Reporting the News

[Robert]

Report the News

I'm introducing a new feature that allows members to report the latest news relating to the Theory of Everything. The feature is considered to be in beta until the kinks are worked out, but I'm releasing it now so I can get more feedback and discover any problems sooner.

What is it?

This is a replacement feature for the 'Current Science News' section on the homepage. Since I'm the only one reporting news, and I've not been very good at that lately, I thought it might work a little better if I had some help. With this new feature, all members can report science articles, book reviews, online interviews, etc. The ToeQuest "Reporting the News" feature will be hosted on a subdomain of ToeQuest, located at http://news.toequest.com.

How does it work?

You will need to register and login before you can submit a story. Once you are on the subdomain, it should be pretty easy to use. To report news, just click the 'Submit a new story' tab and follow the instructions. Be sure to provide a summary of the news and a valid URL before submitting the story. When the story has enough votes to be considered published, it will appear on the homepage in the block named "Published Science News (BETA)". Clicking on the section title will take you to the ToeQuest News subdomain where you can browse the archive and vote or comment on other interesting stories.

What's not working?

I'd like to have this fully operational by the end of the week. Please report any problems to this thread and I'll open a project for it soon where future problems can be reported and tracked. The following is a list of problems I currently know about:

1. The spell checker is not working.
2. The collapse and expand buttons are not all working.
3. Some colors and graphics are not yet perfect.
4. The upper ToeQuest menu bar needs a link to the news subdomain.
5. The news subdomain needs a link back to the ToeQuest home page.
6. Remove the 'Current Science News' block from the home page.
7. Provide a link somewhere to the 'Current Science News' archive.

What can you do?

What you can do is 'Report the News'. Find interesting articles on the internet and submit it to this new tool. Register with the tool and play with it. Check out your profile and see what all can be done. See what is broken and let me know so I can fix it. Be sure to let me know what you think by posting in this thread, sending me a PM, or voting in the poll.

--Robert

[mkirkpatrick]

This is a most excellent idea Robert,I have thought along these lines too,it will be an asset
to the forum,and keep us up todate with latest news.




regards michael.

[Hardik Gami]

Nice one Robert .. keep it up !! .. excellent thing this is !!


Cheers,
HArdik Gami !

[Robert]

Why hasn't anyone submitted any stories? Or voted on any stories. I created a TestUser account to test if a regular user can submit a story and it works fine. Go ahead and play with it. Don't worry about breaking anything, or actually, do try to break it so I can fix it this week. Don't know where to find interesting science news? You can check out the following websites:

1. http://digg.com/general_sciences
2. http://digg.com/space
3. http://www.space.com

Also, did you know ToeQuest has a special news feed page where you can check the latest news from various science oriented websites. The link is in the NEWS dropdown menu titled Science News. Or click here for a short cut. Once there you can click the news feed to highlight it, then click the "Fetch the News!" button and a list of recent news from that website appears. Maybe you will see a story that would be interesting in the context of Theory of Everything. If so, submit the news to ToeQuest and if enough people vote for it then it appears on the ToeQuest homepage.

--Robert

[neutralino]

This is a nice new feature-- thanks Robert.

edit: I did have a question, but a more thorough reading of the introduction answered it!