itself apparent, we'll stick with text. The load time is very fast (I hope!) and the absence of graphics keeps the bandwidth requirements of the site low.

Why can't I search?
Use tags for searching.

What's your privacy policy?
pckrt will never sell, rent or knowingly give access to your contact information. pckrt respects your privacy. You'll notice that we only collect your e-mail address for confirming registration, any other data is TMI.

I'd really like [feature], can you add it?
Send a mail to hi 'at' pckrt.com, let me know what you're thinking. Or you can add a comment to this document. Maybe I can do it maybe I can't. I dunno.

How do you determine what goes on the front page?
You mean you haven't figured it out yet? It does not have to do with votes (those can be gamed too easily), as you don't vote on a pck anyway, just if the stories belong in the pck. Anyway, I wrote it when I was rather tired and otherwise burnt from a crappy day at work; looking at the code, I'm not sure I can tell how it works. In order to give some visual stability of the site, the front page is recalculated every now and then.

How do I contact you?
Haven't done a whois? Mail me at hi 'at' pckrt.com. I can't promise I'll reply, but I'll do my best.

What new stuff are you working on?

• Done! Adding in a favorite or "pcks of interest" so you can keep track of pcks that you care about.
• Getting "dead link", NSFW and "link spam" reporting built into the site. I wanted to have this ready right away. but the details were a little more complex than I anticipated.
• The site could do a better job of reporting to user what things happed to pcks they started, like who commented, when stories were added and the like.
• When designing this site, there were suggestions for a firefox toolbar plugin, so it would be easier to add items to pcks of interest without having to return to the site. That sounds sort of fun, maybe I'll do that next
• Build in checks to see if a URL has been added in another pck. Not sure what the right thing to do would be, but the notion of keeping related things together tells me something should happen.

Where are the advertisements?
They're aren't any.