Thread: new Irish news portal/aggregator

Hi everyone,
New to the forums, first post... be gentle

I created a little news aggregator site called IrishURLs that started as a personal pet project. It's a kind of one stop shop for headlines from all major Irish news outlets. I've been told it's "incredibly useful" so thought I would post it here to see what you think. Damien Mulley was kind enough to give me a plug on his blog earlier today.

Cheers

(P.S. I tried to write this post originally using Firefox on Mac and I couldn't edit in the text box, had to switch to Safari)

Nice, but you need to fix some of the Title and the more >> link as they bring you back to the home page.

Hi Louie,
Thanks, for the feedback. The More >> links actually expand the list of stories, but the javascript to fire them doesn't load till the rest of the page markup loads. There's a lot of html coming down the wire, so it can be a little slow to load the javascript sometimes. I'm currently fiddling with mod gzip to try an cut down load and rendering time, and I'm still working on optimizing the cache functions for the feeds. Part of the problem (I think) is that it's currently hosted on a shared server outside Ireland. The processing of the feeds takes just that little bit too long at the moment.

I'm thinking about moving it to a dedicated host in here in Ireland, but I'm just trying to gauge what people think of the site now.

I like it! It's like an RSS Reader for Irish news. Did you create the site yourself or you some sort of off the shelf thing? Only thing I noticed was that the page itself is 210kb in size and took a few seconds to load each segment.

Maybe for future versions you could ajax loading of new content so you don't have to reload the page. Also, new content would be highlighted in bold (for example) and you could easily see what was new since you last looked. I could see this being used nicely as a tab in my FireFox and just checked it like my rss reader!

There just suggestions really for down the line but now, yeah it's cool. Really like it.

Rgds, Dave

Now, using a database to refresh the data every 30min or so using curl to get the feed, then access it locally will speed up the process for sure.

Another way is show the title and onclick use Ajax to bring the feeds for just that particular title..

You bring too much in one go and it all depends on the feed website response, which could slow down you page.

It is actually using curl at the moment to retrieve and store the feeds locally. There's an element of slowdown somewhere in the parse/cache process that I'm trying to nail.

Everything will eventually be stored in a database and access from there. That's further down the line. This is really only a proof of concept at the moment. The whole thing will eventually be ajax-ified.