You may know about this project I’m working on called Read Ranker — it’s a piece of functionality that turns reading denverpost.com articles into a game — a game where you compete against all the other readers on the site to see who has read the most.

It keeps track of the number of articles (in this draft it’s just articles in the sports section) you’ve read, and lets you know how you compare to the other people on the site right now. As in, there’s a chunk on the website that says “You’ve read 23% of today’s sports articles, which ranks you 782 out of today’s 1,500 readers.”

I’m pushing this live to everyone Thursday. Then, next week, if it goes well, I’ll move it from the sports section into every section.

If you want to take a look at it today here’s the special link that will activate it for you.

-Joe

p.s. If you’ve got better ideas for a name than “Read Ranker,” send it my way.

This is what I like best about the site:

• The site hooks into the Denver Post’s article-commenting member system. That’s the good thing — you don’t have to create YAUN (Yet Another User Name) if you want to participate. The bad thing is so far there aren’t a whole lot of things for folk to do on the site. Beside “reading,” there two actions: commenting on lists and declaring yourself a “fan” of a business (thanks to Lucas Grindley for that idea).
• I like the most-popular app. It’s still in its infancy, but it represents a good chunk of the custom development work I did on the site.
• I like the most-popular app. It’s still in its infancy (as in, it’s just a list of the most-popular lists from the past six hours on the sidebar), but it represents a good chunk of the development work I did on the site.

And, for those of you interested, these are the snippets, apps, and other tools I used on the Colorado Guide. One of the great parts of Django is how easy it is to build on and use other Django-people’s work.

• CoordinatesField, by Jannis Leidel
• Comment-Utils, by James Bennett
• Minidetector, by Metamoof
• db-dump, by limoudou
• Generic Admin, by Weston Nielson
• GeoPy, by Brian Beck
• Django Rating, by Gonzalo Saavedra

• Upgrading Neighbors (the Post’s forum software): This was a challenge. phpBB, a popular online forum system, powers the Denver Post’s forums, article comments, most-commented lists, and is the backbone for its community blogging app and community photo app. We used phpBB2, which was released in 2002, and felt a lot like what the web felt like in 2002. So I put a lot of work in building phpBB2, its backend and its frontend, up to somewhat modern web standards. phpBB3 was released December 2007, and I spent most of February 2008 integrating phpBB3 into Neighbors. This took 80-100 hours of development, documentation and testing time. Most of the work was done on a development environment running phpBB3 on the database with the data as it existed in mid-January. After getting the version-control in its right place, I went through with the search-and-replace to address the easy parts of the upgrade. The add-ons and custom code from phpBB2 took up the most development time — that and the process that allows people to write article comments on the Denver Post’s main site first, and then post them to the forums later…. the big wins out of this were the scrubbing all the custom code and add-ons got, the pretty new CSS and HTML on the forums, the new functionality built in with phpBB3 (friends / foes list, bookmarks, and improved moderator controls), and also some new functionality I built behind the full-name feature on the profiles. Members can now decide if they only want the initials of their name to show, or their entire name.
• Started building The Denver Post’s first Django-powered application: This is still in development, but there are some fun things happening here. I’ll post more about it when there’s more I can post.
• Denver Post widgets: The idea behind widgets is sound: Making your information flexible enough to live anywhere on the web, including other people’s sites and pages. Newsgator is Denver-based business that does a lot of work with RSS, javascript, and widgets. We used their technology to create the widgets on the Post’s site: for breaking news, Politics West, our Rockies baseball coverage and our Denver Broncos coverage. In addition to the information we publish each widget also displays the recent comments on our news, Broncos, Rockies and politics coverage. Michelle Whitman, who has been doing front-end web work for us part-time this year and freelances under the Unity Studios banner, did the design, HTML and CSS. I did the project management, and other odds and ends.
• HappyJournalist.com: This project is best explained by the post I wrote about it on my personal blog, Joe Write.

• Launched the Denver Post’s article commenting and community site. It’s called Neighbors, and it holds a heckuva lot of stuff. I built it on top of the phpBB forum software. We’re publishing city- and town-specific news / community information (Denver Neighbors and Boulder Neighbors are two of the locations). It runs the article comments on the main Denver Post site. It also has a rudimentary community photo gallery, which we’re using to get people to post photos on stuff like their cute kids or their Broncos fan photos. People can write comments, rate comments, write in their own blogs (few do, predictably), and I’m working on giving members a better measure of their participation. We reached 10,000 members in our first four months, which may be fast or may be slow, who knows. What’s most interesting to me is how the tools and functionality in Neighbors are getting used by other parts of our site, and I’ll write more about that in a future post. What’s second or third most-interesting to me is the “full name” decision: A month ago we started requiring both first and last name of new members. (And if you’re still interested about this stuff, and want all the nitty-gritty details of how Neighbors has evolved, you can get that info here)
• Helped launch the Post’s prep sports site. It’s not fancy and it’s not pretty, and we’re still getting the hang of it, but it was done in a ridiculously small amount of time. I helped with some of the CSS, HTML, and site integration.
• Helped here and there with the Post’s new online community for parents in Colorado, Mile High Mamas. Most of this was building on the Neighbors forums to make them work for Mile High Mamas. This wasn’t easy, but the solution turned out to be something real simple. We pointed talk.milehighmamas.com at the Neighbors forums, and I added a little bit of logic to Neighbors to address it. Check it out: If you go to http://talk.milehighmamas.com/forums.php?c=18 it’s the same page, but different look, as http://neighbors.denverpost.com/forums.php?c=18 .
• Helped build out the Post’s web feeds. Up until this summer, Newsgator’s feed-reader app as the main entry point to the Post’s web feeds. It was hard or impossible to find our feeds otherwise. Me and a longtime co-worker / freelancer, Dan, added all our feeds to FeedBurner, put them in the meta-data of the homepage and the major section fronts, and we’re still working out the kinks on our Web Feeds page.

• Launched my largest Django-powered site, Planck Studios. It’s a portfolio site / store for Chicago photographer / video geek Jonathan Johnson. It’s not finished (you should see the to-do list!) but the meat’s there. I’ve been friends with Johnson since the beginning of my Chicago freelancing days, and it’s fun to see him step back into the freelance world himself. He does a lot of HDR and Holga photography, you can check out one of the photo detail views here.
• Built a new commenting system for denverpost.com. We weren’t happy with our comment vendor, so my coworker Doug and I integrated a bulletin-board web app to handle comments on our main site. Although it’s in operation there’s nothing super to look at (yet), so I’ll hold off on linking directly to it.
• Launched the most extensive online poll I’ve ever built. It’s called “Pick the Ticket,” and it’s an online poll in name only. There’s a custom database backend, click-and-drag front-end, and it’s all about who you want to be on the ballots in November ’08. I put it together with help from the Post’s graphics department and the guidance of the Politics West folk, who are heading the Post’s 2008 election coverage.
• Gave my first professional speech at a professional conference. I spoke about the future of online communities, identity systems and information formats at this year’s Special Librarian Association conference. It was nerve-wracking.
• Implemented a “most-commented” section at denverpost.com. I built the queries to output this information from our commenting system, output it to rss, then got it scraped by FeedDigest (to reduce hits on our projects server).
• Built the heck outta our “most-viewed” section at denverpost.com. When I started work here in Denver we had a real basic most-popular application. In April I started overhauling it, and now the page gives the top 50 most-viewed for the day so far, for the previous hour, it gives the top risers and fallers, and last weekend I added the most popular by section lists. That amounts to a long and cluttered page, so my next task is to create some sub-pages and divvy up this content.